Anyone Still Use Faxing?
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Can't you install a fax server and register phone numbers through your provider? Then you have each phone number forward to a network folder where you control everything through group policy? You still get the faxes but the documents are not sitting on a device. That's the issue here right?
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@wirestyle22 said:
Can't you install a fax server and register phone numbers through your provider? Then you have each phone number forward to a network folder where you control everything through group policy? You still get the faxes but the documents are not sitting on a device. That's the issue here right?
That is a part, yes. The other part is fat-fingering the fax number and sending something to the wrong place.
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@Dashrender said:
What I haven't seen is a real easy to use replacement for faxing that is secure.
I know Scott doesn't thing faxing is secure because anyone can tap the phone line, record the whole transmission and then convert that into a text. The problem with that is that it requires physical access to one of the two sides where the phone lines are.
Email by self is not secure. it's like a postcard on the interwebs.
There are several ways to secure email,
- you could pre-encrypt a file, attach it to an email send it, call them and give them the password to decrypt it.
- you could use a service that offers secure email
While option 1 can be completely free, it's time consuming and difficult. Assuming someone uses a different password for every email they send, they will need to either keep track of those password, or consider the email lost after transmission. The same goes for the receiving end.
Option 2 is ridiculously expensive. Most services charge $5+ per month per user. And depending on how you deploy this it can still be a pretty big hassle to use, granted some can be pretty easy to use as well.
Faxing is nearly free in the grand scheme of things.
My office receives approximately 600 pages a day. When I've shopped around for cloud faxing services for this level of inbound faxing, I was looking at costs in the $700/month range. And this was before I looked into what was needed to actually get the faxes to my users.
In a pre existing faxing environment I already have a fax machine, so no extra costs, I have a phone line ($30/month) and I'm storing those on a file server that I already had for other purposes.Huge difference between $30/m to $700/m. Sure with the cloud solution they have dozens or hundreds of lines probably redundant sites, etc - but those things haven't been shown to be needed in my situation.
Then there's the other side - the people sending you stuff - how to you make them change their systems to get the information to you in another way instead of through a fax line?
There's also another issue we've run into. Our EHR has it's own faxing solution. We pick a patient and tell the system to send a fax to another doctors office. Then the fax goes into a queue. We've had more than a few calls where the other office is waiting for those faxes and after 20-30 min they still don't have it. The queue is so long or slow it can take hours to send from our EHR... to by pass this, we print the document, walk it to our fax machine and just fax it by hand.
The medical community is working to solve these types of problems with something called Direct Access - but it won't truly solve the problem, because as I understand it, Direct Access can only send over live data, it can't send things like PDFs, pictures, etc. That may change, but who knows when.
Tons of companies use things like DropBox and Box, and maybe even ownCloud to send these files around - but I just can't see them working in this situation.
I'm all ears for whatever I'm missing.
PGP takes care of this. Not many people use it for whatever reason, but it's easy to implement and secure. You don't need to give out a password, they just grab your public key from a publicly available repo or you could even email it to them. Then they just need their own password and their private key file. SFTP is also secure and easy to implement. Need to send me a file, just drop it in with FileZilla.
I think the big problem is getting people to actually care. I really believe the "ours is the only secure way" is like most other arguments. It's just a thing people say to ignore whatever you're talking about.
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@johnhooks said:
@Dashrender said:
What I haven't seen is a real easy to use replacement for faxing that is secure.
I know Scott doesn't thing faxing is secure because anyone can tap the phone line, record the whole transmission and then convert that into a text. The problem with that is that it requires physical access to one of the two sides where the phone lines are.
Email by self is not secure. it's like a postcard on the interwebs.
There are several ways to secure email,
- you could pre-encrypt a file, attach it to an email send it, call them and give them the password to decrypt it.
- you could use a service that offers secure email
While option 1 can be completely free, it's time consuming and difficult. Assuming someone uses a different password for every email they send, they will need to either keep track of those password, or consider the email lost after transmission. The same goes for the receiving end.
Option 2 is ridiculously expensive. Most services charge $5+ per month per user. And depending on how you deploy this it can still be a pretty big hassle to use, granted some can be pretty easy to use as well.
Faxing is nearly free in the grand scheme of things.
My office receives approximately 600 pages a day. When I've shopped around for cloud faxing services for this level of inbound faxing, I was looking at costs in the $700/month range. And this was before I looked into what was needed to actually get the faxes to my users.
In a pre existing faxing environment I already have a fax machine, so no extra costs, I have a phone line ($30/month) and I'm storing those on a file server that I already had for other purposes.Huge difference between $30/m to $700/m. Sure with the cloud solution they have dozens or hundreds of lines probably redundant sites, etc - but those things haven't been shown to be needed in my situation.
Then there's the other side - the people sending you stuff - how to you make them change their systems to get the information to you in another way instead of through a fax line?
