With cloud technology being in constant refinement, and carriers slowly retiring their PSTN infrastructures, the complete modernization and virtualization of telecommunication environments is inevitable. Many organizations place their fax’s digital transformation to the bottom of their IT priorities because let’s face it – it seems like a daunting and expensive exercise, and why change something that works most of the time?
But what if it wasn’t as a laborious and costly task as it may seem? And what if you could switch to a highly reliable fax solution that could not only help your organization meet HIPAA compliance, but also provide a business continuity architecture for disaster recovery? Keep on reading to learn the top 4 reasons why health providers are going virtual with their fax service, and just how simple migrating can be.
One of the greatest features about fax over Internet Protocol (IP) is how you connect your fax service: the only requirement is a good Internet connection. Once you have your connectivity, your IP fax service can be connected to any type of environment – from a single line fax machine in a doctor’s office, to a large hospital with multiple campuses that operate Multi-Function Devices (MFDs) that send and receive hundreds of patient records daily.
IP fax is also flexible and scalable, allowing your organization to either increase or decrease your faxing volume whenever the need arises. SIP Trunks, which are powerful Internet connections that allow large amounts of data to travel in a quick and secure manner, make that scalability possible. You can opt for SIP Trunks that are specifically conditioned for fax, such as T.38 SIP Trunks. Their high availability and redundancy make IP faxing a highly reliable option for healthcare facilities that have high faxing volumes, or that send and receive fax transmissions around the clock.
Implementing IP fax opens you up to a variety of technologies to choose from. Since health providers are subject to privacy laws, such as HIPAA, it’s crucial to choose a technology that offers robust data security and privacy, and that doesn’t store data halfway through a transmission.
Real-time, IP fax ticks all the boxes. Once a fax transmission is sent, the data travels in real-time and is never stored, hence why real-time IP fax meets HIPAA requirements. A confirmation that the data reached its destination is sent, providing your organization the assurance that the fax communication successfully made it to the intended recipient. What’s more, real-time, IP fax does not require a business associate agreement (BAA) between the health organization and the real-time IP fax provider since data is not stored within the IP fax provider’s server. Additional encryption can also be added to T.38 SIP Trunks should your health organization need more robust security measures for protecting Patient Health Information (PHI).
IP fax service is cheaper than you think. As mentioned earlier, IP fax is connected to the Internet and, depending on your health organization’s faxing volume, may be connected to SIP Trunks, therefore eliminating the need for copper wire connections, or PRIs. Virtualizing your IP fax infrastructure also reduces the costs associated to maintaining legacy hardware, saving your organization the headache to find and pay for specialized labour that is becoming harder to find.
Planning for dark times is never a popular subject. We’re all too familiar with the fact that things happen unexpectedly, like a natural disaster or a pandemic. These can have major impacts on business productivity. Making sure your business stays afloat by keeping core operations going is therefore crucial.
SIP Trunks provide organizations with the possibility of architecting business continuity and disaster recovery strategies. You can implement an active/active infrastructure redundancy, which provides your IP fax service with high availability. Another proven strategy is site failovers, so when one of your fax servers goes down, the other one kicks in.
We only scratched the surface with what IP fax and SIP Trunks can offer health organizations. For a more in-depth overview, join our IP fax experts on Wednesday, November 10 at 1p.m. ET for a deep dive on integration requirements, technical considerations, and more key benefits of IP fax and SIP Trunks. You certainly won’t want to miss this discussion if your business uses, or plans to use, a RightFax server and/or is hosting their fax system in AWS or Azure.