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The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) mandates reasonable safeguards in communicating patient medical data from one care-provider to another. In health care offices, old-fashioned fax machines can accidentally transmit private data to an unexpected recipient, so in an era of technology where offices must adhere to federal regulations, how do offices keep up?

The Privacy Rules do not prohibit a "covered entity" from faxing protected health information. A physician should be sure, however, to comply with the Privacy Rules' requirements for disclosures generally. For example, the physician should check whether the "minimum necessary" rule applies and, if it does, limit the information in the fax to the minimum necessary information.

Health care offices can employ an IP fax service, which may use an encrypted e-mail attachment. The user encrypts the file by using the service's proprietary software, and sends the encrypted file and the recipient's fax number to the service. The service decrypts the file and sends it to the recipient as a traditional fax. An incoming fax is initially delivered to the service, which encrypts the fax and sends it to the recipient as an email attachment.

Computer fax servers and hosted cloud systems are superior to stand-alone fax machines for security, user efficiency, inbound fax routing, auditing, connections to health IT systems and process workflows.

Healthcare is an industry that is rife with documents. With HIPAA, civil penalties can be pretty harsh. Privacy breaches can extend to $25,000 and criminal penalties for misuse of information can reach as high as $250,000 and a 10-year prison term.

Services, like that from Sagecomm’s XMediusFAX, helps healthcare offices meet HIPAA standards, like providing reasonable safeguards against incidental disclosure of private information and exchanging confidential information with third-party business partners in a secure manner.

IP fax plays a critical role in achieving compliance. Security of information exchanged via email or the Internet leaves something to be desired, but exchanging information via IP fax ensures that information is secure from end-to-end with additional measures for secure, accurate routing and automatic long term storage.