Why Healthcare providers should invest in cloud fax

Whilst businesses across all industries are taking to cloud computing, healthcare providers have been slow to adopt the technology; in a survey conducted earlier this year by technology vendor CDW, 35% of healthcare professionals questioned in 2012 said that their organizations were currently using cloud computing. However, the average across all large businesses combined is almost 10% more, at 44%.

Now, the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) are encouraging all healthcare patient records and other data be migrated to cloud computing – in fact, by 2015 all medical professionals with access to patient records must utilize electronic medical and health records (EMR and EHR), or face penalties.

There are several reasons for this migration; storage and backup, security, and accessibility being the key factors. Whilst there are many cloud service providers out there offering solutions for storing documents, with regards to healthcare, providers must make sure that their services adhere to HIPAA guidelines, meaning that an extremely high level of security is needed.

The increasing demand for physicians’ time often means that work has to be done outside of office hours, at home. However, traditional methods of transferring patient records – such as email, manual fax or hard copies, have security issues and are therefore at high risk of access by third parties. Sfax, however, ensures the highest levels of security so that the integrity and confidentiality of patient data is maintained, in line with HIPAA.

Traditional faxing, whilst encrypted during sending, can still compromise patient privacy – physical fax pages are often misplaced or picked up by someone other than the intended recipient. If signatures are required from physicians, for example for prescriptions, obtaining these can be inefficient and time-consuming. Using manual fax is also less accessible to staff who travel or work remotely. Whilst email can be accessed more easily, there are still many security issues; information is not encrypted and they are easily intercepted by third parties during sending.

However, cloud faxing eliminates these issues; data is encrypted using and meets the compliance needs like traditional faxing, but is delivered electronically directly to the recipient and access is password protected, therefore eliminating the security risk of email. Sfax provides a complete audit trail of fax activity, and enables users to set up notifications for deliveries and receipts for additional peace of mind that no fax has gone astray.

Thanks to our latest development; an Sfax app for Android mobile devices, documents can be accessed on-the-go, cutting process time and facilitating collaboration.

We have helped more than 15,000 healthcare users including:

• Physicians and Clinics
• Hospitals
• Home Health and Hospice
• Medical billing companies
• DME
• Laboratories
• EHRs
• Pharmacies
• IT Consulting.

In short, Sfax lets you send, receive, annotate, digitally sign, and manage faxes online without printing a single physical document. They can be accessed via PC or Mac or mobile device, eliminating the time-consuming manual processes of traditional document transfer methods, and improving your document workflow as well as saving mounds of paper. Most importantly, we have the highest level of document protection, and meet the regulatory compliance criteria for HIPAA.