Rasha Maher
Clinic Manager, MLHC
“Phelix has been a game-changer for our business! Say goodbye to tedious filing and hello to flawless patient details. Their fax automation assistant has revolutionized our workflow significantly saving time and improving accuracy. Can’t wait to explore more of their amazing products.”
Introduction
Mississauga Lung Health Centre (MLHC)t is a specialty clinic focused on respiratory health, staffed by a team of six respirologists and an infectious disease specialist. Serving a significant number of patients with chronic lung conditions, MLHC manages thousands of document exchanges monthly, including patient referrals, lab results, and other essential records. The clinic’s administrative staff faced mounting challenges due to the high volume of documents requiring timely filing and accurate categorization. Following extensive research and vendor comparisons, MLHC chose Phelix’s Fax Inbox Agent to streamline and improve their fax processing workflows.
Challenges
Before adopting Phelix’s Fax Inbox Agent, MLHC encountered several obstacles in its document handling processes:
Manual Fax Processing: Fax filing relied heavily on a single full-time medical office administrator (MOA) who spent approximately seven hours each day manually sorting and categorizing incoming faxes. The time-intensive process limited staff availability for other high-priority tasks.
Inconsistent Document Handling: Filing practices varied significantly among administrative staff, leading to inconsistencies in categorization and prioritization. Different MOAs employed their own methods for handling faxes, causing potential delays and miscommunication with providers.
Provider and Patient Impact: Delays in processing and filing affected provider workflows, with some urgent documents going unnoticed or receiving late responses. This variability in document management could potentially impact patient care and added stress to clinic operations.
Solutions and Implementation
Streamlining Manual Fax Processes with Phelix’s Inbox Agent
To address MLHC’s challenges with manual fax handling, Phelix’s Inbox Agent was introduced to simplify document management by automating several key workflows. The solution significantly reduced the time spent on fax filing, as MLHC transitioned from a manual to an automated system, where specific fax categories were triaged and prioritized automatically. Each fax was accurately tagged with essential details, such as patient demographics, referral information, and urgency level, ensuring standardized filing practices across the clinic.
Conservative Rollout with Phased Training
Recognizing the novelty of the technology, MLHC opted for a conservative rollout. To maintain oversight, the system was initially set to manual reviews, allowing their primary fax administrator to inspect each entry for accuracy. Over time, MLHC gradually transitioned to a hybrid model where over 80% of incoming faxes were processed through Phelix, with staff performing quality checks only on a couple of categories like new referrals. MLHC aims to move to a fully automated flow in the near future.
Collaborative and Structured Onboarding Process
The onboarding process was comprehensive, emphasizing both pre-implementation planning and categorization. MLHC worked closely with Phelix to standardize their fax categories, a critical step that ensured smoother integration and minimized initial training hurdles. Phelix’s team provided consistent support and prompt fixes, fostering a collaborative environment that MLHC found to be highly responsive compared to prior experiences with other vendors.
Conclusion
Since implementing Phelix’s Fax Inbox Agent, MLHC has achieved an 80% reduction in time spent on document handling, reducing daily fax processing from a full day’s work to just one and a half hours. This improvement enabled staff to allocate more time to complex administrative responsibilities, enhancing both workflow efficiency and patient care quality. Standardized categorization and automated prioritization of urgent faxes have contributed to improved provider response times, ensuring that critical information is consistently flagged and handled with precision.
The deployment of Phelix’s Fax Inbox Agent has lightened the administrative workload at MLHC, fostering a more efficient and organized environment. MLHC continues to explore further automation tools to extend these improvements, with plans to scale additional patient workflows in the future.
