“Jukka – when I die, they will bury my fax machine with me. We’ll evolve from paper charts to the EMR, but the fax machine will persevere.” This is what a colleague on our physician EMR adoption task force under Bush Sr and Jr said to me. Many years later, his prognostication remains true.
When a friend of mine said to me that inpatient discharge planning could use my innovation lens, and I jumped into my first assignment setting, I was teleported back in time to the 20th Century. Experienced RN Case Managers and LCSW Case Managers were printing out of the EMR and faxing many pages to post-acute providers. That too, became my job. An average referral consisted of 42 printed pages. As we know, fax jobs are riddled with incomplete transmissions - as were many of mine. I was the most educated and highest paid fax machine operator in the world, and to mitigate the bombed transmissions, I would have 3 fax machines smoking at the same time.
eFax and secure emailing don’t save time either and introduces other risks related to PHI. At another hospital, the multifunction fax/copy machine finally experienced a Code Blue and passed. However, a very determined technician sourced parts over a few weeks and performed multiple organ transplant surgeries on the machine. “They don’t make them like this anymore!” I said to him, there is a very good reason why.
Incumbent SaaS products used by many hospitals and post-acute providers are just very expensive, HIPAA-compliant sharepoints. EMR outputs such as progress notes are exported to these hubs. However, faxes are still needed. Case managers remain tethered to desktops, and tasks that don’t require a professional licensure along with years of clinical experience, remain ubiquitous.
When patients-as-consumers complete their satisfaction surveys for their hospitalization, they don’t reflect on the admin tasks and many fax jobs that were needed to support the services and discharge plan they received. No! Quality, caring face time with them and their loved ones are what they remember and will score on.
So how is Talamel Health Tech liberating the case manager from the fax machine and desktop? Our AI agent has attained the Gold Standard within the four AI labs. What this means is that labs such as OpenAI and Gemini, continue to work with us on evolving the agent to the degree it is mature enough to be employed for case management tasks that can and should be digitized, such as referrals for: home health, durable medical equipment, skilled nursing, etc. What we consider “referral entry and fulfillment” should be digitized. By doing so, the case manager has the time to work on tasks at “top of license” which includes meaningful case and care management conversations with the patient and family.
It’s time we give the fax machine an honorable discharge, untether the clinician from the desktop, and foster a meaningful and therapeutic journey home for the patient.
In my next blog, I will share more on our AI agent annotation work, and what really an AI factory is.
