HIPAA News

Thornberry and SecureCare Offer Industry-First HIPAA Compliant Automated Electronic Faxing to Home Care Providers

(May 21, 2008)-- Thornberry Limited, developer of intelligent clinical management software for the homecare industry and SecureCare Technologies (SCUC), a health care information technology company based in Austin, Texas have partnered to provide the first fully automated electronic fax system to the home care industry.

The SfaxTM system which will be available to Thornberry customers on June 1, 2008, eliminates the entire manual physician order fax operation and replaces it with an easy to use, automated fax system that is integrated within Thornberry's NDoc® clinical management software.

Twin Tier Home Health in Vestal, New York will be the first home health agency to implement the new automated faxing system later this month and can expect to realize savings of up to 95percent in administration time and up to 80percent of the cost of manual faxing, said Dennis Nasto, CEO and Director SecureCare Technologies.

"It's exciting to explore new technologies that promise to reduce cost and increase our efficiency, and we're excited to be Thornberry's first deployment," said Joe Cerra, Twin Tier CEO.

In addition to automating the task of sending and receiving fax-based communications, the secure internet-based fax system meets HIPAA guidelines for electronic exchange of patient health information (PHI), which includes faxing. "Sfax securely delivers NDoc 485 documents without the need to print and manually process. All Sfax transmissions are encrypted and a built in audit and log trail mean instant access to data in the event of a Medicare or other audit," Nasto said.

"By offering the ability to automatically send, receive and track documents without the need to print, all from within the patient electronic record, we're giving users of Thornberry's point of care system a way to drastically slash their costs associated with manual faxing, as well as greatly simplify administration and speed workflow," said Thornberry president, Tom Peth.

"Sfax is a low cost solution and requires almost no training making adoption a painless process. The automation of Sfax and NDoc will change forever how healthcare document exchange is done today. I can't imagine any home health care provider not wanting to take immediate advantage of this opportunity to impact their bottom line."

According to a cost study conducted by SecureCare, almost 15 billion fax pages are sent, received, printed, signed and re-faxed every year between healthcare providers costing invaluable amounts of time and money, and greatly contributing to the inefficiencies of the healthcare system -- predominantly through manual faxing methods.

Key benefits of using Sfax with NDoc:

* Reducing fax costs by up to 80 percent (vs. manual faxing)
* Save up to 95 percent of the time (vs. manual faxing)
* Send and receive faxes without printing
* Automatically logs and creates an audit trail for all fax transactions
* Receive email status notifications for all sent and received faxes
* Access faxes from any computer with an Internet connection
* View, route, store, search and resend all fax records and more
* Secure HIPAA ready platform without the need for additional IT resources
* Digitally sign and annotate documents without printing
* Completely integrated with the NDoc 485/PVC printing function and its Document Tracking module

"At Thornberry we are constantly looking for additional ways to help home care agencies and hospice improve their efficiency. Partnering with an industry leader such as SecureCare allows us to deliver that commitment to users of NDoc. We expect a very high adoption rate for Sfax," said Peth.

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