OpenText Fax & Document Distribution Group

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.

Think of the HIMSS tradeshow as the supermarket of healthcare IT–anything and anyone you might be looking for is there. I showed up this year representing OpenText RightFax and took advantage of a valuable chance to locate and interact with people who can benefit from a fax solution. I also attended to keep up to date on the ever-changing trends in healthcare IT.

One trend that is not changing is the importance of compliance. Compliance continues to stand out as one of the biggest challenges faced by healthcare providers. Fortunately, it’s a challenge we have been able to help many of them meet and conquer. Broad-reaching regulatory mandates like HIPPA make it imperative that they always know where their documents are, as well as who has access to them. That’s exactly the solution RightFax provides and that is why we are doing so much of our business in the healthcare sector.

Still, it’s amazing to see the number of physicians’ offices, clinics, and hospitals that still use paper records. In many cases, they are receiving documents from a bank of old-fashioned fax machines, putting them on a cart, and wheeling them to another room to be scanned and filed…and sometimes lost. This type of system is hardly secure. In a sense, every time you generate a piece of paper, you generate a business problem. It’s these kinds of people I went to HIMSS12 to talk to.

As the largest gathering of its kind in North America, HIMSS remains the best annual venue for me to meet with the most important players in healthcare IT.

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

With the desire for the highest quality of patient care in the forefront, healthcare organizations, like yours, are facing many challenges when it comes to secure document delivery and storage. We’ve realized regardless of your size, organizations are looking to technology to reduce cost, safeguard information, maintain the ever-changing regulatory requirements and improve internal workflow processes.

Healthcare IT News wants to know: What are your biggest challenges for developing a centralized digital document delivery strategy that complies with healthcare industry regulations?

Please take part in this five-minute survey, and as a thank you you’ll receive a complimentary copy of the research report that will be published based on your answers.

One of my goals each year for the last few years has been to create videos about our products. I really enjoy doing this, but it’s not always clear how our customers consume those videos. We can’t see if they like the video, or drop off after a few minutes. We can’t really control what our YouTube presence looks like or how to organize the videos beyond a certain level. And we have plenty of customers who just cannot see the videos at all, either because the corporate firewall blocks it or because they live in a country that forbids access to YouTube.

So we decided to come up with another solution that solves those problems. FaxDocs.tv is that new solution. It is a single site you can go to and watch all of the latest videos from our group. You can easily find all of the videos relating to each of our main product areas, as well as those targeting different audiences. We will create special pages as needed with pre-programmed playlists for topics like RightFax Fundamentals, etc.

At first (and for the foreseeable future) we will be cross-posting on YouTube and on FaxDocs.tv, but we expect most people will choose to view the videos on FaxDocs.

I hope you like the new FaxDocs.tv website. If you have any comments or suggestions on how to improve the site, share them with us here on the blog.

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