OpenText Fax & Document Distribution Group

Words, ideas, technologies, people and even food travel greater distances more quickly every day. Some things translate perfectly between cultures, and HIMSS is hoping that will be the case for a new partnership announced May 2 with the British Computing Society (BCS).

The HIMSS electronic medical record adoption model (EMRAM) has already seen great success in both US and Canadian healthcare systems, and now it’s time to see if the same approach can work for hospitals and other healthcare institutions in Britain’s public health network, the National Health Service (NHS).

The program is especially important in the US as healthcare institutions approach the 2015 deadline to comply with the meaningful use requirements set down by the 2009 HITECH Act. The act requires healthcare providers to implement the broad use of electronic medical records (EMR) in an effort to improve patient care. HITECH provides incentives for compliance, and fines for failure.

Based on comments made in the HIMSS press release, both parties seem eager to get started.

BCS Health Chair Matthew Swindells had this to say: “We’re delighted to be working with HIMSS Analytics Europe on this project. We believe information and technology are crucial to the challenge of transforming our healthcare service. The HIMSS Analytics EMRAM model will enable hospitals to measure their progress in the implementation of health IT and benchmark themselves against the rest of the NHS and internationally.”

To ensure the program is appropriately structured and targeted, HIMSS Europe and BCS have formed a steering committee of British healthcare experts including health IT leaders, medical professionals and scholars.

Agencies like NHS Connecting for Health have been trying for many years to come up with a way to centralize and digitize patient records and connect some 30,000 providers to 300 hospitals across Great Britain. Due to several challenges including cost and unstable management, none have yet been able to do so.

HIMSS monitors health IT adoption in 25 countries, and rates institutions on a seven-point scale that grades their “meaningful use” of new technologies to improve patient care. To date, HIMSS has identified only 68 Stage 7 institutions worldwide. A Stage 7 facility is a “fully digitized, virtually paperless environment with a broad range of interoperability and data exchange capabilities with other organizations.” Just 1.2 percent of US hospitals earn that grade, and about 70 percent are still Stage 3 or lower. HIMSS has recognized 15 Stage 7 institutions in Europe as a whole, but have not yet identified any in Great Britain.

OpenText’s Fax and Document Delivery Group (FDDG) follows HIMSS closely because of the central role of fax in the exchange of EMR including protected health information (PHI). To address the requirements of meaningful use, many physicians and healthcare organizations (including NHS Manchester) have turned to an automated software-based electronic fax delivery system to manage sensitive patient records.

Continued improvements in fax over IP (FoIP) technology have brought the security and reliability of fax transactions to the desktop, and even to mobile devices. With most health IT professionals citing cost as the biggest barrier to EMR adoption, the immediate savings on paper and the time saved by automating fax from a single central, searchable server makes fax an ideal solution for healthcare.

Just a week ago, Emory Healthcare in Atlanta, GA became the latest victim of a major data breach involving protected health information (PHI). The health network announced it was unable to locate 10 computer discs containing PHI for more than 300,000 patients treated between 1990 and 2007.

According to a local news article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Emory President and CEO John Fox admitted that the discs had not been properly stored. Although they were in an office with restricted access and nightly lockdown, the cabinet they were in was not locked.

We can hope that the discs were simply misplaced rather than stolen or destroyed, but incidents like this still occur far too often in the healthcare industry. At risk is not only the privacy of the patients whose health information could now be anywhere, but also Emory itself, because it is bound by strict regulatory mandates like HIPAA and HITECH. Non-compliance can result in crippling fines and a loss of public confidence. Emory has already committed to providing identity theft resources to all of the affected patients.

This latest breach comes just six months after an internal breach in which an employee perhaps unwittingly printed medical records that eventually found their way to an identity theft ring. Nine of 32 affected patients reported that their identities had been stolen, and Emory alerted another 7,200 patients who had been in their care at the time. All told, industry analysts calculate the average cost per breached document at $240. Though the employee was let go, Emory spokesperson Lance Skelly said the printed documents were within the scope of the employee’s job duties. In other words, the paper was the problem. To see how OpenText helps medical facilities of all sizes tackle this issue, watch last month’s webcast with TMCnet.

While many healthcare providers are making great strides in effectively managing today’s patient information, how many of them are effectively evaluating the risk associated with “misplacing” historic documents that fall outside the scope of their EMR deployment? For many organizations, it’s unlikely that their next data breach will result from a virus or a group of teenage hackers. The real threat may simply come from the theft of unattended paper documents or an overzealous cleaner diligently “cleaning up.”

OpenText has a solution designed for problems exactly like this. Alchemy, our document server solution, can capture document images from paper or just about any electronic file format, file them or route them to specific users, and track every instance of access: where, when, and who sees them. Had the files on those discs or the leaked paper medical records been scanned into Alchemy, the physical media could have been safely destroyed and Emory would be in the clear.

Click here to check out Alchemy’s latest release, version 9.0.

Recently we co-sponsored a well-attended webinar highlighting the current state of security and compliance in the healthcare industry. Speakers Rebecca Herold (the Privacy Professor), privacy, security and compliance guru , and Chris Patterson, IT Administrator at Florida Heart and Vascular Associates, were extremely helpful in enlightening the audience using real-world examples and the most up-to-date data.

