Air Products Healthcare, based in Conshohocken, is a leading supplier of medical equipment and supplies for use by patients in their homes. With several locations serving the five county Philadelphia area and beyond, Air Products Healthcare typically sends and receives over 2 million fax documents every year to community-based physicians. These faxes contain critical care documentation for providing patients with life-saving and life-enhancing medical services. The management and tracking of these care documents has historically centered on a busy staff of reimbursement personnel printing and sending documents multiple times, in order to complete the document to authorize delivery of care, obtain reimbursement, and maintain adherence with patient privacy and internal quality / audit standards. These teams have had to deal with a literal blizzard of paperwork to track what has been sent and not returned, what was returned but not completed, and so forth. To adhere with Federal guidelines, such as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Program Integrity Manual, these critical care documents must be tracked and verified to ensure the validity of the care request. In addition, this information must be available long-term for audit and review purposes. As a result, the Air Products Healthcare team was expending reams of paper and toner to capture this exchange of patient documentation.

Mike Grabko, Vice President of Reimbursement at Air Products Healthcare, determined that something needed to be done. At Grabko's direction, and through collaboration with the Air Products technical team, the Reimbursement Team explored various approaches to eliminating the reliance on printed documents. After a thorough review, the Reimbursement Team decided that a web-based workflow system, called Inscrybe Healthcare, was the solution to use. Inscrybe is allowing these reimbursement personnel to electronically send and receive patient care documents to referring physicians, which meets the existing requirements for security and compliance, as well as providing Air Products Healthcare a sustainability advantage through virtually eliminating the need for paper and toner.Although technology replacing paper with electronic images is not itself new, the concept of applying secure electronic workflow management to these types of care documents is an innovation for Air Products Healthcare. The Reimbursement Team is on track to remove a significant amount of consumption every year on paper and toner in an area that has historically been an epicenter of documentation accumulation for the enterprise.

In addition, the removal of toner particulates in the air delivers an improvement in the environmental quality of the Air Products Healthcare work site. Published articles have linked printer toner particulates to degradations in air quality in offices, with attendant negative impacts on both acute and chronic respiratory symptoms (for example refer to: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6923915.stm). With over 2 million faxes being replaced with electronic images, the Air Products team will be breathing easier, as well using much less paper and toner.

Air Products Healthcare deserves to win a sustainability award because its Sustainable Health System meets all the judging criteria:

1. Sustainability Essentials: Environmental Quality Air Products' Inscrybe system effectively eliminates the need for paper and toner use in printing and faxing of sensitive patient care documentation. This migration to a paperless and tonerless workflow system has a direct impact on the environmental quality at Air Products Healthcare. Published studies have linked toner particulates found in workspaces where fax machines and printers are used to higher incidences of acute and chronic respiratory conditions. By moving to an all electronic document exchange within their enterprise, Air Products Healthcare is improving the quality of the air their employees breathe.

2. Innovation - New to Industry / Practice: Air Products Healthcare has taken a technology solution and applied it in an innovative way to address their particular workflow, compliance, and environmental needs. The concept of paperless faxing has been used by other industries for some time. The innovation of Air Products' Inscrybe solution, however, is that the web based workflow manages sensitive, complicated patient care documentation in a paperless manner. For most home medical equipment providers, the reliance upon paper documentation is an unfortunate business reality.

Due to the Federal regulatory and compliance mandates Air Products Healthcare must obey, a typical electronic fax solution would not have worked. Air Products turned to the Inscrybe Healthcare solution because of its ability to provide business rules and tracking to meet Federal regulations and drive down the amount of paper and toner used.

3. Positive Impact - Lasting and Measurable: The Inscrybe system being used by Air Products Healthcare has had a positive impact since the very first electronic facsimile was routed through the system. This Sustainable Health System is used every day to capture and track the high volume of patient care documentation Air Products Healthcare must manage as it delivers patient care.

With a growing base of business across the greater Philadelphia area, the number of patients served (and care documents to be managed) will continue to increase over time. The Reimbursement Team at Air Products expects to save over $120,000 annually in paper and toner expenses alone, by using the Inscrybe system.

4. Additional Sustainability Elements - Involves Partnerships and Can Be Replicated: The Inscrybe system in use by Air Products Healthcare involves partnerships with community-based physicians across its service area. Physicians who have a desire to eliminate paper facsimiles from their practices can exchange sensitive patient care documents with Air Products in a fully electronic, secure manner. The same environmental and regulatory benefits Air Products enjoys are available to physicians who are partners in care. Although many physicians currently prefer a paper facsimile to store in their patient's chart, which Inscrybe supports, as more physicians adopt an Electronic Health Record, Air Products can replicate this paperless workflow across an ever growing network of their partners in care. The benefits Air Products enjoys today will be replicated across its care partners in the months and years ahead.