There's also another issue we've run into. Our EHR has it's own faxing solution. We pick a patient and tell the system to send a fax to another doctors office. Then the fax goes into a queue. We've had more than a few calls where the other office is waiting for those faxes and after 20-30 min they still don't have it. The queue is so long or slow it can take hours to send from our EHR... to by pass this, we print the document, walk it to our fax machine and just fax it by hand.
The medical community is working to solve these types of problems with something called Direct Access - but it won't truly solve the problem, because as I understand it, Direct Access can only send over live data, it can't send things like PDFs, pictures, etc. That may change, but who knows when.
Tons of companies use things like DropBox and Box, and maybe even ownCloud to send these files around - but I just can't see them working in this situation.
I'm all ears for whatever I'm missing.
@Dashrender said:
What I haven't seen is a real easy to use replacement for faxing that is secure.
I know Scott doesn't thing faxing is secure because anyone can tap the phone line, record the whole transmission and then convert that into a text. The problem with that is that it requires physical access to one of the two sides where the phone lines are.
Email by self is not secure. it's like a postcard on the interwebs.
There are several ways to secure email,
- you could pre-encrypt a file, attach it to an email send it, call them and give them the password to decrypt it.
- you could use a service that offers secure email
While option 1 can be completely free, it's time consuming and difficult. Assuming someone uses a different password for every email they send, they will need to either keep track of those password, or consider the email lost after transmission. The same goes for the receiving end.
Option 2 is ridiculously expensive. Most services charge $5+ per month per user. And depending on how you deploy this it can still be a pretty big hassle to use, granted some can be pretty easy to use as well.
Faxing is nearly free in the grand scheme of things.
My office receives approximately 600 pages a day. When I've shopped around for cloud faxing services for this level of inbound faxing, I was looking at costs in the $700/month range. And this was before I looked into what was needed to actually get the faxes to my users.
In a pre existing faxing environment I already have a fax machine, so no extra costs, I have a phone line ($30/month) and I'm storing those on a file server that I already had for other purposes.Huge difference between $30/m to $700/m. Sure with the cloud solution they have dozens or hundreds of lines probably redundant sites, etc - but those things haven't been shown to be needed in my situation.
Then there's the other side - the people sending you stuff - how to you make them change their systems to get the information to you in another way instead of through a fax line?
There's also another issue we've run into. Our EHR has it's own faxing solution. We pick a patient and tell the system to send a fax to another doctors office. Then the fax goes into a queue. We've had more than a few calls where the other office is waiting for those faxes and after 20-30 min they still don't have it. The queue is so long or slow it can take hours to send from our EHR... to by pass this, we print the document, walk it to our fax machine and just fax it by hand.
The medical community is working to solve these types of problems with something called Direct Access - but it won't truly solve the problem, because as I understand it, Direct Access can only send over live data, it can't send things like PDFs, pictures, etc. That may change, but who knows when.
Tons of companies use things like DropBox and Box, and maybe even ownCloud to send these files around - but I just can't see them working in this situation.
I'm all ears for whatever I'm missing.
PGP takes care of this. Not many people use it for whatever reason, but it's easy to implement and secure. You don't need to give out a password, they just grab your public key from a publicly available repo or you could even email it to them. Then they just need their own password and their private key file. SFTP is also secure and easy to implement. Need to send me a file at all, just drop it in with FileZilla.
I think the big problem is getting people to actually care. I really believe the "ours is the only secure way" is like most other arguments. It's just a thing people say to ignore whatever you're talking about.
We could never get doctors offices to do this. Period. I can't get them to do anything at all actually.
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@wirestyle22 said:
@johnhooks said:
@Dashrender said:
What I haven't seen is a real easy to use replacement for faxing that is secure.
I know Scott doesn't thing faxing is secure because anyone can tap the phone line, record the whole transmission and then convert that into a text. The problem with that is that it requires physical access to one of the two sides where the phone lines are.
Email by self is not secure. it's like a postcard on the interwebs.
There are several ways to secure email,
- you could pre-encrypt a file, attach it to an email send it, call them and give them the password to decrypt it.
- you could use a service that offers secure email
While option 1 can be completely free, it's time consuming and difficult. Assuming someone uses a different password for every email they send, they will need to either keep track of those password, or consider the email lost after transmission. The same goes for the receiving end.
Option 2 is ridiculously expensive. Most services charge $5+ per month per user. And depending on how you deploy this it can still be a pretty big hassle to use, granted some can be pretty easy to use as well.
Faxing is nearly free in the grand scheme of things.
My office receives approximately 600 pages a day. When I've shopped around for cloud faxing services for this level of inbound faxing, I was looking at costs in the $700/month range. And this was before I looked into what was needed to actually get the faxes to my users.
In a pre existing faxing environment I already have a fax machine, so no extra costs, I have a phone line ($30/month) and I'm storing those on a file server that I already had for other purposes.Huge difference between $30/m to $700/m. Sure with the cloud solution they have dozens or hundreds of lines probably redundant sites, etc - but those things haven't been shown to be needed in my situation.
Then there's the other side - the people sending you stuff - how to you make them change their systems to get the information to you in another way instead of through a fax line?
