Cloud Faxing HIPAA Compliance, How to Ensure

Cloud Faxing HIPAA Compliance, How to Ensure

Faxing remains one of the key communication mediums for healthcare organizations because it’s ubiquitous and universal, secure, legally binding, reliable, and it’s traceable. Sharing data is a crucial aspect of the doctor-patient relationship and keeping that information secure and away from prying eyes is not just good for business but, required by HIPAA.

Medical practices are becoming increasingly susceptible to cyber attacks. According to a recent study, 25% of healthcare organizations don’t encrypt their patient’s data in the cloud. So, in order to ensure the protection of highly confidential information, healthcare providers should use end-to-end encrypted communication methods.

Organizations in all industries are continuing the push to take advantage of IP convergence, using the internet to transfer all forms of information, and adopting unified communications for consistent communications across multiple devices. Fax over IP (FoIP) is part of the strategy for organizations across every industry to take advantage of IP convergence, using the internet to transmit all forms of information, and adopting unified communications for consistent communications across multiple devices.

Cloud faxing security has reduced the Quality of Service (QoS) issues with the T.38 protocol that was specially designed to solve the fax signaling issues introduced by Voice-over-IP and SIP-based telephony services.

A secure cloud fax solution gives up-to-date security controls, ensuring total privacy of confidential medical documents. Healthcare organizations adopting cloud fax are assured of HIPAA compliance with the ability to securely record and create an audit trail of all fax transactions.

In case of inadequacy of HIPAA compliance, cloud fax also provides relief for practices with limiting hardware and hardware maintenance, consolidation of telephone resources, and increased faxing efficiency cause sometimes subtle healthy ROI.

Benefits of Cloud Faxing

In the healthcare industry, proper handling of documents cannot be neglected. The need for necessity should not be accomplished at the cost of confidentiality. Fortunately, cloud faxing can help fulfill both of those goals by:

  • Increasing efficiency in medical billing and claims processing
  • Allowing healthcare organizations to secure document transmissions
  • Fax enabling health-related IT systems, ideal for FoIP medical records and HIPAA compliance
  • Helping organizations to access time-sensitive patient information in a faster way
  • Automating delivery, receipt, and tracking of health records and other sensitive documents

Cloud faxing shines with its reasonable modesty and fundamental flexibility for healthcare systems with enormous networks and multiple locations.

Generally, installation can take place in stages, one department, and one fax machine at a time if necessary. Physical fax machines can be removed progressively, allowing people to adapt to the new system and minimize interruption until you’re able to complete a fully software-based fax infrastructure.

Once established, the speed and ease of cloud faxing become very evident. For example, with an OCR routing module, specific documents like a lab report can be routed right to a specific person or department based on keywords within the fax document.

Word and PDF files are the popular types of digital documents that are faxed, but cloud faxing can handle a wide variety of formats which is very helpful. Every business and every healthcare practice has its own data standards and selected file formats. Cloud fax users are not burdened with the worry of wondering what types of digital files they can and cannot send. Cloud fax saves you time by removing the extra step of converting images, presentations, Rich Text Format, HTML, and other document types before clicking the send button.

Previous fax server solutions are inclined to hindrances and dropped faxes from channels locking up. It is not uncommon however for a cloud faxing solution to handle double the inbound and outbound faxing load of the older matches. Cloud faxing is run by fax experts who know best how to keep up the optimal performance of their infrastructure, fundamentally future-proofing your solution leaving you not much to worry about in relation to network upgrades.

The best cloud faxing services are capable to send and receive tens of thousands of faxes every day. Cloud faxing also offers adaptable infrastructures that ensure service stability in face of a software problem or failure. With so many faxes coming and going, cloud faxing traces and track faxes including automatic notifications of receipt, re-sending of faxes, and automatic archiving.

An IT department can even analyze fax usage statistics for better optimization. HIPAA compliance might be the most important key component for healthcare organizations to shift to a secure cloud faxing solution but there are many more benefits realized that contribute to overall operational efficiencies including cost savings and integration with existing systems.

There are many companies in the market that provide a cloud-based faxing solution to meet their needs. But one should only get the services of companies that offer HIPAA compliant cloud faxing. Because choosing the right service provider is the first step towards ensuring data security within your business.

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