I want to alert everyone to our advertorial in the Greater Knoxville Business Journal’s coverage of the health care industry this month. In the article we talk about the one-touch applications Thermocopy installs on provided equipment and the cost and efficiency benefits they deliver for the users. I thought a good way to illustrate Thermocopy’s continuing commitment to bring cutting edge technology to East Tennessee based companies was to have the writer of this article reference an article written about us a number of years ago by entrepreneur and inventor Lee Martin. 

If you don’t have  a chance to pick up the Greater Knoxville Business Journal I reproduce the whole article below for your reading pleasure.

Medical documents evolve with one-touch applications 

By Ronda Robinson

Knoxville inventor H. Lee Martin spotted Thermocopy’s business foresight many years ago. In his News Sentinel Techonomics column in 2004, Martin cited Thermocopy’s savvy in “promoting technical solutions that ultimately could reduce their historical bread-and-butter business – paper copies.”

Martin’s prediction has come to pass. Established in 1964, Thermocopy is one of the largest and most experienced providers of business technology in East Tennessee. In the not-too-distant past Thermocopy earned its stripes as one of the area’s main suppliers of copy equipment for the office. Since then the company has evolved into an information delivery system expert.

As Martin expected, Thermocopy has come to focus on movement of information rather than paper documents. Nowhere is this more evident than in the health care industry. Thermocopy’s client list includes large East Tennessee institutions such as Covenant Health System, Blount Memorial Hospital, East Tennessee Heart Consultants, Cherokee Health and University Health Systems.

“We provide the infrastructure, both hardware and software, to move information through an organization, whether it is paper-to-paper (copying), paper to digital (scanning), digital to paper (printing), or digital to digital (file translation, conversion procedures),” says Mark DeNicola, chief financial officer and executive director of sales and marketing for Thermocopy.

DeNicola cites one-touch managed information processes as especially attractive to health care professionals.

“In the past, some of the problems with getting people to utilize the scanning from the multifunction devices are that they didn’t always know what to do with the scanned files or how to file and access them efficiently. Our systems allow for certain processes to be eased by utilizing apps that are one-touch and that do many things in the background without additional user intervention.”

These days clients are easily navigating multifunction device panels to manage their information, DeNicola says.

Some of the one-touch applications for which health care professionals use their equipment panels include:

• Physician order routing

Medical professionals can securely route and automatically separate rush orders from routine instructions with the touch of an icon. As DeNicola notes, this saves time and improves patient care by enabling staff to intelligently route and prioritize physicians’ orders. In addition, it may eliminate the need for an analog fax line.

• Document scanning and routing

Documents can be securely directed to network destinations or electronic medical records. This reduces the steps required to scan documents to a shared network folder/electronic medical record. Thermocopy’s intuitive design eliminates the need for extensive training, according to DeNicola. Patients benefit as well as health care providers, because scanned documents are instantly accessible to physician and hospital staff from anywhere in the network.

• Electronic forms printing

Forms that reside on a Web server or file transfer protocol site used to move files from one computer host to another are printed electronically. Users gain the ability to browse shared files. They access the most current forms and save time and money by eliminating the cost of preprinting, updating and storing paper forms. In fact, a large health care organization in Florida documented over $1 million in cost savings implementing the same application that Thermocopy offers.

“We also have applications that will automatically provide optical character recognition of scanned images, do document conversions, and more – with just one touch,” says DeNicola.

As Lee Martin observed in his article about Thermocopy, “Being a leader in delivering solutions to office information management is a service that will always be in demand, no matter what technology is used as the medium.”