There's also another issue we've run into. Our EHR has it's own faxing solution. We pick a patient and tell the system to send a fax to another doctors office. Then the fax goes into a queue. We've had more than a few calls where the other office is waiting for those faxes and after 20-30 min they still don't have it. The queue is so long or slow it can take hours to send from our EHR... to by pass this, we print the document, walk it to our fax machine and just fax it by hand.
The medical community is working to solve these types of problems with something called Direct Access - but it won't truly solve the problem, because as I understand it, Direct Access can only send over live data, it can't send things like PDFs, pictures, etc. That may change, but who knows when.
Tons of companies use things like DropBox and Box, and maybe even ownCloud to send these files around - but I just can't see them working in this situation.
I'm all ears for whatever I'm missing.
@Dashrender said:
What I haven't seen is a real easy to use replacement for faxing that is secure.
I know Scott doesn't thing faxing is secure because anyone can tap the phone line, record the whole transmission and then convert that into a text. The problem with that is that it requires physical access to one of the two sides where the phone lines are.
Email by self is not secure. it's like a postcard on the interwebs.
There are several ways to secure email,
- you could pre-encrypt a file, attach it to an email send it, call them and give them the password to decrypt it.
- you could use a service that offers secure email
While option 1 can be completely free, it's time consuming and difficult. Assuming someone uses a different password for every email they send, they will need to either keep track of those password, or consider the email lost after transmission. The same goes for the receiving end.
Option 2 is ridiculously expensive. Most services charge $5+ per month per user. And depending on how you deploy this it can still be a pretty big hassle to use, granted some can be pretty easy to use as well.
Faxing is nearly free in the grand scheme of things.
My office receives approximately 600 pages a day. When I've shopped around for cloud faxing services for this level of inbound faxing, I was looking at costs in the $700/month range. And this was before I looked into what was needed to actually get the faxes to my users.
In a pre existing faxing environment I already have a fax machine, so no extra costs, I have a phone line ($30/month) and I'm storing those on a file server that I already had for other purposes.Huge difference between $30/m to $700/m. Sure with the cloud solution they have dozens or hundreds of lines probably redundant sites, etc - but those things haven't been shown to be needed in my situation.
Then there's the other side - the people sending you stuff - how to you make them change their systems to get the information to you in another way instead of through a fax line?
There's also another issue we've run into. Our EHR has it's own faxing solution. We pick a patient and tell the system to send a fax to another doctors office. Then the fax goes into a queue. We've had more than a few calls where the other office is waiting for those faxes and after 20-30 min they still don't have it. The queue is so long or slow it can take hours to send from our EHR... to by pass this, we print the document, walk it to our fax machine and just fax it by hand.
The medical community is working to solve these types of problems with something called Direct Access - but it won't truly solve the problem, because as I understand it, Direct Access can only send over live data, it can't send things like PDFs, pictures, etc. That may change, but who knows when.
Tons of companies use things like DropBox and Box, and maybe even ownCloud to send these files around - but I just can't see them working in this situation.
I'm all ears for whatever I'm missing.
PGP takes care of this. Not many people use it for whatever reason, but it's easy to implement and secure. You don't need to give out a password, they just grab your public key from a publicly available repo or you could even email it to them. Then they just need their own password and their private key file. SFTP is also secure and easy to implement. Need to send me a file at all, just drop it in with FileZilla.
I think the big problem is getting people to actually care. I really believe the "ours is the only secure way" is like most other arguments. It's just a thing people say to ignore whatever you're talking about.
We could never get doctors offices to do this. Period. I can't get them to do anything at all actually.
That's what I mean. It's easier to use, and more secure but they will argue just to get you to be quiet and never do it. It's ridiculous.
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@johnhooks said:
@Dashrender said:
What I haven't seen is a real easy to use replacement for faxing that is secure.
I know Scott doesn't thing faxing is secure because anyone can tap the phone line, record the whole transmission and then convert that into a text. The problem with that is that it requires physical access to one of the two sides where the phone lines are.
Email by self is not secure. it's like a postcard on the interwebs.
There are several ways to secure email,
- you could pre-encrypt a file, attach it to an email send it, call them and give them the password to decrypt it.
- you could use a service that offers secure email
While option 1 can be completely free, it's time consuming and difficult. Assuming someone uses a different password for every email they send, they will need to either keep track of those password, or consider the email lost after transmission. The same goes for the receiving end.
Option 2 is ridiculously expensive. Most services charge $5+ per month per user. And depending on how you deploy this it can still be a pretty big hassle to use, granted some can be pretty easy to use as well.
Faxing is nearly free in the grand scheme of things.
My office receives approximately 600 pages a day. When I've shopped around for cloud faxing services for this level of inbound faxing, I was looking at costs in the $700/month range. And this was before I looked into what was needed to actually get the faxes to my users.
In a pre existing faxing environment I already have a fax machine, so no extra costs, I have a phone line ($30/month) and I'm storing those on a file server that I already had for other purposes.Huge difference between $30/m to $700/m. Sure with the cloud solution they have dozens or hundreds of lines probably redundant sites, etc - but those things haven't been shown to be needed in my situation.
