Dr. Matthew P. Shaffer and his staff at Heartland Dermatology and Skin Cancer Center have developed treatment protocols to provide patients with comprehensive medical, surgical and cosmetic dermatological care of skin, hair and nails. The practice has been serving western and central Kansas families since 1977 – with offices in Great Bend, Hays and Salina.
Those afflicted with cancer know of the fear and uncertainty that come with a diagnosis. “We consider the patient the most important member of the healthcare team,” emphasizes Dr. Shaffer. Heartland’s team of providers explains all phases of evaluation and treatment, and encourages the patient to ask questions during visits. “We want the patient to understand his or her condition, treatment and expected results,” says Dr. Shaffer.
While the medical care of its patients is obviously Heartland’s primary concern, “Other factors do enter into the operation of a medical practice,” says Clint Wolf, clinic administrator. To emphasize this point, he notes that some 250,000 people are victims of medical identity theft each year in the United States, according to www.IdentityTheft.com.
Federal Trade Commission statistics emphasize that medical identity theft is involved in about 5 percent of the 8.3 million victims of identity theft. Reacting to these numbers, in 2007 the FTC promulgated its controversial Red Flag Rule requiring physician offices, clinics and hospitals to conduct a risk assessment to identify gaps in their billing processes that might be putting patients at risk of identity theft.
As clinic administrator, Wolf recognized the problem. “We weren’t going to wait until the Red Flag Rule became mandatory before we started complying with the regulation,” he said. Following recommendations by the American Medical Association, the clinic’s anti-identity theft program now includes having copies on file of a patient’s current health insurance card and driver’s license or photo ID.
Compliance deadlines had been extended multiple times by the agency, giving physicians’ offices extra time to develop anti-identity theft programs. Now, however, failure to comply can result in a $2,500 fine. Heartland, however, had already positioned itself to comply with the more stringent guidelines well before they went into effect.
The clinic had been making copies of insurance cards for many years, said Wolf, although the process involved several steps. First, a copy was made of the insurance card. Next, all extra white paper was cut away from that copy so they would have a paper version the actual size of the card. Next, the paper version was taped to the patient’s blue sheet. Finally, the blue sheet was scanned into the clinic’s patient management system.
The first problem occurred the clinic tried to follow the same procedure with a driver’s license. It didn’t work.
“If you’ve ever copied a driver’s license, it’s terrible. You can barely see the face,” explained Wolf. “We needed some way to scan the license directly into our patient management system, so the patient’s picture was recognizable.”
The second problem Wolf had to contend with is that Heartland has offices in three communities, and the scanners in each office were configured to work exclusively with the local computers. While driver licenses could be scanned and uploaded to the patient management system in the clinic’s main office, there was no way to get those scans from the other two offices.
That’s when Wolf went Googling for a solution. He found it with Elusiva Remote Scanner 1.0, a software package that enhances Windows Terminal Services by allowing redirection of local scanners to operate within a Windows-based server application. It works with Windows® and Linux®/Unix® clients extending Remote Desktop software to support a wide variety of otherwise unsupported applications, including document archiving and text recognition [OCR].
“When we introduce a new product, we have no way of gauging how many units we’ll sell – or what problems the software will be used to solve,” says Igor Shmukler, a spokesman for Elusiva, an infrastructure software vendor headquartered in Great Neck, N.Y.
“We listen to situational problems potential customers have, and do our best to meet those needs. We’re a software development firm that emphasizes customer service and support,” says Shmukler.
Remote Scanner is designed to be a cost-efficient way to extend RDP protocol for use in environments like medical billing centers, law firms and distributed offices. After Wolf read the product description, he believed this was what Heartland needed for its three offices. And, because Elusiva offers a modular on-demand desktop and application virtualization solution, he discovered he could purchase this important extension as a stand-alone product.
Wolf downloaded the free trial. It didn’t take long for him to decide. While the price of the product, and the fact that he could purchase the extension as a stand-alone product, were important factors in his decision, they weren’t the only reasons he decided to go with the Remote Scanner. The deciding factor was Elusiva’s customer support.
“After I installed the software, I was having some problems, and called into the support line,” he says.  “I liked their can-do attitude. They were the first technical support company I’ve worked with that said, ‘We’ll get this fixed,’ and by the time we got off the phone, they had it working.”
Even more convincing for Wolf was Elusiva’s willingness to serve as intermediary with Cerner, the company that provides the software for the clinic’s practice management system.
“We needed to be able scan the driver licenses directly into our management software. To do that, Elusiva’s software had to be able to talk to my software. They took the initiative, and called Cerner on our behalf to get the necessary information. That was impressive,” he said.
Without assistance in getting the information directly from Cerner, it probably would’ve taken two to three days working back and forth between Elusiva and Cerner to get a solution, according to Wolf.
Heartland’s three offices see about 150 patients a day. The team at the front desk believes having the ability to scan both licenses and insurance cards into their electronic medical records is saving at least 10 minutes a day in each office. That amounts to saving 30 minutes a day, 2.5 hours a week, nearly 150 hours a year – almost a month of increased productivity.
“Having Remote Scanner is not just saving people time, it eliminates a tedious task. The front office is practically doing cartwheels that they don’t have to do all the copying, cutting and taping any more,” said Wolf.  “It works for us, and it works for our patients.”