"But faxing is the only thing hippa compliant" whine

[tonerhead]

I am getting pretty tired of people whining that faxing is so much hit/miss anymore. How do you respond to "hippa compliance" crap? I know there are solutions for this with email, however customers are not willing to pay for it when faxing is "free". It's amazing that people are willing to do online banking, online purchases, etc, but faxing (which also uses internet through voip) is the only thing hippa compliant.

I am looking for a good response that will make sense to the complete idiot. I've tried comparing it to dial up internet and how that is obsolete but it always boils down to hippa compliance. Unfortunately most of the end users are not the decision makers, they only do what they are told to do. I just want faxes to go away.

Personal note, I would think emails are pretty darn secure now, the only thing is if they go to a wrong email address. I guess a person could dial the wrong number on a fax also though.

[slimslob]

Inform them that they not up to date on the requirements. FAX might not necessarily be sufficiently secure. Sure, the link may be secure but who has access to the receiving unit.

Properly setup encrypted email services are available. With full end to end encryption once again security of the receiving computer is the key.

HIPAA Compliance for Email

[slimslob]

I remember when prescriptions refills were handled by fax. I had one doctor's office that had an Aficio 2045 that all it was used for was to receive faxes from pharmacies. Had to wait for a break in incoming faxes just to swap out PCDU, transfer belt unit and fusing unit at PM time. Rebuilding was done in the shop in order to cut down on down time.

Now everything is done by email, even new prescriptions.

[blackcat4866]

I remember when prescriptions refills were handled by fax. I had one doctor's office that had an Aficio 2045 that all it was used for was to receive faxes from pharmacies. Had to wait for a break in incoming faxes just to swap out PCDU, transfer belt unit and fusing unit at PM time. Rebuilding was done in the shop in order to cut down on down time.

Now everything is done by email, even new prescriptions.

Yeah, I had a Konica Minolta at a retirement home. The nurses would peel the pharmacy labels off of the bottle and stick them on a 3 3/4" x 7" form, then try to fax it somewhere through the DF. They insisted that "IT HAS TO BE THAT FORM!" ... but it doesn't have to be 3 3/4" x 7". (I laid the odd sized original on the glass & covered it with letter. Now it's Letter sized). And the labels peel off: Ok, make a copy first. Endless fishing pharmacy labels out of the DF. =^..^=

[tonerhead]

I am thinking I will draft a handout and just give it to the person. I know if you google hippa compliant scanning, you get all sorts of hits of companies offering these email services. I am just so tired of dealing with this issue. People think hippa is for information privacy (which it is) but does anyone recall the original purpose of hippa? Trivia question.


The original purpose of hippa was for health insurance and medical record transfers. The security thing was blown up by some Senator's wife's medical records getting out to public.
I am old enough to remember my medical files being sent in the mail to me when I moved to another town. How secure was that? Every hospital, clinic, and nursing home violates hippa daily by not having a fax in a locked area, controlled by a responsible person. Any janitor, book keeper, or receptionist can read medical info that they should not be privy to. If I am working on a fax and phi (personal health info) comes out, hippa just got blown away.

I think a handout is best. Faxing is free, but dead. You need to update and pay for a service

[KenB]

Blindly faxing to a machine in a non-secure area and having it immediately print is just plain stupid.

Routing faxes to folder or email is a vast improvement.

Fax servers are a very reasonable compromise. They can send over a variety of mediums, from analog POTS lines to highly secure digital connections, and route them using a ton of different methods, including OCRing and pulling the delivery destination from there.

Healthcare, legal, government and education are the 4 vertical markets which fax is still quite prevalent in.

[Santander]

What about the Federal Court evidence train? Original, copy, fax, pdf, email. Wonder why they want to continue with fax? My fax trumps your email or pdf.

[slimslob]

Blindly faxing to a machine in a non-secure area and having it immediately print is just plain stupid.

Routing faxes to folder or email is a vast improvement.

Fax servers are a very reasonable compromise. They can send over a variety of mediums, from analog POTS lines to highly secure digital connections, and route them using a ton of different methods, including OCRing and pulling the delivery destination from there.

Healthcare, legal, government and education are the 4 vertical markets which fax is still quite prevalent in.

But not all government offices. I had a customer who was a Bankruptcy attorney. All documents submitted to the Regional US Bankruptcy Court had to in the form of a 300 dpi .pdf either emailed directly to then court or submitted by an approved software. Her used a software called Forms of Bankruptcy. It generated all the required forms and also had a built in scanning function that allowed client provided documents to be scanned in. FAX was not accepted due to lack of image quality.

[slimslob]

What about the Federal Court evidence train? Original, copy, fax, pdf, email. Wonder why they want to continue with fax? My fax trumps your email or pdf.

At one time FAX was the only accepted way for anything with a signature on it. It was believed that it was not easy to alter a "FAX" document. That was pretty much the truth with Group 1 and Group 2 facsimile transmission. That went out the window with the introduction of Group 3 digital FAX. And nobody was going to go back to older fax groups considering that Group3 was less than 1 minute per page. Group 2 ran at 2 minutes for high resolution and 3 minutes for standard resolution. Group 1 was double that.

[KenB]

But not all government offices. I had a customer who was a Bankruptcy attorney. All documents submitted to the Regional US Bankruptcy Court had to in the form of a 300 dpi .pdf either emailed directly to then court or submitted by an approved software. Her used a software called Forms of Bankruptcy. It generated all the required forms and also had a built in scanning function that allowed client provided documents to be scanned in. FAX was not accepted due to lack of image quality.

Some government departments are definitely more progressive than others, no doubt.

I remember one law firm about 15 years ago that had scanned PDFs rejected by one federal office (I forget which one) because they were too low a version of PDF.

The Canon machine they had was not capable of creating a higher version, and it was quite current.

The customer had to buy Acrobat (Pro, not Reader) and open then re-save to the higher version.

About 7 or 8 years ago, I had a law firm where we placed a fax server. They frequently sent and received very large faxes, ranging from 100 to 400 pages.

The faxes were sent and received from several state courts and state offices of the Social Security Administration.

All their users had desktop scanners, and an installed copy of Acrobat Pro.