Partners & Integrations
Inside CHC’s Workflow Turnaround: eFax® Integration with athenaOne®
Partners & IntegrationsOrchestrating a secure, efficient, and cost-effective IT infrastructure is a top strategic priority for the majority of today’s healthcare leaders. While organizations pursue digital transformation, foundational communication methods like faxing remain mission-critical for exchanging sensitive patient information. One major hurdle can be found in legacy workflows that lack modernization, often contributing to considerable operational friction, increased security risk, and control costs.
The eFax® integration with athenaOne® directly addresses this imperative, providing a secure, cloud-based solution that digitizes fax workflows and embeds them directly into the EHR environment.
One network of community health centers serving underserved residents of California’s Central Coast known as CHC fell prey to significant workflow disruption as a result of their legacy fax systems. This blog highlights how legacy faxing lets health organizations down, and how CHC transformed their workflow from fax frustration to optimization using the very same integration.
Legacy Faxing: A System Prone to Failure
Before integrating a modern cloud fax solution, healthcare organizations often contend with a fragile and inefficient process.
Common challenges include:
- Transmission failures: Faxes frequently error out, often without a clear reason, forcing staff to resend documents multiple times.
- Poor Quality: Analog transmission can lead to truncated or distorted documents, rendering critical clinical information unreadable.
- Busy Signals: External partners, such as specialists and labs, often struggle to send documents, reporting constant busy signals from overworked fax lines. This delays the receipt of vital patient data.
- Manual Triage and Routing: Inbound faxes arrive in a central repository, requiring staff to manually sort, identify the correct patient, and attach the document to their record. This is a time-intensive and error-prone process.
- Complex Call-Forwarding: Forwarding faxes from multiple local numbers to a central processing service adds a layer of complexity and another potential point of failure, often degrading document quality.
- High Overhead: Maintaining physical fax machines, dedicated phone lines, and associated supplies generates significant, recurring operational costs.
These issues are not isolated incidents; they represent systemic weaknesses that compromise efficiency, frustrate staff, and introduce unnecessary risk.
The Solution: eFax Integration with athenaOne
The eFax integration with athenaOne is designed to solve these challenges by replacing outdated, on-premise hardware with a secure, fully digitized cloud-faxing service. This solution digitizes the entire workflow, from transmission to archival, directly within the athenaOne platform.
Core Workflow and Components
The integration creates a seamless, reliable path for all fax communications. Here’s how:
When a fax is sent to one of your numbers, eFax digitizes it at the point of receipt, ensuring a high-quality digital original before it ever enters your system. The digitized fax is sent directly to your athenaOne tablespace. This eliminates the need for call forwarding and the quality degradation associated with it.
Documents are accessible in the athenaOne Clinical Inbox and the “Faxes Received” page. Staff can manage all inbound communications from a single, familiar interface, offering centralized access to all relevant admins.
The system also offers enhanced search and filtering capabilities, including an eFax filter, allowing users to easily search for documents received through the integration, simplifying reconciliation, and auditing.
With such efficiency, faxes arrive as clear, digital documents, where they can be triaged by athenahealth’s Document Services team or your internal staff and associated directly with the correct patient record. This streamlined workflow ensures that clinicians and administrative staff have timely access to the information they need at the point of care, without the technical hurdles of a traditional fax environment.
Reliability, Security, and Scale
For organizations handling sensitive PHI, security and reliability are non-negotiable. The eFax integration is built on a foundation of industry-leading standards.
- HIPAA-Compliant and HITRUST Certified: The solution is designed to meet the rigorous security and privacy requirements of healthcare, backed by a HITRUST Risk-based r2 Certification.
- High Availability: With a 99.5% uptime guarantee, the service ensures that your critical communication channels are always operational.
- Unlimited Scalability: The cloud-based infrastructure can handle fluctuating volumes without requiring any changes to your on-premise hardware or IT footprint.
- Centralized Management: All fax numbers and workflows are managed through a central platform, providing complete visibility and control over your communications infrastructure.
Fax Frustration to Optimization: How CHC Transformed Their Workflows
Community Health Centers of the Central Coast (CHC), a Federally Qualified Health Center with 33 locations, faced systemic challenges with its legacy faxing process. When CHC centralized its referral coordinators into a single Utilization Management (UM) team, the full scope of the problem became clear.
Before: A Broken and Unmanageable Process
CHC’s decentralized faxing environment was failing the organization and its partners. The UM team was inundated with issues that consumed valuable resources and delayed communications.
On average, the organization experienced 121 fax errors per week with their old faxing workflows. Constant errors and workflow disruptions didn’t just impact revenue and patient care; it also impacted ongoing relationships with external partners. Staff fielded approximately 15 complaints per week from frustrated employees and external partners unable to send or receive faxes reliability.
Due to the near-constant errors, CHC had to dedicate a full-time employee solely to troubleshooting fax issues and manually coordinating the resending of failed documents. With an influx of unstructured documents and limited bandwidth, it was challenging for the UM team to measure fax volume and plan resources accordingly. In fact, the UM team estimated its monthly fax volume was roughly 7,600 pages. After implementing eFax into their existing athenaOne workflow, discovering that true monthly volume left the CHC team speechless.
The Implementation: A Seamless Transition
CHC engaged eFax and athenahealth to implement the eFax integration. The migration was designed for minimal disruption.
To begin, CHC’s existing fax numbers were ported to the eFax cloud platform. This critical step ensured that external partners did not need to update contact information or change their workflows.
The ported numbers were mapped to the appropriate endpoints within CHC’s athenaOne instance, creating a direct digital pathway for all inbound faxes. Once the mapping was complete, the switch was flipped, and faxes began flowing through the new, fully digital system.
After: Night-and-Day Improvement
The results of the integration were immediate and dramatic, transforming the faxing process from a major liability into a reliable asset.
- 90% Reduction in Errors: As CHC Director of Informatics, Alvin Yip, shares: “It just works! I’ve gone from 121 fax errors per week down to 12, and so far, every one of those errors I’ve chased down has turned out to be a problem on the sender’s side. It’s literally like night and day!”
- 100% Reduction in Complaints: The UM team went from handling over a dozen complaints weekly to zero.
- Increased Productivity: The employee previously dedicated to fixing fax issues was reassigned to the UM team, returning a full-time resource to value-added work.
- Enhanced Transparency: With centralized management through eFax, CHC discovered its actual fax volume was nearly double the original estimate – approximately 14.000 pages per month. This new insight enabled better resource planning.
The integration provided the stability, reliability, and efficiency CHC needed to support its operations across dozens of locations.
Managed Migration and Support
Transitioning from a legacy system requires careful planning and execution. eFax provides a dedicated migration team to lead the process from start to finish, ensuring a smooth cutover whether you are moving from an on-premise solution or another cloud fax vendor. Post-migration, your organization gains access to comprehensive training and 24/7/365 US-based support to ensure your continued success.
Transform your Fax Workflow
By eliminating legacy hardware, automating workflows, and strengthening security, the eFax integration with athenaOne allows healthcare organizations to modernize a mission-critical communication channel.
Providers no longer need to tolerate a sub-par fax experience. Learn how the eFax integration with athenaOne can transform your workflows today.
