Paperless Productivity

We toss around the term “enterprise faxing” on a regular basis in our blog and websites. However, it’s worth taking a closer look at this phrase to see just what it is—and isn’t. So, for the next few weeks, we’ll very briefly break down some of the most essential attributes of an enterprise fax solution.

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After our previous discussion on fax integration, it became clear that while a wide range of possible document sources is a valuable feature, it also requires a wide range of security protocols. Thus, true enterprise faxing is also highly secure and subject to very granular, customizable controls.

Any organization large enough to care about unifying its fax environment is almost certainly large enough to have offices that will be handling sensitive data. Even if initial pilot projects do not involve protected data, full deployments or expansions often do. It would be a tremendous disappointment for an initially successful fax solution to get extended throughout the company, only to encounter insurmountable security concerns down the road.

In short, data must be as secure at rest as in transit, and that’s exactly why genuinely enterprise-oriented fax servers and cloud fax services support airtight encryption.

As for RightFax in particular, not only does the available Encryption Module use an ultra-safe protocol (192-bit Triple DES), but it even lets administrators track exactly who accesses which fax images, in addition to the standard ‘audit trail.’ In some cases, and especially for organizations concerned with strict standards like HIPAA, these sorts of detailed security features make RightFax the default option.

Without a doubt, security features are one of the easiest ways to distinguish enterprise fax software from more bare-bones products. We’re all aware that security threats evolve continually, which means fax solutions must do the same if they are to remain a step (or several) ahead and provide the security that large, complex clients require.

In that sense, security is one of many ways in which bona fide enterprise fax solutions are abreast of innovations in networking, workflow automation, and so forth. That’s a matter that deserves far more than a sentence of discussion, so we’ll take it up next week in the final—for now—post in this short series.

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We’d love to hear more about your own experiences with faxing, both enterprise and otherwise. Whether we’re preaching to the choir or offering a completely different perspective, feel free to chime in!

We toss around the term “enterprise faxing” on a regular basis in our blog and websites. However, it’s worth taking a closer look at this phrase to see just what it is—and isn’t. So, for the next few weeks, we’ll very briefly break down some of the most essential attributes of an enterprise fax solution.

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Last time, we talked about the nature and necessity of scalable enterprise faxing, and left off with the observation that documents tend to fluctuate not only in volume, but also in source.

That leads to this week’s main point: almost by definition, enterprise faxing must provide for integration with multiple document sources.

A lot of information (but certainly not all of it!) arrives digitally these days. Even in organizations lacking OCR data capture solutions, most papers are eventually scanned, which leads to even more digital volume.

The value of a fax environment that can exploit digital document availability is therefore pretty hard to argue with. And along those lines, since electronic sources include everything from emails to network storage to back-end systems, a broad range of compatibility is awfully helpful. Since the highest-volume customers (e.g., Fortune 500 firms) demand such complex and robust integrations, OpenText has taken fax compatibility to a remarkable level in the latest version of RightFax.

A full listing and explanation of RightFax integrations is outside the scope of this post. For now, suffice it to say that virtually every major workplace application (like Exchange and SharePoint), ERP system, EMR / EHR software, and so forth is covered, either out of the box or via a straightforward module.

Now, one might astutely point out that numerous and flexible integrations are no good if data cannot be kept private. And that’s absolutely true. After all, from finance to law to healthcare, the duties and penalties around compliance are considerable. For that reason, we believe that true enterprise faxing is also highly secure. Next week we will look more closely at the topic of fax security, and meanwhile, we welcome your inquiry!

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We’d love to hear more about your own experiences with faxing, both enterprise and otherwise. Whether we’re preaching to the choir or offering a completely different perspective, feel free to chime in!

We toss around the term “enterprise faxing” on a regular basis in our blog and websites. However, it’s worth taking a closer look at this phrase to see just what it is—and isn’t. So, for the next few weeks, we’ll very briefly break down some of the most essential attributes of an enterprise fax solution.

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Today, let’s start this little series with one of the biggest buzzwords in IT: scalability.

Why does it matter in the context of fax servers / services? In the long run, it’s extremely important that a fax environment can smoothly grow with demand. Expansion should be easy and affordable, and it must be equally reliable and functional regardless of fax volume.

Conversely, a small-scale solution stretched beyond its limits in a desperate attempt to provide some modicum of fax access throughout a company just isn’t an enterprise solution. Unfortunately, that’s often the case when organizations begin with a few standalone fax machines and enjoy quick growth in business—and in fax usage.

Granted, such an arrangement may work for a little while, but we regularly see these ‘solutions’ cause headaches that just don’t occur in scalable environments.

As opposed to such a haphazard system, an enterprise-grade fax environment is purposefully architected. It is scaled to current business needs (including occasional peaks and even new, upcoming offices/facilities) but retains the freedom to increase/decrease capacity as conditions change. Otherwise—as often occurs with more improvised solutions—fluctuations in volume can make it tough simply to keep up.

And as documents grow in number, it’s likely that they come from increasingly diverse sources. Check back next time as we find out why a ‘source-agnostic’ design is critical to enterprise faxing. Meanwhile, feel free to contact our RightFax experts to learn more.

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We’d love to hear more about your own experiences with faxing, both enterprise and otherwise. Whether we’re preaching to the choir or offering a completely different perspective, feel free to chime in!

A local NPR affiliate recounts some disturbing disconnects between users of ostensibly electronic health records:

Technology entrepreneur Jonathan Bush says he was recently watching a patient move from a hospital to a nursing home. The patient’s information was in an electronic medical record, or EMR. And getting the patient’s records from the hospital to the nursing home, Bush says, wasn’t exactly drag and drop.

“These two guys then type — I kid you not — the printout from the brand new EMR into their EMR, so that their fax server can fax it to the bloody nursing home,” Bush says.

(Proper fax server implementation could have prevented this situation. But more on that in a moment!)

Measures like the HITECH Act have led to $30 billion in public support for EMR adoption since 2009. However, whereas a certain EMR may make communications a breeze within the institution, it does not necessarily help communication with institutions using different software. As Medicare incentives for efficient communication (e.g., avoiding duplicate tests) continue to grow, and general demand for inter-compatible records increases likewise, the door has been flung open for newer, cloud-based EMR vendors.

However, federal interoperability standards remain years away, which means health care providers must find other, more cost-effective solutions in the meantime. For many of our clients, this involves the use of secure health care fax servers or services—albeit far more strategically than described in the quote above.

Native fax server integrations are available for practically all major EMRs, like Cerner, Epic, GE/IDX, and NextGen (among dozens of others). Most importantly, these integrations allow users to receive faxes directly into the software, which eliminates the need for printing or hand-entering data. So, instead of dealing with paper in the example from earlier, the hospital could have:

1. Received a fax electronically, no printouts required
2. Automatically routed that fax into its EMR (even into a specific patient file, after recognizing barcodes or other unique identifiers)
3. Automatically sent the fax to the nursing home’s EMR (which could benefit from a similar workflow of its own)

Now that’s more like it. And if paper is simply inevitable—perhaps as part of a billing or patient registration workflow—its data can still be automatically captured and extracted. Long story sort, there is simply no reason to remain captive to paper while awaiting universal EMR standards. To learn more, simply contact us to schedule a complimentary health care fax consultation or workflow review at your convenience.