The humble fax machine has been a regular fixture within healthcare offices for as long as most of us care to remember. Even in 2018, with so much modern technology at our disposal, fax machines continue to dominate an otherwise rapidly evolving technological industry. One study suggests fax accounts for a substantial 75%[1] of all medical communication today.
There are reasons behind this, of course. A 2017 report by IDC found that many businesses continue to use fax, not because they enjoy it, but because they’re left with little other choice; customers and partners insist on it, industry regulators require it, and embedded company processes make change very difficult.
The same report also found that the biggest challenge faced by organizations using fax is productivity lost by employees sending and receiving paper faxes. The physical process of sending a fax – printing the document, walking to the fax machine, placing a document into the feeder, manually keying in the recipient’s fax number, pressing send, then waiting for confirmation that the fax was received, and filing or destroying the pages – is cumbersome to say the least, and made all that much worse by the fact that only one person can use the machine at a time.
But there is another option: Outsourcing your organization’s entire fax infrastructure to a trusted, enterprise-class cloud fax platform. Cloud faxing possesses all of the benefits of traditional fax – security, compliance, and accountability – without the inconveniences that come with physical fax machines, along with a number of unique advantages that facilitate better, more efficient ways of working. For example:
- Less time wasted standing at the fax machine – Over the course of a week, month, or year, the time employees spend standing next to the office fax machine can seriously mount up. With cloud fax, employees can send and receive faxes in exactly the same way they would an email, right from their desktop computer, which is faster, familiar, and eliminates idle time spent waiting for paper faxes to send or arrive.
- Fax from anywhere – Another major advantage of cloud fax is its mobility. For organizations that have employees working on the road or in the field, a dependence on fax can present a huge inconvenience. With cloud fax, employees are able to securely receive and respond to a fax no matter where they are, all via their laptop or mobile device. This means no more driving back to the office or looking around town for the nearest public fax machine.
- No more troubleshooting – For already stretched IT departments, maintaining a fully functioning in-house fax infrastructure can add even more strain. From fixing things when they break, to providing ongoing maintenance such as replacing toner cartridges and updating software licenses, looking after a fax machine or fax server can be a fulltime job. When you migrate to cloud fax, you essentially hand all of this responsibility over to a third-party provider, which allows IT departments to focus on what they do best.
When you’re ready to investigate moving your organization’s faxing to a cloud fax solution, it is important to work with a company you know you can trust. For more than two decades, eFax Corporate has been helping healthcare organizations to receive, send and store their fax documents in a more convenient, more secure, and more cost-effective way. Migrate your business to a Secure HIPAA Compliant Cloud Fax Solution designed for Healthcare.
[1] https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information-technology/why-the-us-health-system-still-prioritizes-fax-machines-7-things-to-know.html
