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The Fax is Not Yet Obsolete (theatlantic.com)
Fax, once at the forefront of communications technologies but now in deep decline, has persisted in many industries. From a report: Law-enforcement agencies remain heavily reliant on fax for routine operations, such as bail postings and return of public-records requests. Health care, too, runs largely on fax. Despite attempts to replace it, a mix of regulatory confusion, digital-security concerns, and stubbornness has kept fax machines droning around the world.
An early facsimile message was sent over telegraph lines in London in 1847, based on a design by the Scottish inventor Alexander Bain. There is some dispute over whether it was the first fax: Competing inventors, including Bain in the United Kingdom and Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell across the Atlantic, sought to father facsimile technology, which was a kind of white whale for inventors. Telegraphs already allowed messages to be passed across distances, one letter at a time using Morse code. But the dream of transmitting copies of messages and images instantly over wires was very much alive.
Writing in 1863, Jules Verne imagined that the Paris of the 1960s would be replete with fax machines, or as he called them, "picture-telegraphs." The technology did eventually lead to a revolution in communication, though it didn't happen until years later. It first became known to many Americans after the 1939 New York World's Fair, where a fax machine transmitted newspaper images from around the world at a rate of 18 minutes per page -- lightning speed for the time. Further reading: 'You Had to Be There': As Technologies Change Ever Faster, the Knowledge of Obsolete Things Becomes Ever Sweeter.
An early facsimile message was sent over telegraph lines in London in 1847, based on a design by the Scottish inventor Alexander Bain. There is some dispute over whether it was the first fax: Competing inventors, including Bain in the United Kingdom and Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell across the Atlantic, sought to father facsimile technology, which was a kind of white whale for inventors. Telegraphs already allowed messages to be passed across distances, one letter at a time using Morse code. But the dream of transmitting copies of messages and images instantly over wires was very much alive.
Writing in 1863, Jules Verne imagined that the Paris of the 1960s would be replete with fax machines, or as he called them, "picture-telegraphs." The technology did eventually lead to a revolution in communication, though it didn't happen until years later. It first became known to many Americans after the 1939 New York World's Fair, where a fax machine transmitted newspaper images from around the world at a rate of 18 minutes per page -- lightning speed for the time. Further reading: 'You Had to Be There': As Technologies Change Ever Faster, the Knowledge of Obsolete Things Becomes Ever Sweeter.
You cannot beat the simplicity of a fax machine. You put in a piece of paper, enter someone's phone number, and it just WORKS. Yeah, you could in theory say the same about email, but think about how complicated it gets to attempt to scan an image, and then get that image into an email attachment? Everyone here on /. probably knows how, but honestly sit down and attempt to write up the steps for someone who isn't a hard-core techie that just needs to get the job done. Too much tech is getting in the way of the actual jobs at hand.
For an interesting look at the 1948 state of the art of transmitting photographic images by wire, see the based-on-true-story suspense movie Call Northside 777 starring Jimmy Stewart. A major plot element involves this technique. It was a rather involved processs, slow, and not at all simple.
Here is a list of who still uses faxes:
1. Governments
2. Lawyers, insurance companies, and others that have to interact with governments.
That doesn't change its obsolescence.
I volunteer at a K-8 school and we just installed a new phone system. The system uses VOIP, with the hardware running on a virtual machine. However, I am running a phone wire (Cat-3 actually) to the office for the fax machine so we can bypass the old wiring which is a mess using 66 blocks. Educational records are still transmitted by fax.
Problem is that people think Faxing hasn't adapted.*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
My printer can do both, as well as traditional POTS.
*Heck I remember when HylaFax was a thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Even used something like it when NeXTStep was still going strong.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Doctors of all kinds, service workers of all kinds, lots of people still use faxes you idiot lol. Why do you just assert things and expect that to "make it true" anyway? This is a pattern of yours Bill.
Fax is very much alive in Japan. We use it often for the stupidest shit you think we'd be doing by email now...
That would be T.37 or iFax, and a lot of printers come with software that makes the whole process pretty easy.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
For the monthly cost it does provide a certain amount of amusement at my office watching millennials get frustrated at using it. So Iâ(TM)d say there is some value left.
Easy way of putting signatures onto documents.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
When your doctor sends you to get blood drawn, those results come back to him as a fax. They are also sent via electronic data, but a shocking number of medical facilities still do everything by fax, and not because of anything having to do with the government.
When I was in Houston, I could barely believe it when I learned that the world class Hermann Medical Center there still uses faxes for everything. I mean, they got freaking robots doing surgeries and gene splicers and all that stuff, but still waiting on someone carrying a sheet of paper with blood test results from a fax machine to a doctor's hands.
You are welcome on my lawn.
