Fax Today: Fictions and Facts

The following is a guest article by Chris Larkin, CTO at Concord Technologies

In 2018, faxing patient records was deemed part of healthcare’s “1990s time warp” by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (now the ASTP, or Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy). In contrast, they claimed, “the rest of the economy is functioning on fully digitized, integrated data that informs decision-making instantaneously.”

The ASTP is right about digitized, integrated data being the key to 21st-century healthcare quality and efficiency — but wrong to lump fax technology in with CD-ROMs, paper records, and manual data entry. Their imagery called to mind paper jams, the sound of dial-up modems and busy signals, and documents often picked up by the wrong recipient. More accurately, for decades, faxes have been transmitted over the internet using “Fax Over IP” (FoIP), which makes faxing as instantaneous as emailing or direct messaging while also freeing up phone lines and eliminating the need for bulky physical machines.

Digital cloud fax technology, the next step in fax’s evolution, enabled a greater volume of transmission more reliably; this technology currently transmits millions of HIPAA-protected documents daily. Many of today’s cloud fax applications also are using AI to automatically extract and integrate data into core healthcare workflows.

Despite this ongoing evolution, misconceptions remain. One is that faxing is on the decline in healthcare. In fact, fax remains the primary form of communication for referrals, lab and test results, payer correspondence, and pharmacy orders at about 90% of U.S. medical groups. Personnel across healthcare understand fax to be the central pathway for data transfer, especially across organizations.

Yet critics complain about the dominance of fax in healthcare vs. in the legal and real estate industries, where it has been largely replaced with other digital forms of data transfer. The key distinction between those industries and healthcare is the level and stringency of the regulatory environment, as well as the financial and reputational penalties for any breach of those regulations. Any cloud fax platform used in healthcare is already compliant with HIPAA’s strict requirements for data privacy, for instance — something the average law or real estate firm does not have to deal with.

Fax is further cementing its place in healthcare as more organizations are turning toward cloud faxing for scalable, paperless, secure transmission of their sensitive data. The ONC/ASTP itself published a data brief in 2021 indicating a recent rise in the use of digital faxing. Rather than focus on its benefits for a single hospital’s efficiency, however, that data brief cast FoIP and cloud fax technologies as key tools in a broader shift toward overall healthcare interoperability. The ubiquity of fax — and its current role as the preferred form of communication between disparate healthcare organizations — do make it a likely foundation for this long-term initiative.

Efficiency and workflow improvements are another reason healthcare organizations are further integrating cloud faxing into their workflows. With AI advancing so rapidly, efficiencies such as data extraction and document classification are creating tangible time savings while increasing employee satisfaction and patient outcomes.

How AI Will Continue to Improve Cloud-Fax Capabilities

Healthcare’s massive trove of faxed documents shares similar essential categories, even though those fields might be placed or named differently. This combination — a huge number of files, featuring some basic shared categories — makes this the ideal ground for AI-supported data structuring, extraction, and directed placement. With these advances, the leading cloud fax applications can mingle incoming data with converted data from other channels, giving a holistic, real-time picture of an individual patient’s needs and care. Certain cloud fax platforms also provide, through interactive dashboards, a comprehensive overview of specific workflows in a given facility (physician referrals or patient intake status for certain health services, for example).

As an example, recently one midsized outpatient clinic enlisted a cloud fax company to automatically extract clinical data from specific data fields in incoming digital faxes, routing that data to a dashboard immediately available for human review. The company used AI-driven optical character recognition (OCR) to achieve this extraction. (OCR is notoriously difficult to perform with a high degree of accuracy, but some companies have put significant resources toward its improvement, with positive results.) Healthcare research firm KLAS validated this and other use cases for digital cloud fax in its Digital Fax 2023 Performance Report — helping to test claims about AI’s potential with current experiences with its implementation.

In that report, KLAS lays out a “Digital Fax Maturity Framework” with four levels: first, the ability to send faxes from existing administrative, clinical, and financial workflows (or “outbound EHR integration”); second, automated document routing to existing workflows, including inbound documents; third, the use of natural language processing or OCR technology “to extract discrete patient and document identification data for the purposes of patient record matching”; and, at its most advanced level, the ability to “interrogate” digital fax documents, extract pre-selected data, and apply that data to other workflows.

The report concludes with a prediction from the “advanced user” respondents: “faxing is here to stay.” According to these respondents, the digital fax market will grow as more organizations shift from paper fax processes to digital cloud fax solutions — and use those as the basis for their interoperability strategy. Cloud faxing has delivered concrete, measurable improvements to care quality and access, helping move the healthcare community closer to its larger goal of true interoperability.

About Chris Larkin

Chris Larkin is the Chief Technology Officer of Concord Technologies in Seattle. He has held top positions in technology companies, including GE Healthcare and the Healthcare Group Program Manager at Microsoft. Larkin is a leading expert on Cloud Fax and how it can help address the challenges of data interoperability in healthcare.

