Transcript
Andy Slawetsky: What’s happening? Ben Manning is here today from ETHERFAX, he’s joining us to talk about fax software. What’s happening? Ben, how are you today?
Ben Manning: Hey Andy, I’m great. How are you today?
Andy Slawetsky: I am awesome. It’s good to see you again. Good to have you back on the show. We are here to catch up with you. It’s been a little while. You guys have been doing some special stuff that I wanted to review for my viewers. Why don’t we first start off with a little bit of background? Who’s Ben Manning? What do you guys do?
Ben Manning: Yeah, so ETHERFAX was founded back in 2009 by some of the leading experts in both the faxing as well as the telecommunications space. And so this day and age, whether you’re implementing a fax solution for the first time, maybe you’re extending your legacy fax solutions to the cloud, it’s really important to look for a fax service provider that’s going to meet you where you’re at today. And that’s a big part of what ETHERFAX is one of our mantras meeting you where you’re at today. So we’ve put our fax infrastructure into the cloud. It’s essentially what ETHERFAX is founded on. And since we did that back in 2009, we’ve been developing some innovative solutions around the way enterprise organizations both send and receive information. And we really think about faxing less, about two modems hissing at each other and more about the secure exchange of data and documentation between two endpoints. So that’s really where we are in terms of ETHERFAX a little about who we are. And really what we’re trying to do is we’re providing an off-ramp to today’s traditional telephony faxing and an on-ramp to cloud-based secure document and data exchange we call the backbone of our system, our ecosystem, we call it our secure exchange network, which allows any two endpoints to connect to each other without going over a phone line. Two faxes hissing at each other essentially.
Andy Slawetsky: Well let me stop you there – here’s a technology that’s been around forever. I mean it’s really existed a lot longer than I think any of us could have predicted. Why is it still out there? How’s it still out there? It’s been years since I’ve heard of anybody actually buying a fax machine. I don’t even know if you can still buy them very easily. How is this technology still out there and how did you guys jump in there and decide this is a place that we can still help and offer a lot of opportunity?
Ben Manning: Yeah, it’s an excellent question and one in which we get pretty much every single day and a lot of probably about 70% of our volume is in healthcare. So while we do have insurance companies that we work with and banks and regulators and things of that sort, the vast majority, 68 to 72% on any given month if we do a traffic analysis is in healthcare, right? And so yeah, we get it. It’s hard to imagine in 2022 here we are talking about faxing. The reality is you can look at studies that show there are 9 billion pages a year being faxed in healthcare.
Andy Slawetsky: Wow. Just in healthcare.
Ben Manning: Just in healthcare alone, 9 billion, right? That same study showed that roughly 70% of hospitals report using fax both as a means of sending and receiving a summary of care records. And even in today’s day and age with portals and APIs and all these other ways of passing data back and forth, 25% of hospitals still use fax for processing prior authorizations.
Andy Slawetsky: Why do you think that is?
Ben Manning: It’s easy and it works. If you look at some of the fire based standards and HL seven standards, there’s a lot of pieces of information that go into that documentation that has to go back and forth and it has to meet certain minimum standards to go back and forth. I can just walk up to a fax machine, put in the piece of paper, hit the 10 digit, type in my 10 digit number, hit the shiny green button, and it goes and gets securely delivered on the other end. It’s a HIPAA compliant means of communication versus email is not HIPAA compliant and I don’t have to worry if I’m a sender, I don’t have to worry if the receiver wants to get a piece of paper fax, if they want to get whatever their documentation type is, I know that I need to send over this patient’s summary of care in order for you to provide the treatment for that patient. Here it is and it’s the simplest thing that I can do and it just works.
Andy Slawetsky: So you mentioned healthcare, it’s not the only area you focus and you actually play in a lot of the markets, the verticals that you mentioned, but healthcare is a big one, right? And you’ve had some integrations over the last couple of years that you guys have added to your portfolio. So one of them was Epic, we talked about that, I think we talked about that last year in fact, or somebody at ETHERFAX chatted with me about that. But talk to me a little more about healthcare. Why is there such an opportunity in healthcare and how does ETHERFAX play into that? And then for viewers watching this, how is this a solution that can really help them with their customers, add some money at the end of, add some revenue into the account, maybe take some steps out of the customer’s process? How can healthcare, what are some things that they’re looking for in healthcare?
Ben Manning: Yeah, so couple of good questions in there to unpack In terms of the revenue side of things, we can really reduce the cost of ownership, total cost of ownership in regards to faxing. There’s still going to be faxing, it’s going to exist, it exists today. But if you switch to an ETHERFAX account, you no longer need to have the on-premise fax boards. You no longer need to have all of the costs associated with having an on-premise fax board from installing upkeep, maintenance, et cetera. It’s really expensive to have an on-premise fax solution. So by us creating a fax board in the cloud, you can rip and replace all of that. And no, it doesn’t take you a year to switch over anything. It is basically you plug in a cable. We like to say if you can Google, you can fax or you can ETHERFAX.
