Home Forums Faxing from AC

David - you raise an interesting question; from what standpoint to answer the question itself.

In my professional practice, "Can it be done?" and "What do you recommend?" are distinctly different questions, and we get paid to answer one, generally both. Not surprisingly, the answer is often YES it can be done, and NO we don't recommend you do it that way.

So my first inclination is to answer how something might be done, regardless of whether I would recommend it. After a few years of getting to know several folks here, and how they operate their practices, perhaps I should give my advice as to the opportunity cost/benefit as well. I will defer to the community if there is a strong preference for one or the other.

As Khaled indicates, Updox provides a significant value for a practice in being able to directly import faxes into a patient record that can be flagged for signoff at the same time. I have yet to see a practice that wouldn't benefit from using Updox, but some folks see saving $35 as a big deal, and that is their value judgement.

Since we do cost analysis for most SMB to enterprise projects, I'll use your question to illustrate how we would cost-model this decision.

Tasks where Updox impacts productivity:
Filing incoming faxes:: without Updox you view the document, find the patient in AC, and if it is a paper document, you have to scan it in. Then you import it into AC. If it is a paper document, you now have to destroy that document.
Filing incoming faxes with Updox:: you view the document in Updox, start typing the patient name until it matches, select the category, the provider to notify, and import it from Updox.

Lots of practices do this during the morning "coffee time" in batch mode, then on and off during the day. If the person that does this is part-time, there is a more direct cost-benefit [less hours worked], but in most cases that I have seen, this is a full-time person. Another direct model is if there is a staff member being paid extra hours/overtime to catch up with paperwork - again, less likely, but possible.

Let's use $9/hour for a staff member - it may be more or less in your community, so adjust as necessary. The reality of employees is that their loaded costs, especially at the lower end of the pay scale, is 100%; thus that employee's time is costing you $18/hour. That still doesn't include cost to supervise, but that is buried in overhead [and often your free time].

Now we need to estimate the time savings:: I have heard from staff members that switched to Updox that they are 2-3 times as fast importing, but let's be conservative and estimate a 30% improvement. The next question is how many faxes does your staff do in an hour. A conservative estimate would be one every two minutes, so 30/hour. That means your unit cost per imported item is .6 without Updox, .46 with; a delta of $.14. That means that once you have handled 260 faxes in a month, you have gotten your cost return on Updox. If your staff is 50% faster, 180 faxes.

Another area to model is patient communication through the patient portal; let's use the use case of sending out normal lab results. If we stipulate it takes 5 minutes to print the lab results, print a form letter regarding the results, address, stamp, and mail, then we compare that to a minute [or less] to send the send the lab results with a template letter through the portal, we have a 5-to 1 ratio. Cost differential per portal message is $1.2. That means you have to send out 30 portal messages (disregarding material costs) before you get your Updox value.

The strongest way to cost-model is differential revenue, but because it is currently unrealized, it is more subjective. IIRC, David's gross revenue target is $140/hour, but let's stipulate $100/hour to be conservative. If by using Updox in your practice your staff is able to be more efficient, or handle some correspondence in your stead, you need 21 more minutes in a month with a patient, in the higher case , 15 minutes in a month to get your Updox value.

So by any objective measure, Updox makes business sense, but everyone practices differently - YMMV.