Virtual Radiologic (vRad) offers a cloud-based radiology practice to more than 2,700 medical facilities, reading 7 million studies per year. vRad acquired NightHawk in 2010, expanding its ability to deliver leading technologies and fast interpretation to its clients to ensure accurate diagnosis and treatment for their patients. NightHawk chose DocuSign and slashed turnaround time by more than 15 days per document. Since acquiring NightHawk, vRad has continued using DocuSign to maintain the convenience, speed and increased visibility.
Business Challenge
Despite NightHawk’s focus on speed and efficiency for doctors, the company suffered from slow, inefficient paper processes—filling out forms and obtaining signatures from doctors around the world.
With operations in the United States, Switzerland and Australia, NightHawk spent a lot of money on overnight mail. In fact, using the traditional pen-and-paper process, NightHawk spent about $4,000 per month on shipping documents. They waited up to 30 days for US doctors and two months for overseas doctors to return completed paperwork. Not surprisingly, NightHawk staff spent a lot of time reminding doctors to sign and return documents.
NightHawk needed a scalable solution to cut costs, improve efficiency and accelerate turnaround time. DocuSign Solution
NightHawk determined that DocuSign offered what was needed: a complete, secure, cloud-based solution that’s accessible to everyone from high-tech medical facilities to rural hospitals. After NightHawk realized how much time and money was spent on their documentation process, DocuSign was an easy choice. Results
Using DocuSign NightHawk receives completed documents back 15 days faster than before—in the United States, Switzerland and Australia. What’s more, with the savings in overnight mail, NightHawk paid for a full year of their DocuSign service in just two months.
NightHawk has received positive feedback from doctors on the solution. In fact, one of the first comments received was from a doctor who said, “I no longer get writer’s cramp when I sign documents.”
By showing a doctor every place in a document where signature, initials and other information is needed, DocuSign ensures complete documents every time. DocuSign helps prevent signers from making mistakes, eliminates the need to rekey data, and automatically sends deadline reminders on behalf of NightHawk staff—not to mention finally making doctors’ signatures legible.
DocuSign also provides NightHawk with increased visibility into the paper trail. “It’s great to be able to open a sent item in DocuSign and look at the history,” said Katie Kay, applications specialist at vRad. “We can see if a doctor has viewed the document, so we know what we need to do next to finish business faster.”
DocuSign has proven to easily manage the large volume of paperwork NightHawk handles every day. In a single month, NightHawk sent and received 2,697 documents using DocuSign. From the start, NightHawk staff had no trouble using the new process. As Kay put it: “DocuSign is so easy to use, you spend 30 minutes to train a new user, and they’re good to go. Now at vRad, we are very happy to continue to use DocuSign to make signatures fast and easy.”
