Everything you do as provider org walks a fine line between privacy and efficiency. And nowhere is the balancing act more difficult than with faxing.

On one hand, faxing satisfies the need for encryption in transit and at rest. It is also the standard means of communication between providers, pharmacies, and payers. On the other hand, it’s a slow, costly, and error-prone medium.

In fact, 10%-30% percent of outbound attempts fail—before even counting retry attempts, busy signals, and partial fax page transmissions. As a result, many provider organizations struggle to know who really received what information, when.

That reveals a critical but often overlooked fact. While traditional faxing is expensive in terms of phone lines and staff hours, its true cost is its risk to compliance and patient care.

But can Private Fax Cloud® RightFax architecture realistically improve upon an established, commoditized technology?

And if you’re one of the many organizations already using RightFax: are you stuck with a rip-and-replace ordeal, or can you keep your faxing investment while getting rid of surrounding costs?

Below, we’ll explore both the obvious and hidden drawbacks of conventional fax architecture, then look more closely at how the Private Fax Cloud solution reduces or eliminates them in ways that public cloud faxing cannot.

The true cost of legacy faxing

Fax has significant and durable advantages. It remains ubiquitous, partly as a common ground between parties with few other technologies in common.

Perhaps most of all, fax is also an inherently secure means of point-to-point document transmission—something all-important in industries such as healthcare. It thus remains the most common way for healthcare providers and payers to communicate regarding patient care.

Unfortunately, analog telephony became unsustainably expensive, conflicted with the new world of remote work, and have now been phased out altogether.

Moving away from the analog status quo isn’t so simple, though. For instance, it’s not trivial to choose the optimal SIP trunk vendor. They offer wildly different service levels (especially for fax transmission) and their digital fax compatibility is arcane and ever-changing. As a result, many first-time implementations are plagued with disruptive and embarrassing reliability issues.

All of that might still be bearable if we could trust legacy faxing to flawlessly deliver critical patient information.

Unfortunately, we cannot.

The result is precious time spent battling a deficient system.

Can’t fax just work?

In the ideal world, we’d have confidence that every character of every document reached its intended recipient (and nobody else).

And it wouldn’t merely arrive, but would do so promptly, in full, with a built-in audit trail. In short, everything legacy faxing fails to deliver.

Your own org may already be accustomed to sending documents repeatedly, in hopes that all pages will finally transmit, while waiting on edge for confirmations that never appear.

But what if it were possible to make seamless and trustworthy faxing a reality, all while reducing costs and preserving familiar workflows?

Reliable faxing, at scale

Private Fax Cloud® is the culmination of two decades of digital fax implementations with some of America’s largest healthcare providers.

During that time, we found that most users love how RightFax works when it works well. For instance, they appreciate managing faxes from a single place, or collaborating on sensitive patient info without relying on Outlook.

But we also found that users—quite reasonably—dislike faxing when it doesn’t work well. Failures and ambiguous statuses waste precious time, and costs only seem to increase regardless of service quality.

The difference between pleasant and problematic faxing most often came down to one thing: the unusual combination of faxing, telecom, and healthcare workflow expertise.

Without that confluence of specialties, implementations consistently fell short of their reliability and performance targets.

That led us to create a secure cloud fax service for our clients to use privately, as a simple and reliable path to all that’s great about RightFax.

Private Fax Cloud is a partially- or fully-managed private fax platform. At its core is the market-leading RightFax application, with uncompromising HIPAA compliance in a virtualized package that works across cloud vendors.

It bundles RightFax with reliable and secure phone services, all deployed, managed, and supported under one roof, with no added burden on IT. Its enterprise-grade IP telephony bypasses the rigid rates and contractual nightmares of traditional lines.

Private Fax Cloud brings reliable transmission from day one while relieving your technical staff. With its built-in telephony best practices, healthcare-specific workflow integrations, and endless automation possibilities, you’re free to focus on delivering excellent care—not chasing papers.

If your organization already uses RightFax in any fashion, then all the better. Private Fax Cloud can use existing licenses to minimize your investment and reach positive ROI even sooner.

Likewise, it can use the VM infrastructure you may already have access to, whether from third parties like AWS and Azure or through self-hosted VM resources (such as VMware or Hyper-V).

In any case, the result is optimal RightFax configuration “in a box” while getting rid of all hardware, phone line issues, deployment, and even most training and admin costs.

The limitations of public cloud fax services

When the costs or risks of legacy faxing grow unbearable, many organizations rip and replace in favor of a fax service in the public cloud.

