As a 450-bed full-service healthcare facility, Glendale Adventist Medical Center understands the importance of adapting to change — from regulations and infrastructure to technology and patient needs.
When Glendale Adventist recognized the inefficiencies in its manual back-office faxing process, a progressive solution was sought to save time, money and resources, while still being flexible enough to deploy throughout multiple departments. Esker on Demand proved to be the platform to take their fax to a new level of efficiency.
Problem: Manual Faxing
On one hand, Glendale Adventist is not your average healthcare facility. It does, after all, have over a century of experience, nationally recognized patient care, and a slew of ambitious expansion projects in the works. On the other hand, like any other healthcare operation, they share the same back-office struggles, particularly in dealing with the constant stream of critical information coming in and out.
In the past, this flow of information — whether it was receiving medical records or sending orders, schedules and a variety of other paperwork out to different doctors’ offices — was largely paper-based, and thus, quite inefficient.
“We receive a ton of faxes each day,” said Steve Chavez, Telecommunications Technician at Glendale Adventist. “At the end of day, one of our team members would have to stand by the fax machine and send out all of our faxes. It would tie the phone lines up until they all went through — about a 2-3 hour process.”
Solution: Esker on Demand
Engineers at Glendale Adventist were already familiar with Esker before their search for a new faxing solution began, which proved to be a decided advantage in saving them time and energy scouring the market.
“Esker Fax was already being used successfully, but only in our Medical Records Department,” said Chavez.
“When we learned about the capabilities of Esker on Demand, we realized it would be a perfect platform for rolling out to multiple departments.”
Seamless deployment
Currently, Glendale Adventist is in the process of deploying Esker on Demand department by department, based on need.
“It’s got to be all or nothing in terms of an automated solution like this,” said Chavez.
“When people have options they usually fall back to what’s familiar. Luckily for us, Esker has been incredibly simple to use and set up. The transition process has gone smoothly.”
Benefits of Fax Services with Esker on Demand:
- 24/7 delivery with multiple redundant backup systems
- A system of intelligent line allocation and routing
- No telephony investments
- Seamless integration with existing desktop and enterprise applications
- Detailed visibility and reporting on outbound fax traffic
- Worldwide network of telephone lines dedicated to fax reception
- Real-time tracking and automatic archiving of sent and/or received faxes
Results
Since its “go-live” of Esker on Demand, although not yet fully implemented, Glendale Adventist has already achieved a wide range of benefits as a result — one of the biggest being the elimination of paper.
“Some of the faxes can be 5-plus pages in length, but a lot of times we would only need one page,” said Chavez.
“Now, instead of printing those extra pages we can easily locate and send the one page we want, all electronically.”
In addition to taking paper out of the faxing process, Esker on Demand has also allowed the staff at Glendale
Adventist to save a significant amount of time and effort.
“Where faxing used to be a very involved, time consuming and manual process, now it’s a breeze,” said Chavez.
“Esker on Demand has been like a godsend to us. We’re able to send fax after fax without even getting up from our desks.”
Support staff
The savings of time, money and resources were expected through the adoption of Esker on Demand, but there were
also pleasant surprises along the way.
“It’s great to see how responsive and helpful the Esker support staff has been,” said Chavez. “It’s the type of thing you can easily take for granted, but every time we’ve had a hiccup, answers are sent our way pretty quickly.”
