OpenText Fax & Document Distribution Group

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.

The complex and dynamic healthcare IT marketplace was on full display at HIMSS12 in Las Vegas last month. After spending a few days interacting with partners, customers and healthcare IT consumers as a representative of OpenText’s Fax and Document Distribution Group (FDDG), three main trends stood out to me that I feel are important to share with those unable to attend, whether health professionals with IT problems or vendors with IT solutions.

The Cloud
Despite early fears that managing and exchanging sensitive documents like patient information in the cloud would be too unstable or vulnerable, the sentiment is shifting as businesses across all industries become better informed – and consequently more comfortable – with the emerging medium.

Quite a few healthcare IT vendors have done a commendable job of demonstrating that cloud computing can be secure. Although many hospitals and other healthcare providers are realizing they need to step outside of traditional technologies in general, their initial hesitation to embrace cloud is understandable. Many of these institutions have spent a lot of time and money building an IT infrastructure that, while perhaps not as efficient or up-to-date as they would like, makes them feel confident that their sensitive documents are safe. It was great to see more hospitals getting out of their comfort zones and investigating new technologies.

Mobility
To some people, a PDA or other mobile device is simply a phone, a scheduling tool, or even just a neat gadget. But to a growing number of healthcare professionals, these mobile devices have become critical to managing and sharing documents, and, more importantly, delivering quality care.

The continually expanding capabilities and security of mobile devices are making them more and more attractive to healthcare professionals, especially those that need to share sensitive information quickly and without being tied to a desk or a fixed appliance.

HL7 Messaging
Health Level-7 (HL7) messaging is beginning to generate a lot of renewed attention. Originally developed in the U.S. more than 20 years ago as a standard for healthcare information systems, it was quickly adopted by many other nations and remains an important way of managing healthcare information in a unified manner.

Security and compliance has become one of the most daunting challenges for healthcare providers, but their need to communicate quickly and often internationally is growing as well. HL7 is being revisited as a cornerstone for sharing medical records and other health documents.

With these and many other changing trends in mind, our healthcare IT solutions must keep pace. OpenText FDDG will continue to develop document interchange technologies that meet the needs of the Healthcare industry.  Fax remains important, and even as electronic interchange of records grows in Healthcare, fax will still be a backstop.  OpenText continues to put a major focus on secure operability in the cloud, access to critical documents via mobile device, and compatibility with the widest range of applications possible. As Healthcare IT requirements evolve, you can be certain that OpenText will be there to provide superior solutions.

Managing excessive paper-based medical records is not for the faint of heart — especially when compliance violations can result in fines that well exceed seven figures. Healthcare organizations that employ a virtually “paperless” EMR or EHR solution may believe that they are immune to penalties but that’s simply not the case. Send a fax to the wrong person or leave a fax in whole or part at an unattended fax machine and you could be subject to costly fines. In fact, the number and amount of compliancy fines in the US is at an all-time high.

Join OpenText on April 12th at 2:00PM Eastern / 11:00AM Pacific for an educational webinar, where you will hear from security and privacy expert Rebecca Herold, AKA the Privacy Professor, and learn about the risks associated with paper-based communications and processes. During the webcast, attendees will also hear from Chris Patterson, the IT Administrator for Florida Heart and Vascular Associates, and see how they integrated an OpenText digital faxing solution to achieve HIPAA compliance, improve processes, and dramatically lower costs.

Who should attend?

• Healthcare Compliance Officers adopting new healthcare compliance initiatives
• Healthcare Professionals wanting to protect and secure patient information
• Healthcare Practice Managers seeking to improve productivity and patient care
• Healthcare Informatics roles searching for ways to improve workflow and streamline business processes

Register today!

After attending this year’s HIMSS tradeshow, I am as excited as ever about the direction healthcare is heading with regard to new information technologies. Even compared to last year’s event, I can see a real difference in the passion healthcare providers are displaying in seeking out new technologies to deliver better care and service–in particular those that can help them address security, compliance and data privacy. Yes, regulations and compliance mandates like HIPAA means a lot more accountability and a lot more work. But rather than responding to this requirement as if they are being forced to comply, the healthcare community seems eager to find the smartest IT solutions for their compliance needs. They understand that, ultimately, regulatory compliance will improve not just document security, but also patient care and even bottom line.

I attended HIMSS12 representing OpenText’s Fax and Document Distribution Group in an effort to connect with customers in need of a fax-based document management solution. HIMSS is designed to make the job of finding the right IT solutions easy, but it can be difficult to find something if you don’t know what you should be looking for. In some cases, people don’t even know that fax technology can be a viable and effective solution for them. For example, at HIMSS12, I met someone who provides consultancy services for hospitals to improve their process workflows, and she said it had never occurred to her that fax could solve problems for her clients. Further discussions with her saw her realize that OpenText fax solutions can help quite a few of her clients increase efficiency and productivity, reduce costs and enhance the service they offer their customers. It felt great to help her, and it was a welcome reminder that trusted fax technology continues to play a pivotal role in the healthcare marketplace.

