Case Study

Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is the leading provider of eye health services in the UK and is a world-class centre of excellence for ophthalmic research and education.

Moorfields NHS provides a networked model of care from the main City Road site, based on three geographic networks — Moorfields North, Moorfields South and Moorfields East. A staff of 1,800 provides care from 32 locations including clinics, hospitals, medical centres and nursing homes.

Moorfields Private is the private division of the Trust, providing private eye treatment to patients based in the UK and from across the globe. Moorfields Private is highly valuable to the Moorfields Trust as it reinvests all of its profits back into the NHS service provision.

Moving to VoIP without Disrupting Fax

Faxing is an important means of communication for Moorfields Private. Some new patient referrals for private healthcare are received via fax, as are medical records and scans from referring GPs, optometrists, pharmacies and directly from patients. International corporate organisations e.g. embassies, use faxes to send through Letters of Guarantee. These confirm payment has been authorised by the sponsor for the patients’ treatment and must be received prior to commencement of all surgery and outpatient visits.

When Moorfields Private made a strategic decision to move their telephony system from analogue to VoIP, eliminating the need for fixed telco lines, they were faced with a faxing dilemma. They knew that without telco lines they would not have a reliable way of sending and receiving faxes using their fax machines, so they began their search for an online fax solution.

Moorfields Private's Faxing Requirements

Because Moorfields Private is a division of Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, security was top of their priority list in terms of fax solution requirements. Moorfield’s Information Governance team had an extensive list of security prerequisites that needed to be met. Fax transmission encryption, fax data retention and archiving, centralised control of the faxing function, and the ability to provide secure fax access to select hospital and administrative staff. Another faxing requirement, in addition to security, was a desire to go paperless, which would bring the Hospital into line with the paperless NHS strategy. Moorfields Private also wanted to ensure the faxing solution they chose was easy-to-use and would enable them to keep their existing fax numbers.

Referrer Engagement Manager, Tom Griggs contacted eFax to evaluate eFax Corporate®, the cloud fax service that enables users to send and receive faxes securely online, from their email, and with no hardware or phone lines necessary. Moorfields Private started with an eFax® Corporate demo to give them the opportunity to trial the service and see if it met their needs. Griggs and his IT team tested for security, reliability, ease-of-use and flexibility. They also wanted to make sure they could customise specific faxing features in order to ensure centralised control. eFax Corporate® met their criteria on all counts.

Paperless Fax by Email

Since moving to eFax Corporate®, Moorfields Private has eliminated paper from its faxing process and today all faxes are sent and received digitally, so medical referrals, reports and scans can be easily shared, saved and securely stored online, removing the need to print, scan or manually file.

Sensitive documents no longer sit openly on a fax machine and staff can be more productive as they no longer need to wait by a fax machine. And because faxes are now in digital format, administrative staff can retrieve and access patient records much quicker and respond to queries in a shorter timeframe, improving patient services.

Highest Levels of Faxing Security

Moorfields Eye Hospital Information Governance team was closely involved during the eFax Corporate® evaluation process. There were a number of reasons, from a security perspective, why eFax Corporate® was selected:

• Using eFax Secure™ the add-on feature to eFax Corporate®, Moorfields Private can give outbound faxing permission to all staff, but restricts access to inbound faxes, so they can only be retrieved by authorised staff from a secure portal with PIN access.
• eFax Corporate® offers lifetime storage and an audit trail of faxes, secured with AES 256-bit encryption with all data saved at highly secure data centres rated Tier-III and higher. This provides peace of mind that their data is protected and secure both in transit and at rest.
• eFax Corporate’s global network is highly reliable, and protected by firewall, redundancy and security technologies which ensure both 99.5% uptime and rapid delivery time. This means that the Moorfields Private fax process is robust and highly reliable.
• eFax® Corporate is designed to meet NHS Digital’s standards and best practice requirements with IG Toolkit Assessment completion to level 3, the highest level attainable. This was a factor that satisfied Moorfields IG requirements during the evaluation process.

Scalable Cloud Faxing

Should Moorfields Private decide to expand the use of online faxing throughout the trust, eFax® Corporate gives them the flexibility they need to scale up via their intuitive administrative dashboard to add more numbers, assign users, create profiles and manage user groups. eFax Corporate® offers nearly unlimited scalability which means they can scale up or scale back, if fax usage declines.