OpenText Fax & Document Distribution Group

Recently we co-sponsored a well-attended webinar highlighting the current state of security and compliance in the healthcare industry. Speakers Rebecca Herold (the Privacy Professor), privacy, security and compliance guru , and Chris Patterson, IT Administrator at Florida Heart and Vascular Associates, were extremely helpful in enlightening the audience using real-world examples and the most up-to-date data.

We’ve had some time to reflect on the webinar, and also to take a look at the responses to the polling questions. Here are a few realities we can take away from these resources:

■ Security and compliance remain the most important issues in healthcare after quality
patient care

■ The healthcare industry is not yet where it needs to be in terms of securing
private health information

■ Solutions do exist to mitigate the problems

■ Digital fax and document delivery will continue to play a central role in these solutions

The problems
Healthcare providers need to maintain a high level of data security for three main reasons: patient care, patient privacy and regulatory compliance. The rise in the use of fax to securely manage and deliver electronic medical records (EMR) solutions are  helping institutions address these concerns, but even fax is vulnerable to tampering if not properly protected, and data leaks continue to plague the industry.

Rebecca shared several real-life examples of recent breaches in fax security including hacking of fax servers, wrong numbers/email addresses, use of standalone fax machines and public networks, and improper document disposal. These problems come from a mixture of human and technological error and often lead to costly failures of compliance with government mandated regulations like HIPAA and HITECH.

According to the poll, about half of healthcare providers are unsatisfied with their ability to comply with HIPPA using digital documents, and more than half of physicians still rely primarily on paper charts.

The success stories 
The good news is that digital fax and document management solutions like Fax Appliance, RightFax and Alchemy are working for thousands of healthcare professionals, including Patterson. After deploying an OpenText fax solution, Patterson reported that security has improved and the hospital has enjoyed savings of more than $200,000 in the three years since implementation. Patterson also said his fax solution paid for itself within two months and has effectively replaced the work of two-and-a-half full-time employees.

Managing excessive paper-based medical records is not for the faint of heart — especially when compliance violations can result in fines that well exceed seven figures. Healthcare organizations that employ a virtually “paperless” EMR or EHR solution may believe that they are immune to penalties but that’s simply not the case. 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. In fact, the number and amount of compliancy fines in the US is at an all-time high.

Join OpenText on April 12th at 2:00PM Eastern / 11:00AM Pacific for an educational webinar, where you will hear from security and privacy expert Rebecca Herold, AKA the Privacy Professor, and learn about the risks associated with paper-based communications and processes. During the webcast, attendees will also hear from Chris Patterson, the IT Administrator for Florida Heart and Vascular Associates, and see how they integrated an OpenText digital faxing solution to achieve HIPAA compliance, improve processes, and dramatically lower costs.

Who should attend?

• Healthcare Compliance Officers adopting new healthcare compliance initiatives
• Healthcare Professionals wanting to protect and secure patient information
• Healthcare Practice Managers seeking to improve productivity and patient care
• Healthcare Informatics roles searching for ways to improve workflow and streamline business processes

Register today!

As a fax-nerd, I am pretty excited about our September 22nd webinar: Take the Mystery out of SIP Trunking. From a fax perspective and at its most basic definition, SIP trunking simply means to send a fax from one IP device to another without having to go through the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).

This is where the Internet Telephony Service Providers (ITSP) comes to the rescue. Ultimately, there are two important “take-aways” from this upcoming session that I think are worth noting:

First, make sure you are using a Session Border Controller.

You have two methods of working with SIP Trunking: a) piggy-back on your existing internet connection and risking the performance and security issues that come with that or b) get a Session Border Controller (SBC) which will be used to manage the connection between your site and the ITSP. The choice of using a SBC should seem obvious if you are in the enterprise fax world.

Second, know your FoIP protocol choices.

In the world of Fax over IP (FoIP), there are really only two options to consider: T.38 Fax Relay (where the IP gateway agrees to “relay” the fax tones sent to/from the fax server) or Fax Pass-through (where the IP Gateway simply “passes” the fax tone samples sent to/from the fax server).  This makes T.38 Fax Relay the better choice as you do not have to encapsulate every little fax squeak and noise and then over the network between the OpenText RightFax server and the ITSP.  It is the fax tone samples that are the most sensitive to network problems and if lost or out of sync, you are most likely going to get some fax transmission errors. This means if you are using Fax Pass-through instead of T.38 Fax Relay, you may have some issues with SIP Trunking (in particular if you do not use a SBC).

If you are interested in learning more, I encourage you to register for Take the Mystery Out of SIP Trunking on September 22 at 10AM PDT. 

If you have any experiences with SIP trunk faxing, I would love to hear them. You can tweet me @JoshuaTeaches or via email at jbutcher@opentext.com

Image provided by amanderson2