You Don’t Have to Wait for Clinicians to Go Digital—You Can Go Digital Now

Ever read another LinkedIn post about how AI is transforming work and think:

“But my workflows still get disrupted by paper jams…”?

HME providers exist in a strange technological limbo. Most know a fully digital process could make their lives easier, but many still receive up to 75% of their orders via fax—leading to order errors, communication gaps, and delayed fulfillment.

Fax machines still have their place in healthcare. While some clinicians may continue to rely on them for ordering, you can still digitize your system to create a connected, efficient order management experience. Parachute Health lets you run a fully digital workflow today.

But before we explain how it works, here’s why it matters.

The Problem with Fax-Based HME Orders

Three challenges make life more complicated for both intake coordinators and the clinicians placing the order:

1. Order Errors

   Manual form completion leaves a lot of room for errors. Even the most diligent clinicians are prone to the occasional oversight, which explains why roughly 50% of faxed orders require fixes or additional documentation.

   Those errors aren’t always immediately obvious, however. Intake coordinators are often deep into processing paperwork before realizing there’s incorrect or missing information.

2. Document Chasing
   

   All those documentation errors have to be fixed somehow—and that usually involves more faxes or phone calls. Research suggests complex orders can require up to 16 calls between HME providers and clinicians to coordinate.¹

   All that document chasing takes time and adds to your labor costs. In fact, our research suggests the average order requires 10 minutes of fax wrangling alone.

3. Manual Processing
   

   Even after your intake coordinators have the information they need, there’s still time- and labor-intensive work to be done. They must manually enter all that data into their system to process the order—often typing out the same information multiple times.

   This isn’t just repetitive and tedious; it’s a drain on your bottom line—with some studies showing manual processing creates 30% higher operational costs for providers.²

   But the real problem with fax-based orders is not how they impact HME providers—it’s how they harm patients.

The Human Cost of Fax-Based HME Orders

Fax-based orders aren’t just frustrating and inefficient; they affect patients’ experience and care outcomes:

• Delayed Discharge: Nearly 68% of hospitals reported delaying patient discharge when HME was unavailable or delayed.³ Patients are not just left in a frustrating limbo; they may have complex care arrangements that will have to be revised due to HME-related delays.

• Increased Hospitalization: Studies suggest that when HME fulfillment is delayed, outpatients have a higher risk of being hospitalized.⁴

• Slower Recovery: Delayed discharges from acute care have a measurable impact on the rehabilitation process for many patients, leading to longer recovery periods.⁵

• Higher Readmission Risk: A recent Nature article showed that at-home care can lower the risk of readmission or long-term care admission.⁶ But the inverse is also true; delays in HME fulfillment have been found to increase readmission risk by 30%,⁷ which has a negative impact for patients and hospitals whose resources are unnecessarily sapped.

• Increased Costs: Depending on the duration of the HME-related delay, it could have a meaningful impact on a patient’s overall care costs. Studies show that HME costs are often more than 50% lower than the same treatment or support would in a hospital setting.⁸

The question is how you avoid these problems—without needing every clinician to stop using fax.

Upgrade Your Fax Intake Process

The benefits of digitizing fax-based orders have been clear for some time. As a result, the market is flooded with AI point solutions that promise to digitize fax-based orders and make life easier for HME providers.

That promise has some unfortunate fine print, and many providers have found out the hard way. Sure, these solutions can read faxes and save a little bit of time—but what happens when those orders contain errors?

Most are forced back into the fax cycle, requesting corrections or additional information via fax or phone calls. The initial time savings is quickly undermined as team members sit waiting for faxed responses or callbacks. And the total efficiency gain from a standard AI tool is relatively small.

Truly upgrading fax-based order processing requires more than reading orders. Parachute’s AI Intake fills in the gaps other AI point solutions leave by:

• Highlighting missing information with clear qualification summaries
• Allowing you to request additional documentation directly from the Parachute Platform—even if the clinician isn’t on Parachute yet
• Updating qualification automatically as new files are added

Better yet, using Parachute enables you to subtly nudge clinicians toward ePrescribing—and help you reach a truly end-to-end digital workflow.

How does it do that?

Our upcoming blog will explore exactly how the combination of AI Intake and ePrescribing enables 100% of your inbound orders to go digital. But you can also skip ahead and see the Parachute Platform in action today.

Want to explore how upgrading your manual fax processes with digital infrastructure could help generate more referrals?

¹ https://www.beckerspayer.com/leadership/hidden-costs-unveiled-the-financial-impact-of-dmepos-mismanagement
² https://www.beckerspayer.com/leadership/hidden-costs-unveiled-the-financial-impact-of-dmepos-mismanagement
³ https://calhospital.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/2022-CHA-DME-Survey-Update.pdf
⁴ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28914227/ 
⁵ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35760110/
⁶ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-024-01040-9
⁷ https://www.beckerspayer.com/leadership/hidden-costs-unveiled-the-financial-impact-of-dmepos-mismanagement
⁸ https://www.fda.gov/files/medical%20devices/published/Medical-Device-Home-Use-Initiative----White-Paper.pdf