Then there's the other side - the people sending you stuff - how to you make them change their systems to get the information to you in another way instead of through a fax line?
There's also another issue we've run into. Our EHR has it's own faxing solution. We pick a patient and tell the system to send a fax to another doctors office. Then the fax goes into a queue. We've had more than a few calls where the other office is waiting for those faxes and after 20-30 min they still don't have it. The queue is so long or slow it can take hours to send from our EHR... to by pass this, we print the document, walk it to our fax machine and just fax it by hand.
The medical community is working to solve these types of problems with something called Direct Access - but it won't truly solve the problem, because as I understand it, Direct Access can only send over live data, it can't send things like PDFs, pictures, etc. That may change, but who knows when.
Tons of companies use things like DropBox and Box, and maybe even ownCloud to send these files around - but I just can't see them working in this situation.
I'm all ears for whatever I'm missing.
PGP takes care of this. Not many people use it for whatever reason, but it's easy to implement and secure. You don't need to give out a password, they just grab your public key from a publicly available repo or you could even email it to them. Then they just need their own password and their private key file. SFTP is also secure and easy to implement. Need to send me a file, just drop it in with FileZilla.
I think the big problem is getting people to actually care. I really believe the "ours is the only secure way" is like most other arguments. It's just a thing people say to ignore whatever you're talking about.
Actually sit down and write out a set of instructions on doing this - it's like 20 steps. They already don't want to do it.. and now they have a new 20 step process to learn - GAWD, can't I just use my old way? lol
Those things are easy for you and I, not the lease because we care about security. But those things are nearly infinitely harder than dropping some paper on a fax machine, typing a phone number and hitting send.
I walked someone here through printing to PDF - it was like 22 steps. The current process is print, gather, print, gather, drop on fax machine send. printing to PDF gets rid of our paper costs, but adds labor costs (people who don't want to do this in the first place will always be slow about it).
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@Dashrender said:
@johnhooks said:
@Dashrender said:
What I haven't seen is a real easy to use replacement for faxing that is secure.
I know Scott doesn't thing faxing is secure because anyone can tap the phone line, record the whole transmission and then convert that into a text. The problem with that is that it requires physical access to one of the two sides where the phone lines are.
Email by self is not secure. it's like a postcard on the interwebs.
There are several ways to secure email,
- you could pre-encrypt a file, attach it to an email send it, call them and give them the password to decrypt it.
- you could use a service that offers secure email
While option 1 can be completely free, it's time consuming and difficult. Assuming someone uses a different password for every email they send, they will need to either keep track of those password, or consider the email lost after transmission. The same goes for the receiving end.
Option 2 is ridiculously expensive. Most services charge $5+ per month per user. And depending on how you deploy this it can still be a pretty big hassle to use, granted some can be pretty easy to use as well.
Faxing is nearly free in the grand scheme of things.
My office receives approximately 600 pages a day. When I've shopped around for cloud faxing services for this level of inbound faxing, I was looking at costs in the $700/month range. And this was before I looked into what was needed to actually get the faxes to my users.
In a pre existing faxing environment I already have a fax machine, so no extra costs, I have a phone line ($30/month) and I'm storing those on a file server that I already had for other purposes.Huge difference between $30/m to $700/m. Sure with the cloud solution they have dozens or hundreds of lines probably redundant sites, etc - but those things haven't been shown to be needed in my situation.
Then there's the other side - the people sending you stuff - how to you make them change their systems to get the information to you in another way instead of through a fax line?
There's also another issue we've run into. Our EHR has it's own faxing solution. We pick a patient and tell the system to send a fax to another doctors office. Then the fax goes into a queue. We've had more than a few calls where the other office is waiting for those faxes and after 20-30 min they still don't have it. The queue is so long or slow it can take hours to send from our EHR... to by pass this, we print the document, walk it to our fax machine and just fax it by hand.
The medical community is working to solve these types of problems with something called Direct Access - but it won't truly solve the problem, because as I understand it, Direct Access can only send over live data, it can't send things like PDFs, pictures, etc. That may change, but who knows when.
Tons of companies use things like DropBox and Box, and maybe even ownCloud to send these files around - but I just can't see them working in this situation.
I'm all ears for whatever I'm missing.
PGP takes care of this. Not many people use it for whatever reason, but it's easy to implement and secure. You don't need to give out a password, they just grab your public key from a publicly available repo or you could even email it to them. Then they just need their own password and their private key file. SFTP is also secure and easy to implement. Need to send me a file, just drop it in with FileZilla.
I think the big problem is getting people to actually care. I really believe the "ours is the only secure way" is like most other arguments. It's just a thing people say to ignore whatever you're talking about.
Actually sit down and write out a set of instructions on doing this - it's like 20 steps. They already don't want to do it.. and now they have a new 20 step process to learn - GAWD, can't I just use my old way? lol
Those things are easy for you and I, not the lease because we care about security. But those things are nearly infinitely harder than dropping some paper on a fax machine, typing a phone number and hitting send.
