Healthcare CIO here. This is true. Healthcare is still using paper fax. It has a 30 year old data interchange format that no one really supports because it's more profitable to lock in customers to your EMR. Healthcare is HORRIBLE about upgrading anything, at changing processes, and technological progress in general. Healthcare is VERY backwards from a tech standpoint. Another problem is that EVERYTHING is custom, we…
People need to stop hating on fax. Hospitals still use fax because it is a much more punishable crime to tap phone lines which requires physical access, as opposed to a server that could be infected from a hacker halfway across the world.
- It's direct point to point communication (over a network)
- The transport network is dedicated and not open to anyone and covered by quite strong laws in many countries
- It's easy to see the history of communications
- It's easy to see if the other end successfully received something
- It's relatively standardized and ubiquitous ( in health )
Email would be the closest thing, but it doesn't have all the advantages, and the extra add ons that would make it better (like encryption, delivery receipt, digital signatures) are not standardized and/or ubiquitous ( and often hotly argued about )
So fax is the lowest common denominator, that, if it was proposed today, would not be accepted for many of its disadvantages, but it's now hard to find a way to replace it.