Faxes are a fact of life for long-term care pharmacies. But as anyone in the pharmacy market will tell you, faxing isn’t 100{c7f701611f3720f5570d79d554866159dcfdb3989faf70e390d46729ae9002ab} reliable, which drives many in the industry to look for alternatives to traditional faxing. When Erik Dwelly started working at PCA Pharmacy, staff had already started looking into other options. “If we don’t get faxes, we don’t work, we don’t process medication,” says Erik Dwelly, Director of Information Technology and Security at PCA Pharmacy. “One pharmacy could handle four faxes at one time, another pharmacy could handle eight. But that wasn’t good enough during a down time. Customers thought they were faxing in, and nurses would get upset because they couldn’t fax in, so it was just this huge problem that didn’t make sense from an IT standpoint.”

When Jeff Ross, PCA’s Integra sales rep, approached Dwelly with Integra Cloud Fax (ICF), Dwelly noticed immediately that “ICF was a heck of a lot cheaper. A heck of a lot cheaper. It was an easy thousand dollars a month cheaper for us.” With ICF in place for a year and a half, Dwelly has this to say about ICF, “It’s been a very stable service. But the biggest single benefit of ICF was being able to virtualize DocuTrack and not have a physical server dependence anymore. But, one of the best improvements we found was people were no longer complaining about busy signals. That was huge for us. When we used traditional faxing, a lot of my time was spent trying to explain to people that we only have eight lines. If somebody was calling in and it’s busy, I can’t do anything about that.”

Another problem ICF helped PCA fix was problem-solving when a customer had a faxing problem. “Since we moved to a cloud-based service, when a customer can’t fax in, I know it’s most likely an issue on the facility’s end. I would say probably 99 out of 100 times, it has always been the facility’s end. I don’t have to prove that anymore because I can see in the last hour we’ve gotten 68 faxes. I can see that this one facility who can’t connect, most likely has an issue on their end. From my perspective as the IT Director, it took a huge portion of my normal day-to-day support off my plate.”

To read the full case study, click here.