I walked someone here through printing to PDF - it was like 22 steps. The current process is print, gather, print, gather, drop on fax machine send. printing to PDF gets rid of our paper costs, but adds labor costs (people who don't want to do this in the first place will always be slow about it).
What 22 steps for printing PDF? It should be the same number of steps for printing to paper. If you have to include trivial steps for the PDF printing, then you need to for the real printing like stand up, sit down, pick up paper, etc.
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Ummm, I can do it in 4 steps.
Create document electronically, save it.
Upload to E-signature platform of choice.
Email link to person to sign.
Collect verified electronic signature.
Done.Why are you wasting time with email encryption when it is more hassle for the end users?
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Sadly we are still faxing....
On the up side "we're" looking into an eFax system
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@DustinB3403 said:
Sadly we are still faxing....
On the up side "we're" looking into an eFax system
Hope you're ready for the pain of the huge bill.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
Ummm, I can do it in 4 steps.
Create document electronically, save it.
Upload to E-signature platform of choice.
Email link to person to sign.
Collect verified electronic signature.
Done.Why are you wasting time with email encryption when it is more hassle for the end users?
none of my documents are signature documents (or at least that is well below 1% of them)
I need to pages put into my EHR. So the pages must come all the way to me. If they are stopped in a cloud service of some kind I still have to download those and then upload those to my EHR.
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@Dashrender oh not at all in my responsibilities to care about. The boss this it'll save us money while giving us some better capabilities to ensure we receive faxes.
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@johnhooks said:
@Dashrender said:
@johnhooks said:
@Dashrender said:
What I haven't seen is a real easy to use replacement for faxing that is secure.
I know Scott doesn't thing faxing is secure because anyone can tap the phone line, record the whole transmission and then convert that into a text. The problem with that is that it requires physical access to one of the two sides where the phone lines are.
Email by self is not secure. it's like a postcard on the interwebs.
There are several ways to secure email,
- you could pre-encrypt a file, attach it to an email send it, call them and give them the password to decrypt it.
- you could use a service that offers secure email
While option 1 can be completely free, it's time consuming and difficult. Assuming someone uses a different password for every email they send, they will need to either keep track of those password, or consider the email lost after transmission. The same goes for the receiving end.
Option 2 is ridiculously expensive. Most services charge $5+ per month per user. And depending on how you deploy this it can still be a pretty big hassle to use, granted some can be pretty easy to use as well.
Faxing is nearly free in the grand scheme of things.
My office receives approximately 600 pages a day. When I've shopped around for cloud faxing services for this level of inbound faxing, I was looking at costs in the $700/month range. And this was before I looked into what was needed to actually get the faxes to my users.
In a pre existing faxing environment I already have a fax machine, so no extra costs, I have a phone line ($30/month) and I'm storing those on a file server that I already had for other purposes.Huge difference between $30/m to $700/m. Sure with the cloud solution they have dozens or hundreds of lines probably redundant sites, etc - but those things haven't been shown to be needed in my situation.
Then there's the other side - the people sending you stuff - how to you make them change their systems to get the information to you in another way instead of through a fax line?
There's also another issue we've run into. Our EHR has it's own faxing solution. We pick a patient and tell the system to send a fax to another doctors office. Then the fax goes into a queue. We've had more than a few calls where the other office is waiting for those faxes and after 20-30 min they still don't have it. The queue is so long or slow it can take hours to send from our EHR... to by pass this, we print the document, walk it to our fax machine and just fax it by hand.
The medical community is working to solve these types of problems with something called Direct Access - but it won't truly solve the problem, because as I understand it, Direct Access can only send over live data, it can't send things like PDFs, pictures, etc. That may change, but who knows when.
Tons of companies use things like DropBox and Box, and maybe even ownCloud to send these files around - but I just can't see them working in this situation.
I'm all ears for whatever I'm missing.
PGP takes care of this. Not many people use it for whatever reason, but it's easy to implement and secure. You don't need to give out a password, they just grab your public key from a publicly available repo or you could even email it to them. Then they just need their own password and their private key file. SFTP is also secure and easy to implement. Need to send me a file, just drop it in with FileZilla.
I think the big problem is getting people to actually care. I really believe the "ours is the only secure way" is like most other arguments. It's just a thing people say to ignore whatever you're talking about.
Actually sit down and write out a set of instructions on doing this - it's like 20 steps. They already don't want to do it.. and now they have a new 20 step process to learn - GAWD, can't I just use my old way? lol
Those things are easy for you and I, not the lease because we care about security. But those things are nearly infinitely harder than dropping some paper on a fax machine, typing a phone number and hitting send.
I walked someone here through printing to PDF - it was like 22 steps. The current process is print, gather, print, gather, drop on fax machine send. printing to PDF gets rid of our paper costs, but adds labor costs (people who don't want to do this in the first place will always be slow about it).
What 22 steps for printing PDF? It should be the same number of steps for printing to paper. If you have to include trivial steps for the PDF printing, then you need to for the real printing like stand up, sit down, pick up paper, etc.
