OpenText Fax & Document Distribution Group

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.

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.

The new Fax Appliance Feature Pack 2 for Fax Appliance A102 and A104 is now available.  The OpenText Fax Appliance family of plug and play products is designed to simplify overall deployment and use while providing a cost effective alternative to MFP fax kits as well as traditional fax boards and remote fax servers.   We’ve made quite a few changes based on the key capabilities requested by our customers to further enhance our Fax Appliance.

Here is a snapshot of just a few of the new features:

• Receive faxes in PDF file format
• Cloud-based email support (e.g. Google Apps)
• Import contacts to shared phonebook
• Import phonebook entries from FaxPress
• And many more exciting features 

For the complete Fax Appliance feature list, please visit: http://fax-appliance.com/features/

You can also attend the Nov. 1 webinar to learn more.  Register here.

For additional information, please visit www.fax-appliance.com.

Although this blog is mostly a place for us to talk about RightFax and Alchemy, its also a way for you to learn more about the people who make up the Fax & Document Distribution Group at OpenText. Some of us total geeks (like me) and others are little bit closer to normal. But together we make up a company that is excited to bring you products that we think are insanely great.

Before the Global Fax Summit a few weeks ago, we had a global sales meeting to get the troops revved up for the new year and to celebrate the successes of the previous year. The winners of the awards for best sales in the different regions were given iPads along with the instruction to figure out how to do their job better with the tablet in mind.

Some of us are just starting to figure out what the tablet is good for, but I have had a good amount of time with the iPad already. When I bought the iPad1 I thought it would be a toy to play with for a few weeks then get tired of. It didn’t turn out that way and I now use the iPad2 every single day. Now my manager might be scared about that comment if it weren’t for the fact that 95% of the time I am using the iPad is for work.

I use it to gather my thoughts, brainstorm on new projects, figure out my day’s task, read documentation and books, write my video scripts, and record my days activities. I haven’t used it as a replacement to the activities I did on my laptop, but to supplement my laptop with brand new activities I never did before. Its a truly amazing device that I don’t think I could do without anymore.

A few days ago, I responded to a post made by an OpenText colleague about the iPad apps he thought were most useful. The response post on my personal site shows the apps I use every day to get my job done. I limited myself to 13 that I use almost every day. Thats a small subset of the apps I have installed. I think at last count I had about 150 apps installed, but these 13 are the best of the best.

This post is for my colleagues and for all of you just getting started with the iPad. Its not a official OpenText recommendation, but just a list of what I personally find incredibly useful for my job. I figured that since there is increased interest internally in the Fax & Document Distribution Group with regards to the iPad, that warranted the cross-post from my personal site. So go ahead and read the recommendations. Then let me know if you have any recommendations of your own. These are my favorite 13 right now, but I am sure you have one that I haven’t discovered yet.

OmniFocus – I have had such a hard time finding a good way to manage tasks. It was easier to do before when I was able to rely on Outlook. Tasks in Outlook worked pretty well most of the time. Sure, they weren’t perfect, but they were good enough. And then I got this Mac. And I use the Mac all the time. Now Outlook 2011 syncs tasks, but due to the version of Exchange used here, I have to stick with Entourage 2008 which does not sync tasks. Thats really the only issue I have with Entourage. So I started looking around for a better tasks app. I looked at all sorts of stuff, even online alternatives. I finally settled on OmniFocus. It may seem costly at first, but it would be a bargain at double the cost. Having the app on my iPad and my iPhone as well makes having a single list of tasks so much easier than ever before. Now if you are thinking you don’t want to go that route because you are on a Blackberry, then let me tell you this. I didn’t buy OmniFocus because I had an iPhone, I bought the iPhone because OmniFocus was helping so much and it didn’t exist on Blackberry. The iPad version offers some features that aren’t available elsewhere, making the 3 apps work really well together.

iThoughtsHD – I thought a mind-mapping app would be worthless on the iPad. While mind-mapping is great on a Tablet PC, the lack of a serious pen interface would be limiting (and don’t even try to convince yourself that the styluses available provide a decent pen interface). After I spent a few minutes with iThoughtsHD, that opinion completely changed. Although its still better on a real tablet, the iPad interface for mind-mapping in iThoughtsHD is genius. I have been able to fill out so many ideas and lists using this app that have helped me on a wide range of projects at work.

Reeder – I have been a big fan of news readers for a very long time, having been a paying customer for NewsGator when they still had paid customers. Reeder is the best of the news readers I have seen on the iPad for going through my top feeds. It doesn’t present it in a newspaper or magazine format, but when I want that I use Zite which is also pretty amazing.