That’s appropriate for some simpler use cases, but it may create a new set of problems that doesn’t rear its head until long after going live.

Billing surprises

For instance, many cloud services offer a per-page rate based on less than 60 seconds of transmission time. But if one page takes a 61st second to transmit, then that extra second will immediately double the cost of sending the same page.

Conversely, Private Fax Cloud pro-rates in 6-second increments with a 30-second minimum. Not only does this reduce the average cost per page, but it prevents disproportionate charges for trivial increases in time.

Moreover, today’s cost to fax to from one Private Fax Cloud customer to another is $0 as a promotional rate. In the future, the cost will remain minimal while the speeds continue to increase. This alone can amount to thousands of dollars in weekly or even daily savings for large Private Fax Cloud clients, such as a major insurer and an in-network hospital system that communicate in high volume.

Untimely notifications

Delayed or ambiguous failure notification is another public cloud fax pitfall that usually comes by surprise.

By offering real-time fax visibility and notification, we’re able to inform users before sending accidental duplicates that waste time, cause confusion, and risk exposing unexpected transmissions to unauthorized viewers.

Administrative limitations

Furthermore, public cloud services lack the administrative controls that large organizations need for HIPAA compliance.

Most do offer the table stakes of cloud fax security, like TLS encryption and at least rudimentary role-based access control. But they fundamentally handle faxes as email attachments, which precludes granular metadata management and user-level policies.

Private Fax Cloud’s server application lets administrators control literally every aspect of faxing without resorting to custom development around public cloud APIs. And even though the server itself is private, nearly all admin tasks are still possible in a web browser.

Opaque analytics

This virtual server-based architecture puts analytics at power users’ fingertips. It offers granular data that public cloud fax services do not—and generally cannot—expose to clients.

In contrast to most services’ bare-bones reporting, Private Fax Cloud includes a comprehensive reporting tool. Users can start with canned reports that answer common questions, such as “What are my inbound and outbound success rates?” or “Who sent the most faxes this week/month/quarter?”

From there, users can explore trends and find new insights by drilling down to a single department, group, or individual user. Although SQL-savvy users can take advantage of direct database access, no SQL queries are necessary to explore any part of your fax data.

Users can also automate alerting and notifications, and even create their own robotic workflow monitors. This is not necessary in a fully-managed implementation, but it’s always available to clients that prefer hands-on monitoring, or even wish to blend fax data with that of other systems.

The future of healthcare document workflows

So far, we have focused on the reliability and cost-effectiveness of common fax platforms. These tools remain necessary in some form. But even at its best, a trusted and affordable fax platform alone cannot take faxing into the 21st century.

In fact, traditional faxing is becoming a liability as privacy standards and performance-based reimbursement reshape healthcare.

Forward-thinking healthcare orgs realize this. And in response, many have adopted OCR and fax automation to eliminate human error at every stage, from initial document routing and classification to secure archival and granular auditing.

From a day-to-day user’s perspective, the experience is as intuitive as email. But unlike email (or fax-to-email services), our Private Fax Cloud solution builds a granular audit trail with every step a document takes.

And unlike the productivity drag of analog faxing, Private Fax Cloud brings online workflow tools that help users work more efficiently, such as:

  • Fax search and retrieval
  • Fax annotation and redaction
  • OCR and workflow
  • Electronic signatures
  • Document splitting, collation, and image rotation
  • Audit trail viewing and reporting
  • Automatic cover page standards
  • Highly adjustable Archive settings

Which departments use the Private Fax Cloud solution?

Clients generally use it as an enterprise-wide fax platform. It may take time to fully migrating/replacing analog devices (like MFPs/MFDs), but the goal is usually to connect all departments and processes to the same, centrally managed fax environment.

That said, the greatest cost and time savings tend to come from the most paper-intensive teams. These are most often:

  • Finance
  • HR
  • Information Management (e.g., research and trials data), Medical Records, Patient Accounts/Billing, Purchasing, Social Work

Your roadmap to modern fax

The Private Fax Cloud platform comprises fully managed fax management and reporting VMs on a self-hosted or third-party virtual private cloud (most commonly Azure or AWS). The solution uses cloud telephony for reliable delivery with fair and flexible billing.

Regardless of the virtual server host, your full implementation will take one week or less, inclusive of end-to-end privacy protocols and most third-party integrations. Even in the case of highly complex inbound fax workflows, the implementation period rarely exceeds one month.

If your current fax security, cost, efficiency, or reliability are falling short, then a Private Fax Cloud implementation will deliver ROI quickly. To determine whether or how it fits your organization, please contact us today.