Faxing, despite predictions of its impending demise, continues to be an indispensable service in the healthcare industry. With concerns around HIPAA compliance, particularly in light of the recent passage of the Omnibus Final Ruling, fax has been a primary secure methodology for sharing documents and data outside the organization. Many healthcare providers made substantial investments in premise fax servers and telephony lines to support the transmission of documents for physician referrals, billing, patient records, and other critical documents. By Tim Dubes, senior marketing manager, eFax Corporate®
By Tim Dubes, senior marketing manager, eFax Corporate®
Faxing, despite predictions of its impending demise, continues to be an indispensable service in the healthcare industry. With concerns around HIPAA compliance, particularly in light of the recent passage of the Omnibus Final Ruling, fax has been a primary secure methodology for sharing documents and data outside the organization. Many healthcare providers made substantial investments in premise fax servers and telephony lines to support the transmission of documents for physician referrals, billing, patient records, and other critical documents.
Fax servers made some aspects of fax communications management much easier, lowered the time consumption associated with it, and reduced the number of paper documents waiting in attended devices. Yet as fax services continue to evolve, there are alternatives available that offer even greater productivity benefits. In fact the latest trend in faxing in the healthcare industry is to outsource the infrastructure to a hosted fax solution.
Moving from fax servers to a hosted fax service gets you out of the fax technology management business and allows you to focus on your core business initiatives. No hardware, software, telephone lines or paper needed; and no upfront investment or ongoing support and maintenance costs. Best of all, you only pay for the fax volume actually used, so if your fax volume declines over the next few years, you aren’t married to a system that overwhelms its present day value.
Hosted fax services supplant fax servers for healthcare providers with varying fax volumes and remote staff. Employees can be assigned their own fax number that is often linked to their email address, allowing them to send or receive faxes as email attachments anywhere that they have internet access. Hosted services can also be set up to provide secure transmissions, usually via encrypted Transport Layer Security (TLS) between users and the cloud-based hosted servers to address HIPAA compliance issues.
As you investigate hosted fax services, here are six important questions that can help you determine if it is time to move on to a cloud-based solution:
How many faxes do you send each day? Fax volume often goes unmeasured by IT, because once the infrastructure is in place the actual document flow goes unnoticed until the fax traffic strains capacity of the server or telephony service. Fax servers require constant monitoring of system capacity to ensure the solution is right-sized for your organization.
Is your fax volume constant or do you have peaks and valleys? Owning the equipment and infrastructure for faxing means that you need to purchase hardware and bandwidth to accommodate your highest usage level. This isn’t so much an issue if you have a small daily fluctuation in the number of faxes sent and received. More likely however, you may have peak usage periods where weekly or monthly patient encounter reports or billing statements are sent. In this situation, you may have a system that may be capable of a much higher volume yet is severely underutilized when viewed as a whole.
Do you have a backup plan for server downtime? The adage “failing to plan is planning to fail” is familiar to IT directors. Even the most robust server infrastructures require scheduled maintenance and encounter unexpected service outages. Contingencies are needed for these service interruptions, usually through redundant servers and backup transmission lines. For fax servers, it is advisable to have a secondary servers and a rerouting option for telephony issues, because faxed documents often represent time sensitive transactions. If you don’t have a backup plan with appropriate service outage contingencies, documents may be delayed or go undelivered.
Is your organization distributed? Fax servers were introduced years ago as companies looked to centralize core services for easier management control. Since then most organizations have seen a distributed model fits their business better. If you have remote workers or multiple facilities, then having fax services in one location may not be the most efficient—or most reliable—system for you.
Is your telephony environment stable or dynamic? Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has changed telecommunications for providers. With sound quality equal or exceeding equivalent analog phones, over 80 percent of U.S. companies have adopted VoIP. Yet many of these same companies maintain telephony service just to support fax machines and servers. If you have already made the switch to VoIP—or are in the process of doing so—continuing to support in-house fax hardware will mean maintaining otherwise unnecessary telephony costs.
What is your cost for each page faxed? It’s a simple question but most companies have no idea what that number is. We have already discussed how tracking page volume is often unknown; the associated costs can be even more convoluted: hardware and software maintenance, electricity, telephone lines, employee time for maintenance and management. If you do the analysis of all these numbers you might be surprised to find that your actual cost per transmission is higher than you would suspect. With hosted fax services this number is much easier to obtain and control.
Conduct a self-analysis and answer these questions about your faxing environment. Knowing this information before you engage a vendor is akin to doing your research before shopping for a new car. Understanding your current situation will prepare you to take an analytical approach to the best available solutions.
About the author
Tim Dubes is a Senior Marketing Manager with eFax Corporate®, a division of j2 Global, Inc., a global provider of business cloud and digital media services. eFax Corporate is the world’s leading online fax provider and helps thousands of companies in highly-regulated industries, including healthcare, transmit and manage sensitive documents efficiently and securely.
