OpenText Fax & Document Distribution Group

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.

By Susie Cornelius, ProcessFlows

It was recently announced that 132 local authorities have admitted to losing sensitive data in the past three years. Some incidents were more serious than others, but at least 35 councils lost information about children in their care. (http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2127193/loss-epidemic-uk-local-authorities).

In 2010, Hertfordshire County Council was fined £100,000 for faxing sensitive information to the wrong recipients. Since then, other public sector organisations, including the police force and the NHS, have also been fined for similar, avoidable, leaks of personal data.

Councils that have breached the Data Protection Act by failing to protect personal information are being fined by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) – a UK independent authority set up to uphold information rights in the public interest by promoting openness from public bodies and data privacy for individuals.

Fax security should be a major concern for any public sector organization, and councils need to start reevaluating the security risks of their fax processes in order to avoid costly ICO fines.

OpenText RightFax is the most trusted, cost-effective and integrated network fax solution, with robust security features designed to minimise the risk of sending sensitive fax messages to the wrong recipient.

Switching to electronic fax guarantees the security of fax information by providing a traceable, efficient and quick faxing process from the desktop.

ProcessFlows is a UK Distributor, Support Centre and Authorised Training Partner for OpenText RightFax and OpenText Alchemy. ProcessFlows can help you secure all types of documentation and processes, their automated solutions for invoice processing, fax distribution, document management, digital mailroom are fully compliant and provide data security at every stage of the document journey.

For more information on ProcessFlows, contact enquiries@processflows.co.uk.

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.

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.

For over 25 years, Price Brothers (UK) Ltd has been part of the Great Man-Made River water supply project in Libya, a project set up to bring fresh water from deep under the Sahara Desert to coastal towns and cities. They were responsible for the original design of this 1600km underground network of pipes and aqueducts, which is recognised as being the largest of its type in the world.

During this time, Price Bothers amassed a huge library of documents. Current project documentation alone is estimated to be three quarters of a million paper documents – a mixture of drawings, plans and critical correspondence.

Using OpenText Alchemy, a document management solution, ProcessFlows partner Castle Document Management provided an electronic filing cabinet for Price Brothers which exactly replicates and retains their manual filing system.

Searching for information and drawings is now a quick and easy desktop function. Documents can be retrieved and viewed from the CDs at the click of a button and office space taken up by large filing cabinets has been reclaimed, as there is no longer a need to retain the paper documents.

Having dealt with current project documentation, Castle Document Management is continuing to work with Price Brothers to electronically archive older information. Once the process has been completed and everything is in electronic format, backed-up and secure, the paper will be securely destroyed, in line with compliance regulations. There is also the option for Castle Document Management to host the Alchemy repository. Users would then be able to access their documents from any web enabled device. Either way, there is no need for a dedicated document storage server.

Read the entire Price Brothers case study here for more information.

By Todd Curtis of ProcessFlows

I suppose the real question is “How secure are the documents sent or received on the fax machine in the corner of your department?”

Todd Curtis, Public Sector Sales Manager from ProcessFlows, an OpenText UK Distributor answers:

Unfortunately, the answer is not secure at all.

The vast majority of Public Sector organisations I visit have this in common; they are all wasting approximately £50,000 annually on phone line connections and consumables for fax devices that lack  integration with  business systems, offer no document security, and waste paper.

Think about it–anyone in your organisation can send documents from a fax machine–without any authority or proof of sender.

Fax security should be a major concern for any Public Sector organisation.

Safe Havens, a locked room with a dedicated fax machine, are deployed throughout the National Health Service (NHS)  These are secure up to a point, but that room could be used for other services.

OpenText RightFax would provide 100′s of fax Safe Havens within your organisation at a reduced cost, compared to your current fleet of fax machines.

Xerox was the first photocopier company in the UK to integrate their Multi Function Printers (MFPs) into RightFax. This meant an organisation with this combined solution could remove all the costs associated with fax machines (fax toners, fax maintenance, phone line rentals). The combination of MFPs and RightFax not only improves document security, it also provides a reduction in carbon and paper wastage as well as greater staff efficiency.

