Studies have shown that, on average, a cost of $1.50-$2.50 is incurred to search for a paper chart, insert an incoming document, place the chart for approval and to put it back on the shelf. With a conservative average of 20 faxes received per physician per day, a single staff member costs you $2.00 x 20 documents x 20 days = $800.00/month simply in organizing and keeping track of inbound faxes. This does not include the cost of mailing and faxing documents to entities outside your practice. Such expenses related to handling paper charts can easily cover the cost of purchasing an electronic system.

If you cannot answer all of the following questions positively and accurately, you are certainly a candidate for an electronic document management system.

• How many fax machines do I need to ensure that none of my staff has to wait for another employee before they can send a fax?
• How many inbound fax lines do I need to receive faxes such that none of the sending parties get a busy signal?
• Can you perform the following three tasks in less than one-minute from the luxury of your desk?
  1. Can you keep track of all fax machines at your office and other locations to know when a fax has arrived?
  2. Can you distribute faxes to an individual or multiple people in your local or remote office within seconds?
  3. Can you pull up a patient’s chart, note the time of fax arrival, insert the fax into the appropriate section of the patient’s chart and drop the chart off in your physician’s inbox within seconds?
• Can you avoid receipt and printing of unsolicited faxes? You cannot avoid receipt at times, but you can certainly avoid printing of such junk faxes.
   
• Can you fax a document(s) from the comfort of your desk without having to create a cover page, standing in line at the fax machine or having to wait for the receiving end’s busy fax line to be available again?

With DrScribe, your medical records staff can fax documents for a single or multi-location facility with the click of a mouse. When patients make document requests to a doctor while in the exam room, the doctors can pull up the reports and either print immediately or fax to the requesting physician instantly by looking up their fax number with the built-in fax directory.