HOW FAX MACHINES HINDER EMR (AND HOW TO SOLVE IT)

Why fax machines need to go the way of the Walkman.

Want to see if time-travel is real? Simply walk into any doctor’s office or a hospital and ask to use their fax machine.

The fax machine was invented in the early 1960s with its heyday being the late 1980s. Today, nearly 90 percent of healthcare organizations use fax machines with an estimated 75 percent for communications purposes alone. There are four reasons why it's time for this relic to fade away like the Walkman, VHS tapes, and the fanny pack.

Waste of Time and Money

Using phone calls, fax, etc., to process medical information costs the healthcare industry more than $9 billion annually. This is $6 to $11 more per piece of information than if done through an EMR like Epic. Professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) pegs the labor cost for doctors alone at $20 for each piece of paper.

Fax machines cost time, too. Healthcare staff must spend their limited work hours physically retrieving, integrating (i.e., data entry or input), and destroying any confidential documents per HIPAA rules. Providers filling out and faxing those forms can take an average of 8 minutes per piece, with some requiring as much as 30 minutes. All these chip away at time better spent on patient care.

Support staff like healthcare IT is affected as well. Fax equipment, from new machines to legacy, must be maintained. This costs time and money for the technicians who would be better utilized on more important tasks like securing the hospital network or purchasing needed medical tablets for the ICU.

Paper Jams Can Cost Lives and Money

Missing or jammed pages, busy signals, and blurry printouts are well-known issues with fax machines. Normally they’re just an annoyance to the average consumer or business. For medical groups and hospitals, fax issues can be a matter of life or death. As CareAlign CEO Subha Airan-Javia vividly illustrates: “Just last week we received faxed medical records for a patient that made a stack two inches thick. And it came in two or three different faxes, because they ran out of paper half-way through, and it was all disorganized, and there were missing sheets. It was a mess.

“And there I was, trying to put all this information together, it was like sorting through a year’s worth of credit card information for 20 different cards, and being expected to immediately balance your checkbook and know how much money you have in every account, right now. It’s just about impossible.”

The jams are expensive, too. The PwC pegs the average healthcare organization spending a minimum of $200 for each missing record alone, nevermind $120 per paper copy in labor cost.

Cybersecurity on Paper

Finally, fax machines are not covered by HIPAA rules on data encryption. That is because the information to be faxed was not digital in its original, paper form.

Fax printouts with patient information, however, are covered under HIPAA rules. Healthcare organizations are responsible if the printout is not promptly picked up by authorized staff, left alone, lost or, worse, taken by unauthorized personnel. Courts have ruled that groups are still liable if the information is faxed to the wrong number.

Fax machines are vulnerable to cyberattacks, too.

Solutions are Coming. Slowly.

The Obama administration in 2009 provided funds for private healthcare organizations to switch to EMRs. It did not require these systems to be able to communicate with each other, i.e., interoperability. A study published in 2013 showed only 41 percent of hospitals in the US were able to exchange patient medical records with other systems. Fax machines, phone calls, and even physical mail, had to be used to deal with this lack of interoperability.

The government, realizing its mistake, encourages interoperability between healthcare groups. Said Seema Verma, administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in 2018: "If I could challenge developers on a mission, it's to help make doctors' offices a fax free zone by 2020."

The private sector also moved forward. Various healthcare groups developed health information exchanges (HIEs) to share patient information without breaking HIPAA confidential rules. Unfortunately, HIEs are limited to select geographical locations like within states.

Closing Thoughts

Fax machines in medical offices are a throwback to an earlier time. EMRs effectively solve their big shortcomings like costs, paper jams, and lack of cybersecurity. Contact an expert at Cybernet if you’re looking to move from faxing to modern systems.