Piedmont’s Cloud Fax Revolution: Improved Scalability, Efficiency, and Patient Care

When Piedmont Health took a supercharged path to growth, increasing from six hospitals to 26 in a 10-year period, the health system’s approach to bringing new facilities into the fold could be summed up in six words: “Integrate fast. Then, bring the technology.” A phased strategy to technology adoption during a rapid period of growth made sense, but there was much to consider. After all, continuity of care and operations depends on timely access to information. Scaling quickly and ensuring disparate technology systems could speak to each other was vital.

It’s an area where Geoff Brown, CIO at Piedmont, found value from implementing a technology that holds more potential for innovation than most health systems realize: digital cloud fax.

For Piedmont, the decision to move more than 4 million annual faxes to the cloud through a phased implementation across the health system’s 2,000 facilities created economies of scale for the organization during a period of high growth. It also improved reliability of information access and exchange while delivering a strong return on investment.

Cloud Fax as a Tool for Innovation

With more than 2,000 facilities and 4.5 million patients a year, Piedmont’s decision to partner with Consensus Cloud Solutions to replace existing on premise fax servers with a cloud infrastructure “turned out to be one of the best decisions we’ve ever made,” Brown said. “This has really revolutionized the way we operate,” Brown told attendees at HIMSS during a presentation at Consensus’ booth.

Piedmont’s legacy fax infrastructure, reliant on analog lines and telecommunications providers, struggled to handle peak fax volumes, making timely fax processing a challenge. Before migrating to cloud fax, Piedmont often faced challenges with missing orders and gaps in patient information. Additionally, staff would spend hours on the phone, tracking down orders or responding to requests for data. When data came in as faxed documents, staff would scan the PDFs and then index the information so it could be searched for and retrieved later. “We could no longer afford to manage the data in that way,” Brown said. “Imagine the number of hours it would take our clinical teams…we couldn’t operationalize this work.”

The move to cloud-based information exchange—made possible through digital cloud fax—provided a pathway for more scalable, secure, and reliable data exchange. It also reduced the administrative burden associated with integrating patient information into the EHR, it happened automatically when the faxes came in.

“I just can’t tell you the benefit this has provided for our workforce and our clinical practices,” Brown emphasized. Piedmont’s team of approximately 47,000 employees now have instant access to incoming information. This is particularly crucial for its operating room staff who no longer face delays due to missing faxed paperwork; instead, they find the necessary documentation embedded directly in the patient record, allowing them to begin cases promptly with all relevant information at hand.

One added, critical benefit: greater security controls over sensitive information. Consensus’ digital cloud fax solution, eFax Corporate®, is HITRUST certified and meets all necessary compliance requirements.

Leaning into the Power of the Cloud and AI: What’s Next for Piedmont

For large health systems like Piedmont, the application of intelligent data extraction powered by AI is transforming information exchange and the management of unstructured data, including faxes. “By putting this workflow in place, we can elevate our services to a new level, freeing up resources to deliver faster and better support to our physician community, our clinical teams, and, most importantly, the patients who depend on us for timely access to their documents.“

Piedmont is actively exploring how Consensus’ AI technology, Clarity, can automate the processing of the millions of documents handled by their Health Information Management (HIM) team. “I’m excited, I can’t imagine all the benefits that may be realized in the future that  we are not mindful of right now”

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