Still Using Fax?

The Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) Medical Center, which receives 50,000 faxed pages per month and sends another 10,000, recently found that faxing was rapidly becoming both a cost issue and a logistical nightmare. Many industries like healthcare still rely heavily on faxing to transmit sensitive information. Because of requirements for security and privacy in HIPAA, email is considered too vulnerable to interception without having a costly and complex secure messaging system in place, thereby putting patient privacy at risk. Faxes are considered more secure since they cannot be pulled out of cyberspace. MUSC chose MyFax to initially serve the inbound fax needs of 700 users. Today when faxes come in, they are tagged with medical record numbers, if required, critical patient information is pulled in from the medical records system. The faxes are then routed automatically to the right department by software that scans the cover sheets and determines where they should go, regardless of the fax number it was sent to originally. Paper consumption has been reduced by a total of nearly 60,000 sheets per month, which works out to nearly three quarters of a million sheets of paper per year. The organization is also saving the energy needed to power all the old fax machines. (Sujit Kar, IT manager for business development and marketing services at MUSC.)

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