For decades, the standard procedure in healthcare has been to send and receive patients' records through fax. But many practices are transitioning away from fax machines.
Simply speaking, traditional fax communication is no longer efficient, nor secure.
Healthcare has notofiouslyl lagged in technology adoption, which is surprisingly considering how advanced technology has come within the sector.
But that is not the situation. Instead, it has been a long, arduous struggle to go from a faxing environment to a digital fax environment.
In this article, we will discuss why hospitals still use fax machines, and why digitalization fails in healthcare.
Even with digital medical record-keeping software available, hospitals continue to use fax since it intertwined into their legacy processes. Independent doctors also use fax machines for perceived ease of use and not having to adopt hospital processes.
President Obama approved a stimulus package in February 2009. The HITECH Act, a 53-page section, was also included.
This law provided $30 billion to encourage doctors to use digital records. The ONC ( Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology) was responsible for developing a plan to allocate the funds appropriately.
The government believed that if doctors started using electronic records and digital fax, they would be more open to using further digital types of communication like secure email.
The federal government would pay doctors and hospitals bonuses from the $30 billion incentive fund if they matched the ONC’s requirements.
These incentives were effective, as the government had planned, but only for those who qualified. For instance, hospitals embraced EMRs quickly because they were eligible for incentive payments. On the other hand, nursing homes adopted EMRs significantly more slowly because they lacked the necessary qualifications.
Although HITECH successfully encouraged hospitals to switch to digital record keeping, it did not encourage healthcare organizations to share patient data. Moreover, the prerequisites for qualifying for HITECH incentives did not include any procedures for information sharing.
It turns out that there are some valid monetary reasons for medical institutions not to exchange patient information. Doctors and hospitals do not want to easily enable their patients to go to other doctors and hospitals, but rather stay within the network. Revenue is lost when patients are lost.
Therefore, medical information technology companies built their own proprietary digital record-keeping systems without making any effort to ensure they could share information with other medical record-keeping systems.
The cost of healthcare is infamously high in the US, both for consumers and providers. However, private offices and hospitals must stay one step ahead of their competitors. Healthcare institutions are consequently less likely to exchange patient data.
It would be simpler for the patient to see a different doctor if the information were transmitted to another hospital at the patient’s request. Therefore, patients are advised to continue with the healthcare professionals at that hospital if their medical records are only shared inside that hospital system.
Government incentives only encouraged healthcare to switch to electronic medical records (EMRs), not interoperability, which is still the most debatable topic in modern digital health today.
To get rid of fax machines in healthcare, we must consider further educating practices on the benefits of transitioning to a digital fax and automation process. Additionally, according to one of the healthcare policy coordinators in the Obama administration, if the government steps in and assigns the fax machine in the healthcare industry an expiration date, doctors will be forced to switch to safe HIPAA-compliant email or HIPAA compliant fax.
As a medical practice, we were constantly running into busy lines, dropped signals and faxes that went missing. The entire process is now digital and finished with the click of a button.
The #1 AI-Powered Fax Solution Loved by
Healthcare Providers
447 Broadway 2nd Fl
New York, NY 10013