The following is a guest article by Chris Larkin, CTO at Concord Technologies

In 2018, faxing patient records was deemed part of healthcare’s “1990s time warp” by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (now the ASTP, or Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy). In contrast, they claimed, “the rest of the economy is functioning on fully digitized, integrated data that informs decision-making instantaneously.”

The ASTP is right about digitized, integrated data being the key to 21st-century healthcare quality and efficiency — but wrong to lump fax technology in with CD-ROMs, paper records, and manual data entry. Their imagery called to mind paper jams, the sound of dial-up modems and busy signals, and documents often picked up by the wrong recipient. More accurately, for decades, faxes have been transmitted over the internet using “Fax Over IP” (FoIP), which makes faxing as instantaneous as emailing or direct messaging while also freeing up phone lines and eliminating the need for bulky physical machines.

Digital cloud fax technology, the next step in fax’s evolution, enabled a greater volume of transmission more reliably; this technology currently transmits millions of HIPAA-protected documents daily. Many of today’s cloud fax applications also are using AI to automatically extract and integrate data into core healthcare workflows.

Despite this ongoing evolution, misconceptions remain. One is that faxing is on the decline in healthcare. In fact, fax remains the primary form of communication for referrals, lab and test results, payer correspondence, and pharmacy orders at about 90% of U.S. medical groups. Personnel across healthcare understand fax to be the central pathway for data transfer, especially across organizations.

Yet critics complain about the dominance of fax in healthcare vs. in the legal and real estate industries, where it has been largely replaced with other digital forms of data transfer. The key distinction between those industries and healthcare is the level and stringency of the regulatory environment, as well as the financial and reputational penalties for any breach of those regulations. Any cloud fax platform used in healthcare is already compliant with HIPAA’s strict requirements for data privacy, for instance — something the average law or real estate firm does not have to deal with.

Fax is further cementing its place in healthcare as more organizations are turning toward cloud faxing for scalable, paperless, secure transmission of their sensitive data. The ONC/ASTP itself published a data brief in 2021 indicating a recent rise in the use of digital faxing. Rather than focus on its benefits for a single hospital’s efficiency, however, that data brief cast FoIP and cloud fax technologies as key tools in a broader shift toward overall healthcare interoperability. The ubiquity of fax — and its current role as the preferred form of communication between disparate healthcare organizations — do make it a likely foundation for this long-term initiative.

Efficiency and workflow improvements are another reason healthcare organizations are further integrating cloud faxing into their workflows. With AI advancing so rapidly, efficiencies such as data extraction and document classification are creating tangible time savings while increasing employee satisfaction and patient outcomes.

How AI Will Continue to Improve Cloud-Fax Capabilities

Healthcare’s massive trove of faxed documents shares similar essential categories, even though those fields might be placed or named differently. This combination — a huge number of files, featuring some basic shared categories — makes this the ideal ground for AI-supported data structuring, extraction, and directed placement. With these advances, the leading cloud fax applications can mingle incoming data with converted data from other channels, giving a holistic, real-time picture of an individual patient’s needs and care. Certain cloud fax platforms also provide, through interactive dashboards, a comprehensive overview of specific workflows in a given facility (physician referrals or patient intake status for certain health services, for example).

As an example, recently one midsized outpatient clinic enlisted a cloud fax company to automatically extract clinical data from specific data fields in incoming digital faxes, routing that data to a dashboard immediately available for human review. The company used AI-driven optical character recognition (OCR) to achieve this extraction. (OCR is notoriously difficult to perform with a high degree of accuracy, but some companies have put significant resources toward its improvement, with positive results.) Healthcare research firm KLAS validated this and other use cases for digital cloud fax in its Digital Fax 2023 Performance Report — helping to test claims about AI’s potential with current experiences with its implementation.

In that report, KLAS lays out a “Digital Fax Maturity Framework” with four levels: first, the ability to send faxes from existing administrative, clinical, and financial workflows (or “outbound EHR integration”); second, automated document routing to existing workflows, including inbound documents; third, the use of natural language processing or OCR technology “to extract discrete patient and document identification data for the purposes of patient record matching”; and, at its most advanced level, the ability to “interrogate” digital fax documents, extract pre-selected data, and apply that data to other workflows.

The report concludes with a prediction from the “advanced user” respondents: “faxing is here to stay.” According to these respondents, the digital fax market will grow as more organizations shift from paper fax processes to digital cloud fax solutions — and use those as the basis for their interoperability strategy. Cloud faxing has delivered concrete, measurable improvements to care quality and access, helping move the healthcare community closer to its larger goal of true interoperability.

About Chris Larkin

Chris Larkin is the Chief Technology Officer of Concord Technologies in Seattle. He has held top positions in technology companies, including GE Healthcare and the Healthcare Group Program Manager at Microsoft. Larkin is a leading expert on Cloud Fax and how it can help address the challenges of data interoperability in healthcare.