So we’re displacing those physical fax boards and all of the annual maintenance associated with them. So that’s one big piece of the puzzle in terms of cost savings, no PRI lines or T1 lines, no phone lines, no fax boards, et cetera. So that’s a huge cost savings for a hospital system. The other piece of that is in terms of integration, so the Epic App Orchard integration in particular. So we’ve got two different Epic App Orchard solutions. If you go into the Epic App Orchard, you’ll just see ETHERFAX as a solution. But we really have two ways to implement that based on what’s best for the users at that particular hospital system. And one of the things that we think about in terms of interoperability is meeting users where they’re at. The notion of healthcare interoperability just doesn’t work if you are requiring users to change all of their workflows or all of their habits if they can keep doing what they’re doing today.
And interoperability just works on the backend, it solves it for everybody. So really the two, we’ve got a direct integration with Epic in which we’re just using the Epic print services and the Epic fax interface that already exists within Epic today. So you type in that 10 digit DID and you hit the fax button and you’re sending out of Epic, but you’re using ETHERFAX as a delivery mechanism on the backend, provides all of the benefits that we have around security as well as those and the endpoints and not having two modems hitting at each other. And then we’ll deliver that response directly back to the originating epic system of the fax status of being delivered, et cetera. The other solution, the way that we implement our Epic App Orchard is through what we call a local instance. We do that through a solution called ERIS, which is the ETHERFAX Remote integration Solution. And that’s an on-premise hosted solution, but it’s not a local fax board or not a fax server. It is a small dockerized container. It sits behind your firewall. You’ve got full control of the privileges and just like the local solutions fully supported in the Epic App Orchard. So just two different ways to kind of tackle that same solution of faxing out of Epic.
Andy Slawetsky: Very cool. Very cool. So opportunities when they’re out there, when the sales rep’s out there in the field, what are they looking for? Especially you’re in a healthcare account, that can be anything from a doctor, it could just be some of the healthcare administrative offices, it could be urgent care places, hospitals, insurance companies, right? Anything within in that vertical market. So what kinds of things would you recommend that sales reps be on the lookout for?
Ben Manning: Yeah, so a couple of things that we point out. One is finding people that are sending and receiving the faxes and asking their pain points. You’ll get a lot of them still faxing. People still don’t like it. But really what we try to focus on is the workflow. What happens with that fax document when it comes in, who’s the one touching it? A lot of times what we see is the going into an account and you’re finding the communications engineer, the IT engineer, some along those lines. And really where you need to get to is the end user of the actual fax itself and ask them, Hey, how many times do you get a busy signal when you’re sending out a fax? How many times do you have to resend that fax? With our secure exchange network, we have a hundred percent guaranteed delivery from the end-to-end points on the secure exchange network.
There’s no busy signals. We are going to guarantee that that documentation is going to be delivered. And so asking questions about how long it takes to fax large documents we’ve seen, we run reports every Monday. We see faxes that are sometimes 1200 pages, 1400 pages, and we’re sending them in a matter of 2, 3, 5 seconds across our network. Think how long, ask the question, how long is it going to take for a 1300 page fax to be delivered from one end to another? And how much time did you tie up that one particular DID with a busy signal for every other fax you were trying to receive during that time? And how many of those faxes never came through? And if you’re thinking about something like prior authorizations or billing or if you’re an orders management system, how many orders are you missing by faxes not coming through because of a busy signal by faxes not coming through because your phone line’s tied up? There’s the real opportunity for implementing ETHERFAX.
Andy Slawetsky: Makes a lot of sense, especially in healthcare, right? They’re relying on it because of the security and it’s kind of, I think what you alluded to earlier, which is it’s sort of always been there and they all know how to use it, right? It’s simple.
Ben Manning: We maintain HIPAA compliance and we just renewed our HITRUST certification, so everything that goes across our network is PI compliant, HIPAA compliant, high trusts certified. So security is top of mind for us in everything we do because there’s so much personal health information or PHI that traverses the AX network.
Andy Slawetsky: Back to that, you mentioned earlier pages that are going through healthcare. What were your estimates on fax pages going through the healthcare?
Ben Manning: Well, we see about 75% of all communications between two clinical care teams at hospitals going over faxing. So whether it’s my summary of care records, things of that nature, 75% of all of my patient information between two clinical care teams, and we focus on clinical care teams as a metric that doesn’t count for things like billing, revenue cycle, all of that is still huge in healthcare as well. But it’s just amazing to think if my doctor wants a piece of information about me from another doctor at another hospital system, 75% of the time that’s going to be a fax.
Andy Slawetsky: Wow. And so basically you’ve just simplified a very complicated process that years ago was pretty much all hardware. Now it sounds like it’s mostly if not all software.
Ben Manning: Yep. Yeah, absolutely.
Andy Slawetsky: Very cool. Very cool. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on and talk to us about healthcare opportunities and ETHERFAX. The integrations are very, very cool to see. It seems like we get new ones every three to six months out of you guys. So keep it up, keep it up. Say hi to everybody down there in New Jersey for us and look forward to talking to you again. Thanks so much for coming on today.
Ben Manning: Sounds good. Thanks Andy.
Andy Slawetsky: Take care, Ben.