I don't consider picking a filename and where to store it trival steps because the user needs to know that for the next step of the process. But also, they need to confirm the settings on the PDF printer to make sure someone hasn't changed it on them before this run. Granted, as you use it, it will be like second nature and those extra steps over printing will be muscle memory... but when you're first looking at it, it's not a small list of things to do.
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@DustinB3403 said:
@Dashrender oh not at all in my responsibilities to care about. The boss this it'll save us money while giving us some better capabilities to ensure we receive faxes.
LOL - As I posted above, I looked - our costs went up over $600 a month, and made things more difficult to our workflow.
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@Dashrender said:
@johnhooks said:
@Dashrender said:
@johnhooks said:
@Dashrender said:
What I haven't seen is a real easy to use replacement for faxing that is secure.
I know Scott doesn't thing faxing is secure because anyone can tap the phone line, record the whole transmission and then convert that into a text. The problem with that is that it requires physical access to one of the two sides where the phone lines are.
Email by self is not secure. it's like a postcard on the interwebs.
There are several ways to secure email,
- you could pre-encrypt a file, attach it to an email send it, call them and give them the password to decrypt it.
- you could use a service that offers secure email
While option 1 can be completely free, it's time consuming and difficult. Assuming someone uses a different password for every email they send, they will need to either keep track of those password, or consider the email lost after transmission. The same goes for the receiving end.
Option 2 is ridiculously expensive. Most services charge $5+ per month per user. And depending on how you deploy this it can still be a pretty big hassle to use, granted some can be pretty easy to use as well.
Faxing is nearly free in the grand scheme of things.
My office receives approximately 600 pages a day. When I've shopped around for cloud faxing services for this level of inbound faxing, I was looking at costs in the $700/month range. And this was before I looked into what was needed to actually get the faxes to my users.
In a pre existing faxing environment I already have a fax machine, so no extra costs, I have a phone line ($30/month) and I'm storing those on a file server that I already had for other purposes.Huge difference between $30/m to $700/m. Sure with the cloud solution they have dozens or hundreds of lines probably redundant sites, etc - but those things haven't been shown to be needed in my situation.
Then there's the other side - the people sending you stuff - how to you make them change their systems to get the information to you in another way instead of through a fax line?
There's also another issue we've run into. Our EHR has it's own faxing solution. We pick a patient and tell the system to send a fax to another doctors office. Then the fax goes into a queue. We've had more than a few calls where the other office is waiting for those faxes and after 20-30 min they still don't have it. The queue is so long or slow it can take hours to send from our EHR... to by pass this, we print the document, walk it to our fax machine and just fax it by hand.
The medical community is working to solve these types of problems with something called Direct Access - but it won't truly solve the problem, because as I understand it, Direct Access can only send over live data, it can't send things like PDFs, pictures, etc. That may change, but who knows when.
Tons of companies use things like DropBox and Box, and maybe even ownCloud to send these files around - but I just can't see them working in this situation.
I'm all ears for whatever I'm missing.
PGP takes care of this. Not many people use it for whatever reason, but it's easy to implement and secure. You don't need to give out a password, they just grab your public key from a publicly available repo or you could even email it to them. Then they just need their own password and their private key file. SFTP is also secure and easy to implement. Need to send me a file, just drop it in with FileZilla.
I think the big problem is getting people to actually care. I really believe the "ours is the only secure way" is like most other arguments. It's just a thing people say to ignore whatever you're talking about.
Actually sit down and write out a set of instructions on doing this - it's like 20 steps. They already don't want to do it.. and now they have a new 20 step process to learn - GAWD, can't I just use my old way? lol
Those things are easy for you and I, not the lease because we care about security. But those things are nearly infinitely harder than dropping some paper on a fax machine, typing a phone number and hitting send.
I walked someone here through printing to PDF - it was like 22 steps. The current process is print, gather, print, gather, drop on fax machine send. printing to PDF gets rid of our paper costs, but adds labor costs (people who don't want to do this in the first place will always be slow about it).
What 22 steps for printing PDF? It should be the same number of steps for printing to paper. If you have to include trivial steps for the PDF printing, then you need to for the real printing like stand up, sit down, pick up paper, etc.
I don't consider picking a filename and where to store it trival steps because the user needs to know that for the next step of the process. But also, they need to confirm the settings on the PDF printer to make sure someone hasn't changed it on them before this run. Granted, as you use it, it will be like second nature and those extra steps over printing will be muscle memory... but when you're first looking at it, it's not a small list of things to do.
Aren't those the same issues with paper though? You need to know where to put the physical paper (patient file, someone's desk, etc). Same with the printer, they would still need to confirm a regular printer just like the PDF one. Or just set the PDF printer as default and then only change it when necessary.
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@johnhooks said:
@Dashrender said:
@johnhooks said:
@Dashrender said:
@johnhooks said:
@Dashrender said:
What I haven't seen is a real easy to use replacement for faxing that is secure.