It was heartening to see a vibrant healthcare IT dialogue at play, and I look forward to attending next year.

This year’s HIMSS tradeshow in Las Vegas brought together individuals from all corners of the healthcare IT marketplace. I attended representing OpenText’s Fax & Document Distribution Group—the leader in the fax server industry–with more than 10,000 installations in hospitals and clinics worldwide. I found it to be a great opportunity to connect with existing partners and customers as well as those HIT vendors who  do not yet have, or who are looking for a replacement for an existing document distribution solution to automate inbound and outbound fax communications from their applications.

Based on my discussions with numerous technology providers at the show, it is clear that fax is still a ubiquitous document exchange platform across the healthcare industry. Fax servers will continue to play a role in healthcare communications for the foreseeable future, even as the industry/government drives toward a fully electronic Health Information Exchange (HIE) framework. The reason for this is that fax remains the lowest common denominator for secure information sharing amongst healthcare providers, whether for a small physician practice, a large 100+ bed hospital, or anyone in between.

This was my second year attending HIMSS, and I am glad I came back. If you are developing or offering a solution for the healthcare IT market, you have to be there. I attend both to expand relationships with existing partners and to generate new business by identifying ISVs who might benefit from a fax server solution. Everyone I needed to see was there, from IT staff and business decision makers to physicians and other healthcare professionals, all providing their unique perspectives on the challenges and opportunities they see ahead in this time of rapid change within the healthcare sector.

Having everyone together at one venue makes it easy to connect with all stakeholders in the healthcare IT marketplace. The annual HIMSS show is an ideal place to do just that. Mark it on your calendar!

I and several colleagues recently returned from the annual HIMSS tradeshow in Las Vegas. HIMSS is a place where birds of a feather in the healthcare marketplace can meet and learn how healthcare information technology providers can help customers meet their many and varied compliance mandates.

Compliance truly is the central driving factor for healthcare IT consumers, so we spent a lot of time talking to IT personnel, Compliance Officers, and CIOs looking for affordable document management distribution and other IT solutions.  A large amount of our Fax & Document Distribution Group’s business takes place in the document-heavy healthcare industry, so our attendance was vital.

Over the course of the event, we had an opportunity to meet with several of our partners and customers, and to learn from each of them how our products are performing in the real world. It was a valuable chance to gauge the ways in which we are adding value to our customers’ businesses, and to learn more about how we can continue to improve and remain competitive.

I had the pleasure of meeting with many of our partners–for example, GE Healthcare, Vitera, and McKesson–who integrate and resell our fax solutions, RightFax, FaxPress, and Fax Appliance. On top of that, when I was walking the exhibit area, I was very pleasantly surprised at the large number of third parties who have integrated their systems with OpenText fax products independently. To make this even easier, we recently announced an Integration Partners Program to help Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) connect to our products.  If you are an ISV and need to add faxing to your application, you can learn more about our Integration Partner Program here.

To sum up, HIMSS is the place to see and be seen. The value of HIMSS to any ISV is the opportunity it presents to get to know your customer base, and to gather players from both sides of the IT sales process under the same roof. Rather than making a million phone calls, everyone can share new ideas and keep up with regulations together and in real time.

See you there next year!

I am in Las Vegas attending HIMSS12 and I am compelled to write about how the show is going and state my overall observations of the conference. I’ll start off by saying that I am particularly amazed at how large the tradeshow has gotten in contrast to the other years I have attended. The question that begs to be asked, at the very least, is why is that? Is it because the human body is such a complex machine that it requires complex software with many different software applications to manage what can be the inherent complexity of diagnosing and treating patients?

Personally, I don’t know the answer! However, I do trust what one of our customers said, and it was something to the effect that the reason why he has to support so many disparate clinical information systems is because the human body is such a complex machine that it requires multiple vendors and niche solutions and no one vendor can build a monolithic solution encompassing all of the information management requirements.

I chuckle because, yes it is a long statement, but honestly I am 100% behind his argument. And thus I believe that there is a tight correlation to his comment with the number of vendors participating and exhibiting at the conference.

The last time I was at HIMSS was back in 2007, that’s five years ago. It doesn’t seem like a long time ago, but really it is. It’s phenomenal how so many things have changed, but yet some have stayed constant. So, your traditional powerhouse vendors in the healthcare provider market, of course, are still participating – and they won’t be leaving anytime soon. And yes they are showcasing their conventional wares. For them, their booth size, look and feel and traditional messages on their core competencies have not changed. They have, however, expanded their messages and a big portion includes mobility and portals.

It’s really mesmerizing how all of the vendors, including ourselves, can deliver healthcare portals and mobility solutions. Vendors from all shapes and sizes are talking about aggregation of clinical information, health information exchanges, clinical portals, clinical mobile apps, BI and to some degree social media and patient engagement. The Cloud message is creeping up, but being that patient data is sacred and it needs to be guarded dearly, many CIOs are somewhat reluctant to experiment with cloud offerings. And I wager to say that’s why we are not seeing a proliferation of the cloud message.