All public spending is under scrutiny.  I urge you to find a project with a quicker ROI, that can be implemented with minimal internal resource and delivers all of the following benefits:

• Improved document security
• Reduced costs
• Improved staff efficiencies
• Decreased carbon emissions

Integrating your photocopiers with RightFax and removing your fax machines will do all this.

Do you

• Use standalone fax machines?
• Work in the Public Sector?
• Want to improve document security, reduce costs and improve staff efficiency?

ProcessFlows serves as UK Distributor, Support Centre and Authorized Training Partner for OpenText RightFax and OpenText Alchemy. For more information on ProcessFlows, contact tcurtis@processflows.co.uk.

By Chris Schultz, Satori Solutions

The University of Kansas Hospital is one of the United States’ leading academic medical centers. The hospital provides clinical experience and residency positions for students in a multidisciplinary approach to patient care. As a 600-bed facility, the hospital retains more than 4,500 employees and 500 physicians.  To manage the weekly transfer of thousands of medical files, The University of Kansas Hospital relied on dozens of fax machines, multi-function devices, and fax servers. Disparate faxing methods across the organization produced challenges.  According to Keith Anetsberger, assistant administrator with Information Technology Services for The University of Kansas Hospital, inefficiencies and unreliability inherent to hardware-based faxing occasionally impeded employee productivity and patient satisfaction.

The University of Kansas Hospital turned to OpenText Premier Partner, Satori Solutions, for project design, execution and support.  Led by Satori, a team of members from several hospital departments and application vendors consolidated previously separate and unreliable faxing methods into a single, high-availability virtualized RightFax enterprise-wide solution, leveraging Dialogic’s T.38 Fax over IP (FoIP) technology to integrate with their existing Avaya VoIP infrastructure.

Read the complete case study.

As you may be aware, there is a new version of RightFax coming out very soon. Its pretty exciting for us because of all the new features. But its pretty exciting for us with every release of our software. And I don’t mean just the big releases like RightFax 10. Even the Service Releases and Feature Packs are pretty exciting. Sometimes its easy to miss them, but its well worth checking out the readme that accompanies each release. I sometimes forget to read the readmes too, but they show how much we care about improving our products on a regular basis.

I was reminded of this in a recent class. In class I usually use the base product, without updating to the latest feature release. But this time we got up to date on the first day. On day two, I brought up Wireshark to demonstrate the difference between the TCP/IP and Secure TCP/IP connection types. The difference between these two options is that everything is encrypted with Secure TCP/IP, at a minimal cost in bandwidth. One of the most obvious differences between these in RightFax 9.4 base is that the password is transmitted in cleartext. If you are interested in learning more about this, see my earlier blog right here.

There are three ways to solve this issue. First, you can switch to Secure TCP/IP. Although there is an increase in bandwidth, everything is encrypted. Second, implement Integrated Security, where you associate the RightFax user with a Windows user. Then we don’t need to verify any password. The third, and probably best option, is simply to update your installation.

That’s right, we changed this behavior. And we did it very early on. Way back in Service Release 2 this was addressed. I am not sure what the date was on that but it was probably around the time of the blog where I talked about it.

So go ahead and check out the Service Releases and Feature Packs and their readme files. You can find them at http://knowledge.opentext.com. Right now as of this posting we are at RightFax 9.4 Feature Pack 1, Service Release 3. It looks like we addressed some pretty interesting issues in there and I am already looking forward to at least one of the updates in the next one too.

Of course, be sure to test these updates in your environment before you roll it out to the entire enterprise. We have done thorough testing on our side, but we don’t have the same environment as you. You might have some other application running that may cause a conflict with our updates. So just like any updates from any other manufacturer, please test them in your test environment first before a complete rollout.

