John Knox Village Home Health Agency implemented Sfax in May 2007 as its predominant method of patient health information exchange to physicians. The agency’s costs of supplies and delivery methods for document exchange were dramatically reduced with the integration of Sfax. They also decreased their labor hours spent on document exchange by more than one full work week a month for a full-time employee, which can now be dedicated to quality patient care or other pertinent operational priorities. 

About John Knox Village Home Health Agency

John Knox Village Home Health Agency is a Medicare-certified home health agency, with offices in Lee’s Summit, Mo. and Lansing, Kan., that provides intermittent skilled care as ordered by a physician. Services are provided by licensed health care professionals to patients in and around the Greater Kansas City area. Currently the John Knox Village agency serves 350 patients. The home health agency is a part of John Knox Village, one of the largest continuing care retirement communities in the nation, founded in 1970.

We’ve been using Sfax and love it! We save so much time and money because of all that can be done from the computer and nothing gets lost or misplaced. Sfax also gives us automatic notifications on the status of our fax documents and provides a complete searchable log of all sent, received, and failed faxes. Learning how to use it takes almost no time at all, and the biggest surprise was we are getting our orders back much faster from the doctors. I can’t imagine ever going back to manual faxing.
Michele Lewis, Medical Records Home Health, John Knox Village, Lee Summit, M

John Knox Village’s Past Methods of Document Exchange

Prior to using Sfax, John Knox Village spent extensive amounts of time and money on the less efficient mediums of U.S. regular mail, manual faxing and hand delivery for transfer of information for its 350 patients. Each patient requires three disciplines of documentation to be sent to his or her physician monthly, with each document consisting of an average of three pages. In total, John Knox Village was transferring 3,150 pages of paper to physicians per month.

U.S. Mail: On its first attempt to contact physicians’ offices, the agency used regular U.S. mail as its sole method of patient health information exchange, mailing approximately 260 documents a week and spending close to 42 hours a month stuffing and addressing envelopes. The total costs attributed to mailing these documents using the U.S. mail service came to over $1700 a month including stamps, paper, envelopes and labor charges. Manual

Faxing: Approximately 50 percent of the time John Knox Village experienced no response to the mailed documents, at which point they turned to manual faxing, sending 575 faxes (consisting of an average of three pages per fax) each month to physicians’ offices. John Knox Village medical records personnel spent approximately 35 hours each month processing incoming and outgoing faxes (printing, scanning, filing, etc.). The cost associated with manual faxing, including fax lines, ink, paper and labor was close to $700 each month.

Hand Delivery: As a last resort if John Knox Village employees still did not receive a response to manual faxing, which occurred approximately 15 percent of the time, they hand delivered the documents to physicians’ offices in bundles of 20 to 30 at a time. After stuffing and addressing envelopes and including travel time, employee labor hours amounted to almost eight hours per month in delivery of the documents. Total costs in supplies and labor was approximately $130. John Knox Village’s Home Health total spending on patient health information exchange was estimated at over $2,500 per month including employees dedicating around 85 valuable hours solely on paper processes.

After Sfax

After converting to Sfax, John Knox Village has experienced significant cost and time savings - over $17,600, saving 540 hours of employee time. In addition, the agency had been printing over 5,500 pages a month, which is virtually eliminated with Sfax.

Michele Lewis, Medical Records, and Bill Billings, Administrator of Community Health Services, both agreed that the John Knox Village Home Health Agency staff has a positive image of Sfax, referring to it as convenient and easy to use. Michele cited Sfax’s Index and Search capability as her favorite feature which allows her to instantly locate faxes stored securely on the Sfax server. This feature was particularly useful, she said, because of the amount times she is required to resend faxes to physicians’ offices that never respond. With Sfax, John Knox Village Home Health now has the ability to seamlessly transfer information to physicians, increasing staff efficiency and the security of important and sensitive patient health information.