There are still of course many other niche vendors selling solutions from magnetic digitized white boards, imaging and DICOM toolkits, clinical image viewers, PACS systems, 3D post processing, Practice Management, EMRs, RIS, LIS, HIS, oncology, and long-term care case management; to integration middle-ware. I really thought that right up to 2007 vendors were going through a period of consolidation. And I didn’t expect for HIMSS to expand and be as large as it is today in 2012. But I suppose, that with the proliferation of mobility, social media, collaboration, and portal capabilities, this has brought forth a new breed of vendors, small and large, willing to partake in the journey of better managing the human body, our clinical conditions, and our clinical pathways.

Did you go to the show? What did you think of what you saw this week?

Alex Martinez, Product Marketing Manager
Healthcare Solutions ECM
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.

Are YOU on Google+? In case you haven’t seen it, Google has a new online property that’s taking the world by storm. Is it a Twitter killer? A Facebook Killer? I don’t know, perhaps its’s too early to tell, but it certainly has a lot to offer.

About a week ago, they opened Google+ to businesses, whereas before that it was just for real human beings with real names. Businesses can have pages just like on Facebook. The pages are a bit different than the Facebook variety, but all of it is so new, what I say here today may change tomorrow. All that I can say for certain is that if you are not there yet, you should be. And now that everyone can join without an invite, there is just no excuse to not join in.

The Fax & Document Distribution Group has a page on Google+ now. When you get onto plus.google.com, do a search for FDDG (the full name is OpenText FDDG Videos and Training). Or just click on this link to go right there. Then add us to one of your Circles.

Whenever we post anything to our Google+ page, you will see the message in your main Google Plus page. Go look around for your friends as well and add them to your circles. Then you will see news from everyone. On the left you can click on individual circles to filter down the news. I have circles for co-workers at OpenText, for people in FDDG, and for those in my department at the company. I also have circles for friends from when I was at Microsoft, and at other companies, and photographers I find interesting. How you create your circles is really up to you. Then when you decide to share something, you can share it with only certain circles.

One of the most exciting things for us on Google+ is the idea of a Hangout. This is like a multi-way video conference. You can have a bunch of people (for now its up to 10) join in on a hangout. We might have a hangout to just talk about RightFax or Alchemy. Or we might interview someone, maybe a partner or someone interesting inside OpenText we though you might like to meet. Who knows?

Its a new platform and the first few times we try it, it might not work. But if you would like to join us for the first experiment, add our page to one of your circles. I’ll post the link to the hangout there. At a minimum, I will be on there (this is Matt Williams posting), and Joshua Butcher is planning to be there as well. If you join you can ask us a question about anything you like. I am thinking its going to be on Tuesday at a time thats not too inconvenient for both the US and Europe. But you’ll have to watch for the announcement on Google+ for the precise details. If you aren’t one of the first 10 to join, don’t worry. I plan on streaming the hangout on Livestream.com as well, but the details for that will be on Google. You’ll also be able to post questions to Twitter.

I look forward to seeing you add us to your circles. I’ll then add you to our circles so that I can see what you are up to as well (if you choose to share any news with us). And look out for the posting on Monday or Tuesday morning at the latest. And then we will see each other on the Hangout.

See you then!

Question #8: Where can I find good FoIP technical resources?

One of the most respected names and leading authorities on FoIP is Cisco’s David Hanes. These links provide neutral information on FoIP:

• Implementing Fax over IP
• The Emergence of T.38 as the De Fact Standard for FoIP
• Facebook Forum Summary – Fax Over IP (FoIP) Basics, Design and Best Practices 

Question #9: Who is the Market Leader in FoIP?

We don’t mean to toot our own horn, but OpenText is the world leader of FoIP as well as traditional fax servers (source: Davidson Consulting).   Frost and Sullivan, in their November 2010 Enterprise Fax Market Report, announced that OpenText is the fax server market share leader by almost double its nearest competitor.

OpenText RightFax has been successfully deployed across multiple IP networks and SIP trunks. RightFax 10 (released in June of 2011), has many feature enhancements which will assist you with your FoIP deployments. RightFax is also much more than fax. Embedded as part of RightFax is a secure document delivery solution called SecureDocs that allows you to send and track almost any file type securely.

Question #9 and 1/2: Where can I go to discuss FoIP with the experts?

Don’t miss your chance to hear from two of the industry’s leading experts on FoIP: David Hanes; Gonzalo Salgueiro from Cisco – two guys who literally wrote the book on FoIP. Join David and Gonzalo on November 10^th for an educational webinar that will Explore the Roadmap of SIP Trunking for FoIP. You can also view a recording of a recent joint webinar by OpenText and Dialogic Take the Mystery out of SIP Trunking.

Matthew Brine, General Manager
Fax and Document Distribution Group
OpenText Corporation

Joshua Butcher, Senior Technical Instructor
Fax and Document Distribution Group
OpenText Corporation