Faxing is one of the most common workflow bottlenecks in healthcare. It’s notoriously cumbersome, yet it remains prevalent due to its security and familiarity.
But fax no longer necessitates paper nor extensive on-prem infrastructure. Across the industry, organizations are adopting cloud fax solutions in response to cost and regulatory pressures.
Cloud fax refers to transmitting and managing faxes via public or private cloud services. It’s also possible to implement a hybrid cloud fax approach wherein the fax server remains on premises but fax telephony resides in the cloud.
When properly implemented, cloud faxing is safe and secure for sensitive documents in highly regulated industries. However, not all vendors offer adequate encryption, user authentication, or audit capabilities for healthcare use cases.
Private Fax Cloud® is our pre-configured, bundled, and managed cloud fax solution. It’s built around RightFax, the perennial industry standard, and tailored to the workflow and security needs of modern healthcare orgs.
HIPAA imposes extensive privacy standards—and enormous penalties for violations. That’s why Private Fax Cloud has HIPAA-friendly security measures “baked in” to a standard implementation.
Although faxing is just one piece of HIPAA compliance, the right cloud fax platform can considerably reduce its burden, mitigate risks, and free up resources for other privacy and security efforts.
Traditional fax machines are costly to operate. Paper, toner, and maintenance add up quickly—but pale in comparison to rising analog telephony costs or the sheer hassle of large quantities of paper.
On-prem fax servers are a vast improvement on every level. However, they still require significant resources to deploy and support. They’re also becoming harder to integrate as other line-of-business applications move to the cloud.
Private Fax Cloud drastically reduces these costs by deploying most or all fax components on secure cloud infrastructure. As a managed, pre-configured RightFax implementation, it lets healthcare organizations save on physical resources and reduce or eliminate the need for dedicated fax lines. Likewise, it shifts the burden of update and maintenance off of internal IT and onto our specialized team.
Private Fax Cloud users can securely send and receive faxes from anywhere via any device with internet access. This flexibility is particularly beneficial for remote workers as well as medical staff who regularly travel between facilities.
With nearly real-time statuses and centralized fax management, important documents can be accessed and transmitted quickly, ensuring timely communication and improving end-to-end efficiency.
On-prem fax platforms can be sized for local clinics, Fortune 500 corporations, or anything in between. But when the organization grows, problems arise. An on-prem solution eventually needs expensive infrastructure based on educated guesses about future usage.
Conversely, cloud solutions offer smooth and prompt scaling—in either direction—without the need for hit-or-miss capacity planning. Private Fax Cloud is inherently scalable, accommodating the needs of small practices and large hospital systems alike. As the user base and fax volume grow, capacity keeps up without additional hardware or infrastructure changes.
EMR and EHR systems are the backbone of modern healthcare operations. Private Fax Cloud offers native integrations with all major EMRs/EHRs, line-of-business software, and even legacy office devices. Custom integrations are also possible via several APIs and other interfaces maintained by OpenText, the company behind RightFax.
The end result is an intuitive fax workflow right within the EMR or EHR, resulting in quicker and more accurate communication around patient records, lab results, and other critical documents.
Traditional fax servers can be made redundant and resilient, but it comes at the cost of essentially duplicate infrastructure, not to mention the expertise to configure and manage it all. Enterprise cloud fax solutions offer extensive storage and service redundancy, typically transparent to users.
For example, Private Fax Cloud automatically backs up documents and can support whatever level of telephony failover and SLAs your organization requires. In the event of a disaster, service is quickly restored thanks to the underlying cloud service provider’s worldwide redundancy and failover.
Public cloud fax services do minimize support and scalability constraints. However, we don’t generally recommend them for healthcare customers. Compared to Private Fax Cloud, they typically have larger billing increments, fewer native integrations, and less granular management of users and metadata.
Those limitations are more pronounced with larger user bases, higher fax volumes, or more line-of-business software integrations. A managed RightFax environment like Private Fax Cloud is more robust and cost-effective in enterprise-scale healthcare scenarios.
Private Fax Cloud is the easiest and most cost-effective way for healthcare orgs to implement RightFax smoothly and securely at any scale. Typical on-premises implementations bring significant IT and telecom overhead and require several vendors for specialized support. Private Fax Cloud offers centralized management and support under one roof.
If you’re evaluating infrastructure changes or facing fax service issues, then Private Fax Cloud may resolve your reliability, cost, and compliance concerns.
To discuss your needs or arrange technical deep-dive with a solutions engineer, please contact us today.