Keeping Faxes Secure in Healthcare: A Checklist and Case Study

  

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With robust HIPAA, HITECH, and state governmental regulations, meaningful use financial incentives, and accelerated auditing of Protected Health Information (PHI), it’s always smart to ensure the basics are in place to protect the security of faxes containing PHI. The HIPAA Act also establishes guidelines and regulations for faxing PHI data.

Some questions to ask include:

1. Where are sent/received fax documents and who has access to them?
2. How do users easily access and maintain fax # destinations to ensure they go to the right recipients?
3. How do recipients know they have received a fax and senders know their faxes have been received?
4. What’s on the cover page and who sees them?
5. How and where are faxes stored?
6. How do you audit and track fax communications across the enterprise?
7. How to ensure faxes are routed to only the proper locations?
8. Have you looked at computer fax servers or hosted cloud services which are far superior to stand-alone fax machines or MFP systems?
9. When outsourcing cloud fax infrastructure:
   1. Are faxes sent / received to the cloud via multi-hop TLS email methods or the more secure SSL which is point-to-point and encrypted?
   2. Does the fax vendor use Tier1 data centers with robust and scalable redundancy and network security?
10. Have you looked into examples of successful conversions?  For example, St. Anthony’s Medical Center in St. Louis achieved significant benefits in cost, efficiency, accuracy, and compliance by moving to a fax server system with workflow.

Biscom enterprise fax servers and hosted cloud fax offerings are reliable, easy to use, interoperable with health IT systems, and help you achieve compliance with healthcare regulations. Please download our checklist on Keeping Faxes Secure in Healthcare and the St. Anthony’s case study for more detail.

Download the Checklist brochure and case study:

You'll also receive a hospital case study when you register

Also access the hospital case study:

St. Anthony’s Dramatically Improves Physician, Patient and Service Provider Satisfaction with Biscom’s Fax Server and Workflow