We know, we know. Embrace fax?! It’s the antithesis of prevailing attempts to modernize healthcare technology. But we’re taking the bold stance of embracing fax in the era of interoperability, and our extensive experience working with health organizations of varying sizes and budgets gives us all the confidence we need to stand by it. Today we’ll look at just a few compelling reasons to lean into fax technology in the healthcare sector, but as you’ll see, there’s definitely a better way to fax.
Traditional Fax is a One Trick Pony
We can agree on the fact that traditional faxing is limited in its ability to do much else than get a document from point A to point B. In fact, even that basic premise falls short when the dreaded blurry lines bastardize basic text, rendering the final product akin to a game of telephone gone bad.
Given the necessity to transmit and exchange accurate PHI, transactional point-to-point fax is subpar for most medical use cases. And that’s not even getting into the administrative burden of indexing records, the cumbersome turnaround time of record exchange, or the need for entire workflows to accommodate PAPER!
You may be thinking, ‘Right! So how can you advocate embracing fax in healthcare?!’
Glad you asked…
Cloud Faxing as a Game-Changer
When we advocate for faxing, we’re not talking about sending paper from one machine to another (Can you just hear the tone thinking about it?). No, what moves the needle toward progress is cloud faxing. Utilizing smart folder structures, paperless transmission and receipt, and even leveraging e-PHI physician review workflows changes the engagement with fax all together by tapping into cloud capabilities to more securely and efficiently handle (what is still) a faxed record.
Documentation Only as Good as the Proximity to Point-of-Care
One of the most powerful advantages of cloud faxing is the ability to deliver documents right into a provider’s workflow. Information that is not accessible at the point of care isn’t serving the care experience. Continuity of care happens optimally when records are exchanged often (real-time is the goal) and well, the latter requiring integration into the logical workflow for busy doctors and their staff.
Cloud faxing solutions can deliver valuable healthcare information into EHRs, HIEs or even secure messaging inboxes to accommodate all the various means that providers leverage to take care of a single patient. This is massively important considering many healthcare organizations don’t have the budget or bandwidth (literally and metaphorically speaking) to adopt more robust health IT solutions. But if true community connectivity has any hope of manifestation, we’ve got to recognize the ability of existing technology like fax to close the gaps in care and improve outcomes (clinical and administrative).
