Analog’s Last Frontier:

In an increasingly connected, digital world, enterprise-level healthcare systems have a surprising method for getting data from Point A to Point B: faxing.

Providers invest substantial resources to shore up what should be an obsolete approach to communication. Large medical groups that process hundreds of referrals daily take digital data, manually send it via analog fax systems, only to require the other side to manually handle and re-enter or scan the fax back into a digital platform.

Handling all that paper wastes time—10 minutes or more for both sender and receiver—and requires upkeep of the infrastructure.

Providers must bear the cost of maintaining the required number of lines, the software licenses, the physical servers, and fax machines or services, and the maintenance of a redundant system in case the primary goes down.

Yet faxing remains the cornerstone of operations across healthcare, because the alternative—integrating disparate systems with HL7 interfaces—is time-consuming and expensive, and not an option for all medical practices.

In 2011, Chris Craft, CEO of ScriptSender, decided there had to be a better way. “If you know the right questions to ask, you can figure out the right tools for the answer,” he said. Where is the data? Who needs access? What format is it stored in? What do users want to see? How do they want to see it? On what devices?

But getting those separate systems to sync up is expensive and time-consuming. It can take months for dedicated I.T. specialists to get an HL7 integration to work, and then it’s time to start over with the next referrer’s system. Few imaging providers are robust enough to spend resources—financial or technical—on HL7 set-ups, let alone on continued maintenance.

The answers led to a technology innovation that replaces faxing—and replaces the need for any VPN or HL7 integration. To bypass those inefficiencies, ScriptSender enables a referring physician to activate—in one click—a virtual printer (using a driver native to the operating system). Using a simple print command, the referrer can now transmit any document, from any application, to another medical provider—orders, prescriptions, clinical notes, lab results, anything.

And even better, it stays digital. The receiving end receives real data, not just a PDF of the original order. “It is real data that populates the RIS. Our system recognizes the inbound document and automatically directs the data in that order to its proper home in the RIS—saving time and effort and removing the possibility of human error.”

What started as a fax replacement has evolved into a robust information sharing suite. Craft said: “ReportSender returns a report with image links so that referring physicians can access, share, and export images. We can auto-write orders directly into any EMR or work with HL7 interfaces by creating files to import through our Translation Services module. We also offer Web Orders as well as our own image viewer.”

“It’s all about unblocking information,” said Craft. “No matter what EMR a medical group has, communication can flow, and everyone can access the same data. Plus, no unnecessary workflows or processes are added for the referring doctor. We always design to require as few clicks as possible. That’s one thing I’ve learned from doctors in my career—the fewer clicks the better.”