Healthcare can be a complex and confusing maze of loosely affiliated – and often disconnected – parts, head-spinning terminology, inexplicable payment policies and sometimes antiquated business practices and technology. And while appreciation for our healthcare providers goes without saying, innovation to improve their work experiences and the business of healthcare hasn’t always kept pace with other industries. As a company that has been serving the healthcare industry for many decades, Konica Minolta is in a unique position to help drive transformational change.
The administrative processes required to capture documentation necessary to register or admit a patient or resident into a clinic, hospital or long-term care facility can be laborious, manual and paper-driven. Some healthcare providers have accelerated their digital transformation significantly, many as a result of COVID, and since have continued to advance those efforts. However, a majority of healthcare organizations continue to rely on some mix of paper, electronic, fax and other processes to manage their patient onboarding. This can result in hybrid systems where staff must manage both an electronic health record (EHR), as well as paper processes, yielding inefficient, costly workflow and in some cases, may even risk data privacy or HIPAA violation exposure. According to the 2021 report by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, mail or fax continues to be the most common method for exchanging summary of care records for care transitions, resulting in about 7 in 10 hospitals using mail or fax to send and receive health information in 2019.
Healthcare organizations receive documentation from a variety of sources, making the onboarding process a real business challenge. And because our healthcare system is composed of multiple care settings, with providers across the care continuum on disparate EHRs and back-end systems, there is limited connectivity available to them, thus the reliance on old technology like fax, which remains the common denominator for interoperability. This disparity among care settings, especially between acute and extended care has created a digital divide from a technology perspective. And while there has been a migration to the cloud for fax, as well as so many other systems, the digital divide in healthcare continues to keep good old analog fax in business, especially in post-acute care environments. What’s even more interesting is that this continues even though Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) lines were phased out by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 2022, meaning that the FCC no longer requires phone carriers to support POTS lines – analog voice transmission systems that use copper wires – making these type of phone lines more and more expensive.
Not surprisingly, paper continues to play a prominent role in healthcare – insurance requirements, consent forms, advanced directives, med history from prior treatments – all need to find their way into an EHR. And the various steps taken to accomplish this may differ widely from provider to provider. Some may have invested in technology that integrates directly with their EHR, others may have added a third-party document management system that may or may not interact well with their system. Still others may just maintain manila files for their paper records, while also using an EHR – thus managing dual charts!
A handful of EHRs are predominate in the extended care setting (defined as skilled nursing facilities, assisted living, rehab, home health, etc.), namely PointClickCare, Wellsky, MatrixCare, Yardi and a few others. This is where Konica Minolta can assist. Through our partnership with Kno2® Konica Minolta offers our customers a value-added experience from our multifunction printers (MFP) that provides EHR-integrated scanning, Direct Secure Messaging and HIPAA-Compliant Cloud Fax (NOT ANALOG FAX!), all available from the industry’s most secure printers via our Share PHI app and our Healthcare-Enabled MFP. Nurses and administrative staff across memory care, assisted living and skilled nursing facilities are enjoying a new level of capability from their MFPs not previously available in the industry, with customer-driven features added through real clinical use case scenarios.
The Share PHI (Protected Health Information) app is 100% cloud based, thus requiring no on-prem hardware requirements, and offers an optimal user experience with minimal data input required at the MFP control panel. This is accomplished through user-centric design and API integration into leading EHRs, enabling nursing staff to quickly search for the resident/patient, select the document type, scan the document(s) and send via Direct Secure Messaging (healthcare interoperable exchange protocol) or HIPAA-Compliant Cloud Fax; scan to the resident chart; or both within a single workflow. Direct Secure Messaging utilizes the foundation of the Direct Standard®, and is a widely deployed and accessible means for communicating sensitive health information to other trusted parties.” According to DirectTrust, a non-profit trade alliance, and membership organization, as well as an ANSI-accredited standards body, more than 2.7 million Direct addresses have been issued representing 325K organizations and 294 million messages were sent and received ending Q1, 2024.
Share PHI is a key component of the Konica Minolta Healthcare Document Workflow and Security Portfolio, a robust suite of solutions and services that are unparalleled in the industry. Share PHI is well positioned for extended care and is priced accordingly, but is also appropriate for select ambulatory care environments based on the EHRs used in those practices. However, for organizations across the care continuum, whether they be in acute, ambulatory or even extended care, additional solutions are available that address numerous workflow challenges.
Secure print release solutions with EHR integration, including Epic, as well as advanced capture and workflow with HL7 and CDA capabilities are available that drive automation across multiple care settings and departmental use cases.
Stay tuned for more on this topic and how we’re helping our acute care customers save time, operational expenses, increase security and HIPAA compliance and address the ongoing challenges associated with labor shortages and staff burnout by implementing digitally transformational technology. Learn more about the Konica Minolta Healthcare Solution Portfolio here.
