OREANDA-NEWS. Ricoh Americas Corporation today unveiled three major innovations for mobilizing information in today's dynamic healthcare environment. Announced at the HIMSS healthcare IT conference in Orlando, the solutions improve the capture, transformation and management of faxes, prescriptions and clinical photography.

Enterprise fax
Sixty-three percent of healthcare providers still use fax to communicate, and more than 4 in 10 respondents admitted to having read a paper fax intended for someone else.

The Ricoh Enterprise Fax Server Solution for Healthcare helps eliminate the efficiency and privacy problems of "old school" fax, including phone line and paper costs, through a new software-based "electronic faxing" solution. The solution automates fax delivery from Ricoh multi-function products (MFPs) and a variety of clinical and back-office applications, organizes faxes for more secure retrieval (including mobile), and integrates fax with electronic health records (EHR) and hospital information management (HIM) platforms, labs, pharmacies and claims-processing systems.

The solution lets healthcare organizations retire standalone fax machines and costly dedicated phone lines. It also helps healthcare organizations comply with new, more stringent privacy protections in the HIPAA final omnibus rule.

Plain-paper Rx
Nearly half of Americans take prescription drugs,(3) and physicians ordered or prescribed 2.6 billion drugs in 2010.(4) To meet CMS rules protecting against copying, modification or counterfeiting, many healthcare organizations are using secure watermarked paper with unique serial numbers and time-consuming chain-of-custody procedures. This approach comes with a steep price: 15 to 25 cents per page for the paper alone, plus more costs for dedicated printers and special ordering and management processes.

The Ricoh Secure Plain Paper Rx Solution for Healthcare offers a more flexible and affordable way to meet CMS mandates. Instead of requiring full chain-of-custody documentation, the software uses microprinting, security feature warning boxes, consecutive numbering and other checks-and-balance features. It eliminates the need for pricey paper, removes reliance on printers with locking drawers, and demands significantly less intervention from the hospital's human resources staff.

Healthcare camera
Digital photos play a major role in the care of wounds, burns and incisions. Unfortunately, downloading images can be error prone, saved images on the camera can present privacy problems, and most cameras can't be sterilized.

Ricoh today demoed the G700SE Dynamic Capture camera, designed specifically for these healthcare challenges. It's a powerful solution for capturing patient images, integrating them with EHRs and documenting patient progress over time. With the G700SE, a clinician uses the digital camera's built-in barcode scanner to link information - such as images of an injury site - to a patient's chart. The clinician can then enter any additional metadata such as barcodes, user-defined pick-list items, free typed messages and sound.

When the metadata is complete, the image and data stream wirelessly transmits to the EHR or HIM system through Ricoh's integration solution, powered by InterSystems software. This workflow helps reduce the need for paper records, exhaustive text descriptions, time-consuming uploads, file associations and manual data entry.