We’ve had some time to reflect on the webinar, and also to take a look at the responses to the polling questions. Here are a few realities we can take away from these resources:

■ Security and compliance remain the most important issues in healthcare after quality
patient care

■ The healthcare industry is not yet where it needs to be in terms of securing
private health information

■ Solutions do exist to mitigate the problems

■ Digital fax and document delivery will continue to play a central role in these solutions

The problems
Healthcare providers need to maintain a high level of data security for three main reasons: patient care, patient privacy and regulatory compliance. The rise in the use of fax to securely manage and deliver electronic medical records (EMR) solutions are  helping institutions address these concerns, but even fax is vulnerable to tampering if not properly protected, and data leaks continue to plague the industry.

Rebecca shared several real-life examples of recent breaches in fax security including hacking of fax servers, wrong numbers/email addresses, use of standalone fax machines and public networks, and improper document disposal. These problems come from a mixture of human and technological error and often lead to costly failures of compliance with government mandated regulations like HIPAA and HITECH.

According to the poll, about half of healthcare providers are unsatisfied with their ability to comply with HIPPA using digital documents, and more than half of physicians still rely primarily on paper charts.

The success stories 
The good news is that digital fax and document management solutions like Fax Appliance, RightFax and Alchemy are working for thousands of healthcare professionals, including Patterson. After deploying an OpenText fax solution, Patterson reported that security has improved and the hospital has enjoyed savings of more than $200,000 in the three years since implementation. Patterson also said his fax solution paid for itself within two months and has effectively replaced the work of two-and-a-half full-time employees.

Tens of thousands of businesses around the world already use OpenText’s Alchemy Server to manage their critical documents. On April 18, 2012 new features in the areas of capture, access, workflow and retention were released as Alchemy 9.0. See the full press release here.

Alchemy 9.0 is a simple solution for managing documents. Any business that relies on thorough and precise tracking of records will benefit from Alchemy’s unique capabilities. Here are a few of them:

• Alchemy 9.0 captures and archives paper or electronic documents from MFP, desktop, back-office and third-party applications.

• All of your documents reside in a single, centralized database.

• Full-text search allows “Google-style” search of all documents just by plugging in a word or phrase.

• Alchemy 9.0 helps you create simple workflows so documents are automatically routed to the correct decision-makers depending on their status (e.g. “accepted” or “rejected”).

• Retention utilities let you manage the lifecycle of your documents from creation to deletion based on any criteria you choose (e.g. you can tell Alchemy to delete certain records days, weeks, months or years after a chosen event).

Immediate benefits include reduced payroll burn from manual document management like faxing and filing; reduction of paper and paper-related supplies; less hardware and maintenance on MFPs and fax machines; and audit-readiness for less risk of compliance failure.

Alchemy is particularly useful for small- to medium-sized businesses with an internal or mandated need for secure document management. Healthcare, legal, financial and manufacturing institutions in particular face severe fines for improper, inaccurate or incomplete document access and management.

We are very excited about this release and the enhanced capabilities of Alchemy 9.0, and you should be too!

Check us out at http://getdocumentmanagement.com or to view more fax and document solutions, see OpenText’s full suite at http://faxsolutions.opentext.com.

Darren Boynton
Product Marketing Manager
OpenText Corporation

Visit OpenText at HIMSS12 – the largest annual healthcare IT conference and exhibit in the US. Over 20 current and former OpenText staff (including our former and recently retired CEO John Shackleton) will be on hand to showcase our company’s full line of healthcare solutions spanning healthcare records management to secure private health information exchange.

Stop by booth# 2474 at any time to view product demonstrations or to speak with OpenText healthcare experts. We encourage attendees to learn about our solutions and discover how they have helped thousands of healthcare organizations capture and streamline their paper-based clinical and business processes, manage compliance, mitigate risk and enhance delivery of services. If you’d like to schedule an appointment with us during HIMSS12, click here!

To learn more about OpenText healthcare solutions, visit our new healthcare microsite.

OpenText at HIMSS12 (Booth# 2474)
Venetian Sands Expo Center, Las Vegas
Exhibition Dates: Feb. 21 – 24, 2012

• Tuesday, February 21 – 1:00pm -6:00pm
• Wednesday, February 22 – 9:30am-1:00pm & 2:30pm-6:00pm
• Thursday, February 23—9:30am-1:00pm &2:30pm-6:00pm

Get Social at HIMSS12
Make sure you follow us on Twitter (our handle is @faxsolutions) and join the conversation using #HIMSS12 hashtag.

As many of our customers know, Alchemy is an incredibly useful tool for departments and small- to medium-sized businesses to manage their documents. One of the most difficult challenges though, is getting the documents to the right place in Alchemy and indexing them with the most relevant metadata. One of the guys in our Dutch office realized this and worked with a developer on the Services team to come up with a solution to solve the issue. Jaap Jan’s idea, combined with Eric’s skills resulted in one of their most successful collaborations.

Fast forward a year or two and now that solution is being offered as a core product: The Alchemy Productivity Suite v9.0. Its still a little ways out but it’s exciting that we are allowed to talk about it publicly. One of the first ways you can learn about it is a video I created that covers the basics. I hope to release a few more Alchemy videos in the coming weeks and months.

There are a bunch of other changes slated for the Alchemy 9.0 release and as we get closer to that point, more of those details will start to trickle out and I’ll talk about it here. If you have any comments about Alchemy, comments about this video, or suggestions for future videos, share them with me here or contact me on Twitter where I go by the name Technovangelist.

Also, be sure to check out all of our videos on our new video channels site: http://faxdocs.tv