Advances in Fax Technology

How many faxes do you receive per day? Probably a lot more than you think because you and your staff don’t have enough time in a day to count them. My estimate, based on researching health care clinics, is that most pain clinics fax/receive from 2,000 to 5,000 faxes per month! The fax machine has become a viable tool for you and your staff to communicate with the outside world. According to International Engineering Consortium, in 2007, there were approximately over 100 million fax machines in the World and there were over 400 billion faxes received/sent per year. Another important note is that fax correspondence makes up 30% of the your telephone line usage per year. Think about how much information you fax out and are faxed back daily (e.g., referral letters and reports, radiology, lab, reports, etc.). Think about the amount of labor it takes you and your staff to generate and manage faxes over a month’s time period. Manual faxing is a significant cost to you and an area where you can save a lot money if it is handled more efficiently.

Faxing: A Brief History

Facsimile (fax) technology is the transmission of images over a telephone line. Fax technology came about 70 years ago as an application for sending something called a wire photo to transmit photographs for newspaper publications. Faxes are a replica or “picture image” of a page. Mainstream fax usage started in the 1960s but transmission speed was very slow. It was not until the development of image data compression in the 1970s that fax usage became practical and started to take off. Faxes are considered somewhat safe communication because they cannot be easily changed or altered versus an email that can be altered and then resent. Thus, for the highly regulated health care pain clinic, faxes are the safe and HIPAA standard to communicate as opposed to using emails.

The first fax machine used thermal paper. Thermal paper came on a roll (like a credit card slip) that slowly faded over time. In the 1990s, fax machines started using regular paper and became a staple in daily business life.

Fax Machines and Healthcare

Fax machines have completely transformed the way you send and receive information when compared to the costly and time-consuming method of mail and overnight express services. You are able to have someone send you a fax and then while you are talking to that person, be able to review something such as a radiology report. The speed and connectivity of information between providers and other health care support services have been incredibly improved because of the fax machines’ speed in transmission. Think about what happens if your fax machine were to break. So much communication would grind to a halt. Your staff would rebel because they use faxes to communicate with insurance companies, labs, other doctors, patients, etc.

The fax usage in your office, while efficient, needs some sort of fax communication protocol. The fact is that faxing causes a lot of paper generation and handling. It is one of the most costly components of your practice.

Incoming paper faxes are associated with the following issues:

• The need for proper routing and identification
• Receipt notification back to the faxing party.
• Communication coordination in your clinic. A user needs to share the faxed information with others in the clinic and often with patients in order to make an appropriate response to the faxing party
• Time sensitive responses to faxes can be difficult. Clinics need to be able to set up alerts for other staff members to have a timely response to a fax. A paper filled environment makes this process very inefficient as alerts can easily be lost and vital information may not be handled in a time efficient manner.
• Increased costs. The amount of usage/time dictates your phone fax line costs. Transmission time to send/receive faxes also determine your phone line costs.
• Mis-dials (wrong faxes, garbage faxes) is very costly in phone costs, printing costs and labor to your clinic
• Possible HIPAA violations due to paper sitting on a fax for others to pick up and read.
• Paper fax machines utilize a lot of staff for manual intervention. Staff must print a document, walk to retrieve, sort it, make copies for others that need to see it, log the fax in a record, file the document, etc.
• Paper fax machines cost the fax machine, paper, toner, labor, etc.
• Your fax machine creates a lot of paper for your clinic

Sent paper faxes are associated with the following issues: