Handling incoming Faxes in your EMR

More often than not, greater than 50% of the paper floating around in your medical office came in via the fax machine.  That innocuous machine sitting is the corner is a notorious killer of trees!  You have lab results, consult notes, referral letters, refill request and a plethora of other medical documents pouring into your office over thin copper wires!

Let’s take an incoming lab for example, in a typical paper office with no EMR.  The fax machine spits out the coversheet and lab result.  Your nurse (or designated person), collates the faxes, hunts down and pulls the patient chart, attaches the fax to the front of the chart, drops it off on your desk (possibly with a post it note on top of the fax with any notes).  You read the fax and assuming everything is normal, sign off on the result, put another post it note (or another type of note) on the chart and hand it back to your nurse/MA/assistant to call the patient and let them know all is well.  Beautifully choreographed like ballet, except not quite as graceful!  Now if the lab results are not normal, you just added another layer of complexity to this dance.

Now let’s take the example of an office with an EMR.  I will make the assumption here that most EMR’s today have a document management module built in, as that is usually the case.  Most EMR’s today also have some capability for fax management, whether it is built in or using a third party tool.  Either way, the faxes are now coming in as digital images to your fax server, no longer denuding the rainforests in Brazil.  You do not have to automatically print out every fax.  You could now load the incoming fax directly to the patient’s electronic chart (no more hunting for the chart).  Via a built in notification function, the doctor is notified of the lab received and can now view and sign off on it electronically.  If the patient needs to be called, the doctor fires off an internal message or internal email notification to the nurse to do the same.

There are many advantages to this change in your workflow:

1. Save trees (I am a certified tree hugger, so this comes first J)
2. Save money on paper
3. Speed – from fax receipt to notification, the work process is measured in seconds, not minutes.  The subsequent follow up actions are also greatly streamlined.
4. Improved patient safety – no more misplaced faxes.
5. Improved tracking functions – audit trails as to who did what, when etc.

Surprisingly, many offices, even those with EMRs already, are not taking advantage of this ability.  It is in your best interest (especially in the best interests of your pocket book) to make sure that you do consider this method as a ‘must do’ step.  If you already don’t have an EMR, then this is a perfect example of the workflow benefit you could be getting once you do make that jump!