I know Scott doesn't thing faxing is secure because anyone can tap the phone line, record the whole transmission and then convert that into a text. The problem with that is that it requires physical access to one of the two sides where the phone lines are.
Email by self is not secure. it's like a postcard on the interwebs.
There are several ways to secure email,
- you could pre-encrypt a file, attach it to an email send it, call them and give them the password to decrypt it.
- you could use a service that offers secure email
While option 1 can be completely free, it's time consuming and difficult. Assuming someone uses a different password for every email they send, they will need to either keep track of those password, or consider the email lost after transmission. The same goes for the receiving end.
Option 2 is ridiculously expensive. Most services charge $5+ per month per user. And depending on how you deploy this it can still be a pretty big hassle to use, granted some can be pretty easy to use as well.
Faxing is nearly free in the grand scheme of things.
My office receives approximately 600 pages a day. When I've shopped around for cloud faxing services for this level of inbound faxing, I was looking at costs in the $700/month range. And this was before I looked into what was needed to actually get the faxes to my users.
In a pre existing faxing environment I already have a fax machine, so no extra costs, I have a phone line ($30/month) and I'm storing those on a file server that I already had for other purposes.Huge difference between $30/m to $700/m. Sure with the cloud solution they have dozens or hundreds of lines probably redundant sites, etc - but those things haven't been shown to be needed in my situation.
Then there's the other side - the people sending you stuff - how to you make them change their systems to get the information to you in another way instead of through a fax line?
There's also another issue we've run into. Our EHR has it's own faxing solution. We pick a patient and tell the system to send a fax to another doctors office. Then the fax goes into a queue. We've had more than a few calls where the other office is waiting for those faxes and after 20-30 min they still don't have it. The queue is so long or slow it can take hours to send from our EHR... to by pass this, we print the document, walk it to our fax machine and just fax it by hand.
The medical community is working to solve these types of problems with something called Direct Access - but it won't truly solve the problem, because as I understand it, Direct Access can only send over live data, it can't send things like PDFs, pictures, etc. That may change, but who knows when.
Tons of companies use things like DropBox and Box, and maybe even ownCloud to send these files around - but I just can't see them working in this situation.
I'm all ears for whatever I'm missing.
PGP takes care of this. Not many people use it for whatever reason, but it's easy to implement and secure. You don't need to give out a password, they just grab your public key from a publicly available repo or you could even email it to them. Then they just need their own password and their private key file. SFTP is also secure and easy to implement. Need to send me a file, just drop it in with FileZilla.
I think the big problem is getting people to actually care. I really believe the "ours is the only secure way" is like most other arguments. It's just a thing people say to ignore whatever you're talking about.
Actually sit down and write out a set of instructions on doing this - it's like 20 steps. They already don't want to do it.. and now they have a new 20 step process to learn - GAWD, can't I just use my old way? lol
Those things are easy for you and I, not the lease because we care about security. But those things are nearly infinitely harder than dropping some paper on a fax machine, typing a phone number and hitting send.
I walked someone here through printing to PDF - it was like 22 steps. The current process is print, gather, print, gather, drop on fax machine send. printing to PDF gets rid of our paper costs, but adds labor costs (people who don't want to do this in the first place will always be slow about it).
What 22 steps for printing PDF? It should be the same number of steps for printing to paper. If you have to include trivial steps for the PDF printing, then you need to for the real printing like stand up, sit down, pick up paper, etc.
I don't consider picking a filename and where to store it trival steps because the user needs to know that for the next step of the process. But also, they need to confirm the settings on the PDF printer to make sure someone hasn't changed it on them before this run. Granted, as you use it, it will be like second nature and those extra steps over printing will be muscle memory... but when you're first looking at it, it's not a small list of things to do.
Aren't those the same issues with paper though? You need to know where to put the physical paper (patient file, someone's desk, etc). Same with the printer, they would still need to confirm a regular printer just like the PDF one. Or just set the PDF printer as default and then only change it when necessary.
I'll give you that there aren't more or at least many more steps than going to paper - but they already know the old way.
You've never got push back on a process change? also, there's something in people's minds that a change on a computer is so much harder than one in the physical world.
-
@Dashrender said:
@johnhooks said:
@Dashrender said:
@johnhooks said:
@Dashrender said:
@johnhooks said:
@Dashrender said:
What I haven't seen is a real easy to use replacement for faxing that is secure.
I know Scott doesn't thing faxing is secure because anyone can tap the phone line, record the whole transmission and then convert that into a text. The problem with that is that it requires physical access to one of the two sides where the phone lines are.
Email by self is not secure. it's like a postcard on the interwebs.
There are several ways to secure email,
- you could pre-encrypt a file, attach it to an email send it, call them and give them the password to decrypt it.
- you could use a service that offers secure email
While option 1 can be completely free, it's time consuming and difficult. Assuming someone uses a different password for every email they send, they will need to either keep track of those password, or consider the email lost after transmission. The same goes for the receiving end.
Option 2 is ridiculously expensive. Most services charge $5+ per month per user. And depending on how you deploy this it can still be a pretty big hassle to use, granted some can be pretty easy to use as well.