Instapaper – I often find stuff online that I want to read, but don’t have time for right now. So I save it for later with Instapaper. Having this app on the iPad means I have that list of reading material where ever I am.

Teleprompt+ - This is a pretty specialized app, but when I record my videos, its truly invaluable. I no longer have to edit out the sound of rustling paper when I read from my script. I keep meaning to build a teleprompter mount, but even without, this is still magically useful

Notesy – I started with SimpleNote, but have moved on to Notesy. I can’t remember why. It probably was something I heard Merlin Mann say. But I use Notesy, synched with DropBox for all my ongoing notes. I use the same app on the iPhone, plus Notational Velocity on the Mac, all looking at the same list of text files. I keep notes on things I said to people, books I read, gifts I bought, measurements of furniture I need to buy, future blog posts, translations of Dutch articles I am working on, instructions for apps, scripts I am working on, and more. Notesy handles it all without a problem.

LastPass Tab - I tried using 1Password to manage passwords, but since the app on iPad is so pathetically useless, I switched to LastPass. LastPass Tab is a tabbed browser for iPad that has access to my LastPass password store as well. I find I use it almost as much as Safari on the iPad

Squarespace – My personal blog is hosted at Squarespace. The Squarespace iPad app (and the iPhone app) means I have the quick ability to respond to comments, report spam, and see visitor stats.

WordPress – This blog is hosted by OpenText and uses WordPress. Everything I said for the Squarespace app applies to this WordPress app as well.

Tweet Library – I have used Twitter for a long time. Well, for a long time in Twitter years. Tweet Library makes it easier for me to maintain a library of my tweets going back to almost the beginning. Because occasionally I say something good, and 6 months later I need to find that. Tweet Library makes it easy to find those little gems.

Tweetings – Tweetings is the ultimate iPad Twitter app for me. I have tried plenty of others, but I keep returning to Tweetings. It does the basics, like my timeline, mentions, and DMs. I can create buttons for my favorite searches (right now they are FCPX, Blender 3D, and Timelapse). The best part is the window for creating a new tweet, with quick access to recent hashtags, url shrink utils, scheduled tweets, lists of contacts, and more.

Goodreader – This was the first PDF reader I found on the iPad and I see no reason to change. It syncs easily with specific subfolders on dropbox so I always have whats important and not the rest of the stuff I share in Dropbox. Goodreader has great features for annotations too.

DayOne – I have blogged now for a little over 15 years. It wasn’t called blogging then and the tools were terrible, but its still the same idea. Ever since the beginning, I blogged because I wanted to record something that I would have forgotten otherwise. If others want to read it, great, but thats not really my goal. I have always known that everything on the Internet is NOT private, no matter what you do to secure it, so sharing more…um….intimate things was always off limits for blogging. DayOne is kind of a private blog for me, stored on my machine. It syncs to my Mac and my iPhone so I can always record what I did that day, who I met, etc. Its a beautiful app I really enjoy working with.

So what do you think of those. Are you using them already? Is there another app you use every single day that I didn’t mention? Let me know in the comments below.

Advocate BroMenn Medical Center is a full-service, 221-bed hospital serving central Illinois for more than a century. It is staffed by more than 1,800 employees, 350 physicians and 800 volunteers. Efficiency can be elusive when hospitals contend with outdated, manual processes. For BroMenn, incoming physician orders for radiology, cardiology, and surgical procedures previously arrived on fax machines. The Radiology Department alone receives up to 110 orders per day requesting MRIs, CT scans, ultrasounds, or x-rays. Between reduced staff productivity, denied insurance claims, delayed procedures, and patient dissatisfaction, BroMenn needed a solution that could support their overall mission for exceptional patient care and best healthcare practices while improving processes.

By working with Risetime, a Chicago-based solutions provider, to digitize and automate the management of physician orders BroMenn implemented ECM solutions from Open Text and Microsoft. The combined solution which included Open Text Fax Server integrated with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007, Open Text Fax Server Connector for SharePoint 2.0, Risetime Medical Fax Management Solution for SharePoint, and Microsoft Silverlight, has enabled enhanced patient services, improved billing efficiencies for financial stability, and improved employee productivity.

BroMenn is in the process of expanding the pre-screening order process to other areas of the hospital, including cardiology, surgical care, and lab.

Adam Young, Field Project Lead with the Information Systems Department of Advocate BroMenn Medical Center offers advice to other hospitals dealing with paper-based, manual order processing. “If you don’t have a way to manage orders electronically now, Open Text Fax Server integrated with Microsoft SharePoint is one of the best ways to do it.”

Read the Full Case Study.

For additional product information, please visit: http://www.risetime.com/