I used to ask myself this, and still do from time to time, but
the reality is that most of the medical and social services world still
thinks it’s 1991 and uses faxes for everything. Many of these places are
even using paper fax machines hooked up to phone lines. The reason for
much of this is that
HIPAA,
FERPA,
and all those other privacy-related acronyms pretty much say nothing
about privacy precautions for faxing (or, say, sending medical records
via first-class mail with no signature or tracking!) but require
extensive precautions to transmit data via e-mail or cloud storage the
way most of us do. Most places don’t have the IT capacity or the funds
to revamp their entire system to use encrypted e-mail or cloud systems,
so they’re stuck using fax and postal mail.
While I don’t work in community service or a medical setting, I now
have to deal with these places several times per week between being a
foster parent, having a child with multiple disabilities, and
participating in a number of community programs to get services for this
child and to make ends meet for my family. This means that at least
once a week, I need to fax something because the place doesn’t accept it
via e-mail. (Or I could take it there personally, or mail it and hope
it gets to the right person, but that ends up being more trouble than
it’s worth.)
This means I am now the (proud?) owner of a fax number. Fortunately, I
don’t have some yellowing plastic paper-jam-ridden machine attached to
my nonexistent landline. I’ve been using sFax, and the $9 a month is
totally worth it. It’s actually $7.20 per month
with one of these 20% off codes that they
keep sending me, and sometimes less if you pass the codes along to
friends. Yes, you heard me, I actually found a fax-number pyramid
scheme; the internet really does have a sketchy multi-level-marketing
deal for
everything!
The service however is not at all sketchy, and actually is quite
impressive. They have a free iPhone app that lets you fax things from
your iPhone (it even works on my ancient crank-operated 1929-model
iPhone). It’s been incredibly time-saving to just snap a cameraphone
picture of whatever I need to send somewhere and fax it off. No one so
far has noticed or cared that I’m sending phone pictures of documents; I
mean, really, you’ve seen some of the crooked, mangled faxes that
doctor’s offices send, right? That’s the other weird thing about faxes;
for whatever reason the medical and social services culture considers a
faxed document to be an “original.” Hey, works for me.
