Work-from-Home Faxing & HIPAA Compliance

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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