I'd like to see a similar piece about the law and banking industries.
Insurance as well.
Why does American medicine still run on fax machines?
21–30 of 53 posts
Re: Why does American medicine still run on fax machines?
#22Faxes are considered the only secure communication channel by medical companies. Email is not secure. The Vatican has the same stance. They pope communicates via fax the majority of the time, per 60 minutes.
Re: Why does American medicine still run on fax machines?
#23old tech like fax will die when the independent Doctor's practice as a viable business model dies...within fifteen years. Most of us already see physicians through network orgs like PAMF in the Bay Area, who migrated to digital tech internally long ago and are slowly replacing independent practices. I have never seen a physician use paper for any reason in PAMF
Re: Why does American medicine still run on fax machines?
#24Faxes are considered the only secure communication channel by medical companies. Email is not secure. The Vatican has the same stance. They pope communicates via fax the majority of the time, per 60 minutes.
Which is utterly insane, because faxes aren't encrypted. All anyone would have to do is tap into the phone line and copy the signals and they could print out any fax that was sent over the wire.
Re: Why does American medicine still run on fax machines?
#25Paging Pokitdok, Hashed Health, Change Healthcare etc.
Re: Why does American medicine still run on fax machines?
#26Half of Japan still runs on fax machines. They can still be a useful technology. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/world/asia/in-japan-the-fa...
And hence the ubiquitous fax copy scan multifunction machine in every convenience store.
Re: Why does American medicine still run on fax machines?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
They've heard of it, but aren't going to use it. Email is generally not encrypted when stored at rest in many hops along the way, which should be considered insecure. While fax is unencrypted, it's generally not stored in any intermediate systems and has established history of being considered HIPAA compliant.
Security by presumed obscurity. We have a winner.
Security by obscurity isn't military grade security but it's a lot better than insecurity by non-obscurity if those are your only two options.
Re: Why does American medicine still run on fax machines?
#28old tech like fax will die when the independent Doctor's practice as a viable business model dies...within fifteen years. Most of us already see physicians through network orgs like PAMF in the Bay Area, who migrated to digital tech internally long ago and are slowly replacing independent practices. I have never seen a physician use paper for any reason in PAMF
My city has a large, world-class Children's Hospital, but the administration there is ridiculously political, and the doctors will change nothing to make things more efficient.
A colleague of mine had a son who needed to get seen there. They asked him to fax in the admissions forms. Who has a fax machine? He found somewhere and faxed them in, in a couple of jobs. Nope, can he fax them so they all come through in one continuous job. So he goes back and faxes them again. Nope, can he fax them so that the documents arrive in the right order? So he decides to go to a different children's hospital in the city.
I had a friend who worked in the QA dept of that hospital and tried to get processes improved. He said that any time you tried anything, the relevant head of department would say "If we make this change, children will die". Everyone around the table would know the lie for what it was, but the head of dept had the final say if it involved child health.
In short, faxes will still be going strong there for a while yet, and they're a big hospital. :)
Re: Why does American medicine still run on fax machines?
#29Faxes are considered the only secure communication channel by medical companies. Email is not secure. The Vatican has the same stance. They pope communicates via fax the majority of the time, per 60 minutes.
Which is utterly insane, because faxes aren't encrypted. All anyone would have to do is tap into the phone line and copy the signals and they could print out any fax that was sent over the wire.
I mean they have a few niceties like having to physically be in the same spot to interact with it and lacking any sort of central discoverability. There’s not really an equivalent to email:francis@aol.com password:p0p3 and having anybody with a computer getting a copy.
Re: Why does American medicine still run on fax machines?
#30At least part of it is that no one has come up with a document format that suits everyone. Doctors want to scribble notes with a stylus but when you digitize that you don't really gain anything, other systems don't know how to interpret those scribbles. Suggesting doctors enter fields into a form instead of scribbling notes will get you no where, doctors are the stupidest and most stubborn smart people you will come…
From working with a variety of ticketing systems, any veteran dev will be able to tell you just how painful it is to work with multiple fields. Entry is never zippy. The more fields you have, the more painful it is. Most devs, given the choice, will use a ticketing system that is basically free text + a ticket title. If devs, who live and breathe tech, can't comfortably handle the idea of splitting information over various fields (for superior tracking and analysis), why should doctors be any different?