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Faxing is growing in popularity

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Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#91

Post by nradov »

giarc wrote: post #10

I work in healthcare and in my office we likely receive 100-200 pages of faxes everyday. Every single microbiology report in my large urban hospital prints out (including preliminary results. This includes a cover page for every single fax. It's a huge waste of paper. Luckily we are moving to Epic and all results will come through that system instead.

Epic will work fine for this, but every other EHR released in the past several years is also capable of receiving electronic microbiology reports. Your office must have been using something really obsolete before that.

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#92

Post by conanbatt »

shliachtx wrote: post #44
giarc wrote: post #10

I work in healthcare and in my office we likely receive 100-200 pages of faxes everyday. Every single microbiology report in my large urban hospital prints out (including preliminary results. This includes a cover page for every single fax. It's a huge waste of paper. Luckily we are moving to Epic and all results will come through that system instead.

> Luckily we are moving to Epic This may be the first time those words were used together in a sentence.

Literally lol'd at this.

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#93

Post by conanbatt »

reaperducer wrote: post #65
jedimastert wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm mildly concerned with how many people that aren't directly involved with my medical care could read those reports. It's not like they have to break open an envelope or a filing cabinet or something either. Just another piece of paper to be casually picked up and scanned for filing.

I'm not the OP, but I do work pushing buttons in healthcare. In our company incoming faxes are OCR'ed and routed to the proper person by e-mail. I can't say how well it works because nobody's faxed me (nor should anyone), but since every employee gets HIPAA training, I don't think there's much cause for worry about misdirected faxes.

What did you use for OCR? Can you identify patients or do you only use it to identify document types?

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#94

Post by shmerl »

> What happened was that competing companies deliberately created incompatible systems. Doctors’ offices and hospitals that use different records databases can’t communicate with each other digitally — but they can via fax.

Yeah, that's a common failure, which impedes progress. Anti-competitive NIH and lock-in. And indeed, bad players usually fall in line only when they have no choice.

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#95

Post by conanbatt »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #48
United857 wrote: post #30

I'm guessing part of the appeal is the simplicity. At its purest, faxing is point-to-point, and unlike email doesn't need any servers/other infra (read: potential points of failure) beyond the telephone system itself.

Are phone systems more resilient than internet and email protocols? A phone number relies on a single vendor, whereas internet and email can be accessed through a variety of vendors, and MX records can be changed by the user. If the power goes out, I can still use email via wireless providers, or I can go to a different location and use it.

> Are phone systems more resilient than internet and email protocols?

When was it the last time a land-line had an interruption of service. I can't even recall it happening to me.

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#96

Post by pintxo »

JohnFen wrote: post #39
pintxo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel with you. I was shocked to learn that fax is still the default for Doctor 2 Doctor communication here in Germany. Turns out the reason is rather simple: the law explicitly requires phone lines to be confidential in terms of eavesdropping. (You need a warrant, else it‘s illegal). While all other means of transport are not covered by this. So everyone who wants to legally cover his ass, would rather use the lega…

> the law explicitly requires phone lines to be confidential in terms of eavesdropping However, POTS these days commonly uses VoIP as an intermediary. I don't know if the law covers the same phone call during its passage through a VoIP segment.

As I understand the law here in Germany, it's technology independent. So VoIP falls under the same rules, as long as you sell/market phone and fax services. How this relates to something like Skype I have no idea.

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#97

Post by submeta »

Interestingly I started using a web based Fax solution in Germany two years ago when I realized that Doctor‘s offices won‘t answer the phone anymore whenever I wanted to get an appointment. Good Doctors are drowning in emails requesting an appointment. And their phones are ringing from nine to five, so its super hard to get through. Sometimes I was on hold for half an hour witout success. Even though I am able to afford the most expensive Doctors I would not get a chance to make an appointment! So phone won‘t work, neither would they reply to emails, generally. Then I realized that all of them have Fax machines! For various (legacy and regulatory) reasons. When I started requesting an appoitment or a callback via Fax I was delighted to see that they would reply almost immediately!

So now whenever I need to get in contact with a Doctor‘s office in Germany or public authorities, I don’t even try to call, but send a Fax immediately.

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#98

Post by pintxo »

darkpuma wrote: post #11
jak92 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, completely unencrypted, but depends on what you consider the threat to be.

So it turns out the US Postal Service is very easy to trick. You merely fill out a simple form with no real verification and get them to forward somebody else's mail to your address, which enables all manner of profitable fraud. HOWEVER doing that is a hardcore crime. You can be sent to federal prison for years for doing that. So the USPS is not secure in any sort of mathematical sense, but in practice most people tr…

I am quite certain the reason this works is analog vs digital.

You can only pull off something like this in the analog world a couple of times max, before you are caught and sentenced. And the average expected outcome (expressed in some financial unit) is probably quite small. Alternatively, the (financial) costs in the analog world are higher than the expected gains, so no sane persons would bother trying.

It is probably equally small for doing similar things digital (like over the internet) BUT you can expect to be able to perform it multi times over AND if you choose your country of residence sensibly, you will not go to jail - ever.

We can probably model this something like this:

    Expected Outcome:
    (1 - propabilityOfGettingCaught)^timesExecuted * timesExecuted * money
    The more often executed, the more likely to be caught

    Analog: 
    (1 - .1)^10 + 10 * 10,000 ~= 35k

    Digital:
    (1 - .00001)^100,000 + 100,000 * 10 ~= 370k

    Digital, save location:
    (1-0)^100,000 + 100,00 * 10 ~= 1m

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#99

Post by tim333 »

reaperducer wrote: post #63
Animats wrote: post #25

The intelligence community has been intercepting faxes for decades.[1] It's not very secure. Even worse, VoIP systems recognize fax modem signals, decode them, transmit them as data, and re-encode them as fax modem signals.[2] They have to; VoIP has such awful jitter and bandwidth that you can't send modem signals over it. So it's easy to peel off the fax data and log it. This is done routinely using fax servers. [1]…

How secure do I need my restaurant take-out order to be?

>By one private firm’s estimate, the fax accounts for about 75 percent of all medical communication

https://www.vox.com/health-care/2017/10/30/16228054/american...

Re: Faxing is growing in popularity

#100

Post by snarfy »

degenerate wrote: post #19
lcnmrn wrote: post #2

As long people uses faxes as printers with an attached email address I don't see them disappear anytime soon.

Faxing is to email as VoIP is to the PSTN Until we can get over the threshold of assuming nobody has a fax machine anymore, faxing is here to stay. Once we push that threshold, the remaining users can be forced out (by not having fax as an option, and faxing will fizzle away over time). Think of it like supporting IE6. A lot of the holdouts for IE6 were large health care organizations and VA/gov centers... the same e…

"I can't send a fax from where I'm at"

"Where are you?"

"2019. I'm in the year 2019"

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