The medical world takes one of the biggest hits in document transfers, as compliance risks and penalties are severe for hospitals and care providers. With this knowledge and experience, some healthcare providers have taken the paperless route, although it doesn’t relieve them of penalties and fines entirely.

“Send a fax to the wrong person or leave a fax in whole or part at an unattended fax machine and you could be subject to costly fines,” an OpenText recently highlighted.  

To date, numbers of compliance fines in the U.S. is at an all-time high. So how do we pinpoint and fix these gaps in compliant operation? Start by identifying the risks.

Rebecca Herold, CIPP, CISSP, CISM and CISA for OpenText, discussed some of the risks with fax during an educational webinar recently.  She mentioned the fact that hospitals and clinics she works with indicate that “close to half of all breaches involve fax transmissions.” That’s a pretty steep indication of how risks with fax affect healthcare providers.

With risks including what problems come with stand-alone fax machines, physical access to documents, disk storage, public networks and human mistakes, there is clearly room for error, especially with malicious intent or improper disposal.

Chris Patterson from the Florida Heart and Vascular Associates group discussed a bit about why his organization selected OpenText’s fax solutions on the webinar with Herold. He mentioned his intra-office communication focuses on the specialist who communicates with pharmacies, labs, primary care physicians, hospitals, diagnostic testing facilities and immunizations.

All of these communications require compliant processes, and with about 10 faxes per patient, the business cannot afford to have slip-ups.

“The group experienced some problems including too many fax machines, maintenance, reliability and poor communications including busy signals, jobs waiting in queue, employees waiting for faxes, large stacks of incoming faxes,” said Patterson.

OpenText’s fax solutions turned out to be the key ingredient for making these communications run more smoothly.

Listen to the archived version of the webinar here to learn more.