Are there any recent updates, fixes, improvements that you found most useful? Share them with me in the comments below. Or contact me on Twitter where I go by the name Technovangelist.

Go to the Google books web site and search for “The Internet For Dummies” By John R. Levine, Margaret Levine Young. If you then search for the word “social” Google will tell you that there are 39 occurrences spread across 432 pages. Our friends in Mountain View are always good for an easy warm-up session that doesn’t tax the body too much.

Let’s try a similar exercise on a much larger scale. Jog over to your IT department and nimbly request access to all fax documents your organization has ever sent or received which contain the vendor ID for the company that supplies your office with staplers. For many firms this request will give you more than enough time to catch your breath and perhaps write a book yourself. While it’s great for one’s cardiovascular system, searching for highly specific snippets of information in large, unmanaged repositories is frequently an exhausting, overwhelming and imprecise process.

Even though many organizations have taken steps to better manage their inbound and outbound fax communication, a large percentage still haven’t installed measures that enable them to maintain a long term, secure archive of searchable fax documents. This seemingly minor omission in a corporate information management strategy is unfortunately capable of doing much damage when the time comes to respond to an audit or discovery request. Conversely, not having a complete grip on those information assets can prevent companies from identifying documents that may strengthen their position in legal disputes or, assist in resolving issues concerning costly business transactions.

Introducing a dedicated fax archive into your fax management solution substantially mitigates many of the risks associated with the long term management of high volumes of fax documents. By deploying an archive which performs OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on faxes on their way into the archive, IT organizations can be confident that they can quickly search through the entire contents of the archive for faxes containing a particular set of characters, words or phrase. This granular level of indexing often proves far more useful than narrow searching on fax header data many companies are limited to today. In those cases where faxes need to be provided to an external party, a well-managed archive will allow for rapid retrieval and multiple distribution options such as burning to optical media, sending to portable storage devices or uploading to FTP sites. In short, the fax archive provides a safe, accessible haven for faxes ensuring they remain as a long-term asset rather than a future liability.

OpenText customers have long been able to deploy highly searchable archiving capabilities using RightFax’s sister product, OpenText Alchemy. As of March 15^th 2011 those RightFax users who have not yet added an archive safety-net will be able to do so by selecting one of four new RightFax Archiving bundles. The “Basic” bundle will provide core capabilities for the smaller RightFax systems with the “Standard”, “Professional” and “Advanced” editions providing increased recognition capacity along with more advanced encryption and access features.

I am confident that reading through the last 508 words has provided more than enough exercise for the day but for those of you who need to “feel the burn” a little more, why not push your body to the limits by reaching out to your OpenText partner for more information on these forthcoming RightFax Archiving bundles?

This article has not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease (unless it’s fax related in which case we’ll fetch our scalpels)

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By Manish Kamdar of Rincon India Solutions Pvt. Ltd., a Premier OpenText Partner

eBay.in, India’s leading online marketplace, deployed OpenText RightFax to protect sensitive customer information received on fax while using PaisaPay – eBay’s payment gateway. As per Indian regulations, if the value of the transaction on PaisaPay exceeds INR 35000, it is mandatory for the company to collect identification proof such as credit card copy, PAN (Permanent Account Number) card copy, etc. The buyer faxes these documents to eBay’s Headquarters in Mumbai.

Prior to deployment of RightFax, faxes were received on any of the three fax machines kept at the headquarters. Since confidentiality of clients’ financial data was of paramount importance, eBay opted for OpenText RightFax. According to Jesal Patel, Project manager (IT Services), eBay India, “The key reason RightFax made its way to eBay India was the application’s capability to securely deliver faxes to the individuals for whom it was meant. The sensitive nature of the data received on faxes made RightFax the right solution”.

Now with the deployment of RightFax, eBay can address security, compliance and productivity concerns with one solution and confidently manage over 300 faxes a day.

Click to read the complete case study.

For more information on Ricon India Solutions, please contact www.rincon.co.in or contact Manish Kamdar at manishk@rincon.co.in.