XMediusFAX^® SP integrates with TriWest’s medical management system in 21 states

The Client

Established in 1996, TriWest Healthcare Alliance is a Phoenix-based corporation that employs 1,600 people in the 21-state TRICARE West Region. TriWest contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to provide access to cost-effective, high-quality healthcare for three-million active and retired military members and their families.

TriWest had just landed an expanded contract with the DoD to manage and administer the TRICARE program throughout 90 western United States locations when the company was faced with an immediate need for a secure, HIPAA- and government-compliant enterprise fax server solution to help process TRICARE requests.

The Challenge

TriWest required a fax server solution that would be secure, robust and flexible enough to handle its 6.6 million pages of inbound and outbound faxes per year. These faxes, consisting mainly of TRICARE healthcare services requests, reports and daily correspondence, would translate into an estimated 554,000 fax pages per month or 28,000 per day.

For this high fax volume, traditional analog faxing would be extremely time-consuming and expensive. TriWest no longer wanted to deal with the hassle and cost of analog POTS lines, specialized hardware, supplies, toners and paper.

TriWest was seeking a fax server solution that would:

• Provide extreme flexibility and perform under TriWest’s unique business processes for viewing, routing, archiving and searching of faxes
• Meet a 10-week, fixed-date DoD contract requirement, which included custom code for workflow management and audit tracking, and integrate with TriWest’s mission-critical medical management system (MaxMC)
• Securely transmit highly confidential healthcare information against contractual government service level agreements (SLAs), per the Department of Defense Information Technology Security Certification & Accreditation Process (DITSCAP), and in order to maintain the government’s Authority to Operate (ATO) certification
• And integrate seamlessly with existing infrastructure (e.g., Microsoft Exchange, imaging, Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR), Active Directory, etc.)

The Solution

Given the central role of fax communications in TriWest’s business processes, the company was quick to realize the bottom-line benefits of implementing a new IP technology solution, such as Sagem-Interstar’s pioneer T.38 Fax over IP (FoIP). TriWest’s product analysis included several fax offerings, such as Captaris RightFax, but they selected Sagem-Interstar’s XMediusFAX SP for several reasons, most notably:

• New IP technology – the first FoIP solution that doesn’t require fax boards
• Industry-class, highly scalable, fault-tolerant technology that is easy to use and extensible
• Sagem-Interstar’s close relationship with Cisco
• Attractive features
• Price versus performance edge
• And Sagem-Interstar’s younger, aggressive company profile

Results and Benefits

Sagem-Interstar worked closely and diligently with TriWest to deliver:

• The base XMediusFAX SP product
• System and infrastructure integration
• Substantial TriWest-specific customization

All this was accomplished on time and within budget – in only 10 short weeks!

TriWest Healthcare Alliance is a very satisfied customer. As a result, TriWest’s future growth plans include continued partnership with Sagem-Interstar.

For TriWest, the benefits experienced with XMediusFAX include the following:

• Cost-savings of $500,000 per year
• Increased productivity: the inbound/outbound fax load handled almost doubled from 28,000 pages to 45,000 pages (18,000 faxes) per day
• Number of fax users increased to 90 locations, compared to 32 locations initially

Other XMediusFAX system enhancements include:

• Integrating OCR capabilities into its fax-processing workflow
• Audit tracking capabilities to store, process and manage clinical notes, improving on its document management integration receipt/routing features
• And support for TriWest’s goal of “unified messaging” (i.e., integrated email, fax and voice) infrastructure