Healthcare relies on faxes and fax machines more than just about any other industry imaginable. While some in this space think faxing is a technology that is no longer necessary, time and again fax has proven to be the best communication outlet available for doctors’ offices, pharmacies, hospitals, and other medical care facilities around the globe. By bringing fax into the 21st century with a Fax over IP, HIPAA-compliant faxing solution based in the cloud, however, healthcare practitioners get all the benefits of faxing combined with the positive elements of modern technology.
An example of some of the pervasive stereotypes of the role fax solutions play in healthcare today was on display recently at Health Datapalooza 2015, which took place from May 31 to June 3 in Washington, D.C. According to MedCity News, a number of speakers at the event railed against faxing, including Dr. Karen DeSalvo, the Acting Assistant Secretary for Health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and Dr. Farzad Mostashari, former National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at the HHS and former Brooking Institution Visiting Fellow. They said faxes impeded the free flow of data and thus should be banned.
“I would like by 2020 the fax machine to be abolished in health care,” Tim Kelsey, national director for patients and information in the U.K.’s National Health Service, said at the event, according to MedCity News.
However, these problems are a gross misrepresentation of faxing, as it can be an integral, and HIPAA-compliant solution for the effective sharing of information – especially with FoIP – and it is far more reliable than other forms of communication. This was recently made apparent with Kelsey’s NHS, in fact. On June 17, the e-referrals system used within the NHS went offline, The Register reported. While it appears as though email was mostly still available that day, healthcare practitioners in the U.K. covered under the NHS primarily turned to fax in the wake of the outage. This is yet another example of how the reliability of faxing makes it indispensable in healthcare settings today.
FoIP is an ideal solution to health care communication problems.The benefits of transitioning from legacy fax to FoIP
While faxing is still one of the best modes of communication available today to healthcare practitioners, the speakers at Health Datapalooza 2015 are correct in identifying some of the medium’s faults as it pertains to legacy technology. By relying on paper for the bulk of their information gathering and sharing, doctors’ offices and hospitals are spending a lot more money than is necessary to communicate. Just think of how much can be saved when costs related to reams of paper, ink cartridges, toner, physical fax machines, and phone bills are no longer a major concern in the healthcare industry. In addition, real-time communication is difficult with legacy faxing – unless of course someone is constantly standing by the fax machine waiting for an incoming message.
“To get all the benefits of fax without the downsides, turn to FoIP.”
To get all the benefits of fax, including reliability and security, without the downsides, turn to FoIP. With cloud-based faxing, healthcare practitioners get a proven, cost-effective, HIPAA-compliant solution. Instead of needing a physical fax machine and everything that goes along with it, incoming and outgoing messages in the healthcare industry are handled virtually via email to fax capabilities. This ensures that faxes can be seen more quickly, and it means all critical communications – email, fax, VoIP phone calls, etc. – are going out over one line.
Furthermore, FoIP can be a great option for security-conscious organizations. A quality, HIPAA-compliant faxing solution for healthcare will encrypt all messages that are both in transit and at rest, which will go a long way toward preventing storage systems from being targeted by hackers. Plus, the almost infinite storage capabilities of cloud-based faxing ensure that correspondences are never lost and can be easily retrieved, an ideal feature in the event of an audit.
In health care, fax sometimes gets a bad rap. By opting for cloud-based faxing, however, doctors’ offices, hospitals, and other healthcare organizations can get all the benefits of faxing – reliability, security, compliance, ease of use – without any of the downsides – high costs, lack of timeliness, difficult tracking.
Enhance enterprise communication, collaboration, and compliance efforts with a proven FoIP solution from FaxCore. Contact FaxCore today to learn more about their ‘Partly-Cloudy’ fax solutions.
