RightFax

Nearly everyone who can work from home is doing so. That’s true essentially nationwide, and nowhere more than here in Seattle. 

As we all settle into this new normal, it’s no surprise that paper-intensive firms have felt a substantial impact. 

Amid the turmoil, many are seeing fax workflow problems—and opportunities—in a new light. 

Can Work-from-Home Be HIPAA-compliant? 

If you’re part of a healthcare payer or provider, like most of our clients, then HIPAA applies to nearly every piece of information you handle. 

For orgs that already use an electronic fax solution, HIPAA-compliant faxing is possible while working from home. Of course, this assumes the fax application is a HIPAA-friendly product with a web client, such as RightFax. 

If so, then WFH staff may need nothing more than a website log-in to fax securely, wherever they are. With no fax machines to monitor and no paper to shuffle, the team’s physical location no longer matters. 

Done right, HIPAA-compliant faxing feels a lot like email. 

However, many teams still rely on legacy fax machines/MFDs, which are not straightforward to keep in compliance. And, more apropos right now, they just aren’t accessible off the premises. 

Unfortunately, that makes working from home impossible, or at least unproductive. 

As the entire health system scrambles to meet unprecedented demand while keeping back-office employees off-site, remote productivity has never been more important. 

WFH-Friendly Faxing for Healthcare Teams

Even aside from today’s public health crisis, the trend toward remote work makes electronic faxing a wise investment. In terms of organizational resilience, it’s often necessary. 

And that’s without accounting for digital fax ROI under normal conditions. 

RightFax led the market long before working from home was a trend, let alone an imperative. But since then, it has evolved to: 

• Support both on-premises and cloud telephony 
• Automatically enforce critical HIPAA faxing rules, such as recipient number look-ups, metadata restrictions, and cover sheet policies 
• Encrypt all fax images while providing a comprehensive audit trail 
• Integrate (often natively) with every major EHR vendor and most line-of-business applications 

Better still, the latest RightFax version (as of writing) even extended its web client to mobile devices. 

For work-from-home fax users, this adds up to a night-and-day difference between modern RightFax and legacy faxing. 

Where to Begin with HIPAA Faxing from Home

We’re keenly aware that it’s hard to do anything new right now.  

Most teams, especially in healthcare, are struggling just to keep their heads above water while navigating new work patterns and general chaos. 

If that rings true, then we recommend two things that are usually feasible remotely: 

1. If your org already has RightFax, then now is the time to understand and scale out its WFH-friendly features. Universal access to the web client is a quick win. Or, with more time upfront, greater workflow automation can alleviate current bottlenecks and pay dividends for years to come. 

1. If your org does not have RightFax, it’s worth feeling out the architecture, level of effort, and time frame to get WFH employees productive again. Different architectures require more or fewer resources on site for implementation, so now is the time to determine what’s realistic for your own team. 

We’re here to help navigate the document workflow aspects of this tough period, while creating efficiencies for the future. Please drop us a line any time. 

Meanwhile, we wish you all the best dealing with today’s unforeseen challenges—and, above all, we wish you good health. 

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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 digital fax solutions 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 digital fax solutions and 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!