In a strange and no doubt frustrating situation, a low-income Iowa woman was recently unable to receive state-administered child care assistance due to a missing fax. According to The Des Moines Register, Chelsie Runge, a nursing assistant and mother of two, needed the human resources coordinator at the health care clinic where she worked to send the Iowa Department of Human Services certain paperwork so that she could continue to qualify for the child care assistance. Despite the fact that Jean Davis, the HR coordinator, faxed the necessary information to the state officials, Runge was ineligible for the aid because the information did not arrive in time.
In situations like these, those parties involved often wonder how things could have been different. In this case, where a misplaced fax resulted in further financial hardship for a hardworking mother, perhaps fax-over-Internet-protocol solutions would have provided a better way to get the information to the DHS. Let's take a look at how fax solutions could have helped Runge's information get to the proper people within the accepted time frame:
"You don't have to be at a physical fax machine anymore."
Ease of use
Email to fax equipment is easy to use and offers increased accessibility due to connections through mobile applications and email. According to Huffington Post contributor Jessa Barron, one of the biggest benefits of FoIP is the fact that documents can be sent and viewed from virtually anywhere – with mobile applications and email capabilities, you don't have to be at a physical fax machine anymore. This guarantees that you can receive and therefore view documents at any time.
Faxes are safely stored
Officials from the Department of Human Resources claimed that they hadn't received all of the fax documents that Davis said were repeatedly sent. However, if the organization had been utilizing cloud-based fax solutions, the document would have been saved to an email that could have been brought up when Davis sent her letter to the DHS.
"Loose pages can easily be lost or damaged, but with Internet fax, your pages are all stored online, so you are free from that worry and headache," Barron wrote. "Additionally, if you're looking for a particular document, you can save a lot of time with Internet fax, as these services allow you to sort through your saved faxes by date, sender or by entering specific keywords."
Simplify workflows
Whether it was oversight by workers at the DHS or an error due to a missed fax, FoIP could help state-level government departments better streamline workflows and thus minimize these kinds of error that often occur due to overworked staff members and antiquated processes. When the extra step of printing and organizing physical fax documents is eliminated, government staff members will be better able to keep up with their tasks. In this way, fax solutions could help citizens like Runge get the help they need.
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