Faxing is nearly free in the grand scheme of things.
My office receives approximately 600 pages a day. When I've shopped around for cloud faxing services for this level of inbound faxing, I was looking at costs in the $700/month range. And this was before I looked into what was needed to actually get the faxes to my users.
In a pre existing faxing environment I already have a fax machine, so no extra costs, I have a phone line ($30/month) and I'm storing those on a file server that I already had for other purposes.Huge difference between $30/m to $700/m. Sure with the cloud solution they have dozens or hundreds of lines probably redundant sites, etc - but those things haven't been shown to be needed in my situation.
Then there's the other side - the people sending you stuff - how to you make them change their systems to get the information to you in another way instead of through a fax line?
There's also another issue we've run into. Our EHR has it's own faxing solution. We pick a patient and tell the system to send a fax to another doctors office. Then the fax goes into a queue. We've had more than a few calls where the other office is waiting for those faxes and after 20-30 min they still don't have it. The queue is so long or slow it can take hours to send from our EHR... to by pass this, we print the document, walk it to our fax machine and just fax it by hand.
The medical community is working to solve these types of problems with something called Direct Access - but it won't truly solve the problem, because as I understand it, Direct Access can only send over live data, it can't send things like PDFs, pictures, etc. That may change, but who knows when.
Tons of companies use things like DropBox and Box, and maybe even ownCloud to send these files around - but I just can't see them working in this situation.
I'm all ears for whatever I'm missing.
PGP takes care of this. Not many people use it for whatever reason, but it's easy to implement and secure. You don't need to give out a password, they just grab your public key from a publicly available repo or you could even email it to them. Then they just need their own password and their private key file. SFTP is also secure and easy to implement. Need to send me a file, just drop it in with FileZilla.
I think the big problem is getting people to actually care. I really believe the "ours is the only secure way" is like most other arguments. It's just a thing people say to ignore whatever you're talking about.
Actually sit down and write out a set of instructions on doing this - it's like 20 steps. They already don't want to do it.. and now they have a new 20 step process to learn - GAWD, can't I just use my old way? lol
Those things are easy for you and I, not the lease because we care about security. But those things are nearly infinitely harder than dropping some paper on a fax machine, typing a phone number and hitting send.
I walked someone here through printing to PDF - it was like 22 steps. The current process is print, gather, print, gather, drop on fax machine send. printing to PDF gets rid of our paper costs, but adds labor costs (people who don't want to do this in the first place will always be slow about it).
What 22 steps for printing PDF? It should be the same number of steps for printing to paper. If you have to include trivial steps for the PDF printing, then you need to for the real printing like stand up, sit down, pick up paper, etc.
I don't consider picking a filename and where to store it trival steps because the user needs to know that for the next step of the process. But also, they need to confirm the settings on the PDF printer to make sure someone hasn't changed it on them before this run. Granted, as you use it, it will be like second nature and those extra steps over printing will be muscle memory... but when you're first looking at it, it's not a small list of things to do.
Aren't those the same issues with paper though? You need to know where to put the physical paper (patient file, someone's desk, etc). Same with the printer, they would still need to confirm a regular printer just like the PDF one. Or just set the PDF printer as default and then only change it when necessary.
I'll give you that there aren't more or at least many more steps than going to paper - but they already know the old way.
You've never got push back on a process change? also, there's something in people's minds that a change on a computer is so much harder than one in the physical world.
Oh no, I have I'm not trying to say it's easy, I didn't mean to come across that way. I was just trying to show it's comparable.
One way I've been able to get process improvement across is just by doing it for myself. Once they see how easy it is, they usually get on board (at least in my experience). It may be almost double work for a short amount of time, but it's paid off each time I've done it.
I have to wonder if people like that complained about automatic transmissions in cars? I mean, they went from a manual process to one that's almost completely automatic (you still need to do some selecting) but did they say "Well I already know how to shift gears with a manual".
Disclaimer: I love driving manual transmissions, I don't think auto is better or worse just easier.
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@johnhooks said:
I have to wonder if people like that complained about automatic transmissions in cars? I mean, they went from a manual process to one that's almost completely automatic (you still need to do some selecting) but did they say "Well I already know how to shift gears with a manual".
Disclaimer: I love driving manual transmissions, I don't think auto is better or worse just easier.
LOL - I saw a movie a long time ago... a kid was transported in time forward something like 20 years to when automatic transmissions were common. He was trying to make a get away, but couldn't figure out how the car worked since there wasn't as stick shift. lol
Yeah, I've shown the process to people as well. Younger people grasp it pretty quickly.. anyone 40 or over, just forget it.. they would rather whine than learn something new - which really isn't learned.. ultimate it's just muscle memory - they don't learn why they do it, etc.. they only know their a paint by numbers and they do that.. sadly it's not uncommon at all for someone else to come along and change one or two numbers without telling anyone else until years later and now that change has broken things... and they can't figure out why until they go back and look at the old process and the process creator asks why they aren't following the process, etc, etc, etc/.