3. Small offices. These offices usually exist because they fill some small special niche market. There must be hundreds or thousands of these (hard to count all of them) just in any small city. 4. Travelling offices. It is much easier to carry a fax and plug into the pay phones at a truck stop to get documents from an office than getting email on your phone and trying to connect wirelessly to a printer. Just an example of something complicated being very simple and effective, even though everyone around rolls their eyes. 5. Fun! As soon as you hear the fax machine pick up with its endearing tone, everyone gathers around to see what will come out. Page after page, what page is next? It's endless fun just wondering what will happen next. Need I give more of the endless set of examples that come to mind?
How many of those doctors, service workers, and others are required by law or regulation to use FAXes?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
In the last five years I've moved from Australia to the USA and then to the UK, and now back to Australia. In all countries I have set up businesses, filed taxes for myself and the businesses, corresponded with the various government departments required to do all that stuff. I have had health care and gone to the doctors.
I had to send three faxes in this five year period - all to companies/organisations in the USA. Each time I had to do it (many months apart) I marvelled at what a weird anachronism it seemed to be, and asked various friends & family in other parts of the world if faxing was something they had to do very often (usually after me asking them if they had a way for me to send a fax, which they didn't), and they seemed equally surprised.
I can't remember the last time I sent a fax in Australia; easily more than 10 years ago.
Correction: the fax is not yet extinct. It is certainly obsolete.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
My wife and I are currently fighting a denied health insurance claim. The reason it was denied was that the insurance company sent a fax to the wrong phone number at the hospital, and didn't check for a confirmation. Some companies are barely in the 1990's technology-wise.
Have you read my blog lately?
Protection safeguards per the HIPAA laws vary with the method of data transmission. FAXes are assumed to be confidential as long as you know the number you're dialing is correct; e-mail and other digital means require you to validate most of your entire IT chain, and probably to encrypt the e-mail as well.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Law-enforcement agencies remain heavily reliant on fax for routine operations, such as bail postings and return of public-records requests. Health care, too, runs largely on fax.
You left out higher education.
We're adding an addition to our high school, which includes a new office for the careers counselor. I consulted with the architects on the low-voltage wiring. When we ran it by the counselor for approval, she asked me, "Where's the fax line?" I looked at her dumbfounded, wondering why she couldn't just use scan-to-e-mail, or run to the district office down the hall if necessary. She said, "Student transcripts are all private information. Every student portfolio I sent is by fax. I send at least three a day, with the average fax between eight to ten pages." In the age of secure upload, I couldn't believe it, but she said that only one college she works with regularly uses 100% secure-upload, while everyone else is 100% fax.
They are also sent via electronic data, but a shocking number of medical facilities still do everything by fax, and not because of anything having to do with the government.
Do you happen to know if that has changed? and if so, what the current reasoning is?
The reason the fax continued existence is blamed/credited to government is because signatures sent over fax are legally recognized as signatures by every government agency in the US.
Similarly with actual paper signatures.
For some silly reason, a signature replicated and sent by any other means isn't always considered legally binding.
While most hospitals and doctors do now use electronic data for many things because.. well because it's better in almost every way. But when a signature is needed, they still send a fax or mail a paper, just to cover their ass legally in case the electronic version is ever questioned in court.
I'd imagine that it is simpler and easier on the back end systems to just always send a fax/mail copy than to bother keeping an up to date list of the few rare edge cases where all parties involved accept an electronic signature.
In many jurisdictions, a fax has a long case law history of being considered as good and legal as paper (usually when confirmed in person or verbally). That is why faxes continue to exist. Yes, digital signatures might be better in some cases, but faxes will continue to rule until there is an agreed upon deployment of an alternative that is considered equally non-repudiable.
Scott Adam's Dilbert strip on this:
https://dilbert.com/strip/1992-12-21
It is always hilarious that the most illegible, easily manipulated transmission vector is the gold standard for authenticity. Photoshop away, print it out, and FAX it to someone and it is valid.
Just because people still use it does not mean that it is not obsolete. For example, imperial units are obsolete but some people and countries still insist on using them for a variety of reasons, why should faxes be any different?
There are no signatures on blood work results. It's just a list of test results. And yet those are always faxed, even by the biggest nationwide labs in the country, like Quest Diagnostics.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That they "have to interact with governments" is not the only reason they use them. The paper copy helps provide an invaluable paper trail, and can last much longer than a more easily deleted computer record.
[Fax is common among] Lawyers, insurance companies, and others that have to interact with governments.
Doctors of all kinds, service workers of all kinds, lots of people still use faxes
Service workers interact with state assistance programs run by governments. Doctors interact with Medicare and Medicaid,* which are run by governments. Doctors also interact with insurers, who interact with governments in countries attempting universal availability of coverage.
* And foreign counterparts
Working at a company that deals with HIPAA communications for state benefit programs...we make purls all the time (with prearranged login information to verify the recipient that use secondary methods of authentication, such as SMS, etc.) so we can send important communications via email just to avoid sending via fax or USPS. The end result is that we saved several states several hundreds of thousands of dollars in mailing each year. Nothing in the email contains HIPAA information. The problem with a fax and usps is that anyone on the other end can view the information. With a purl, we can almost certainly guarantee that the person on the other is the person who signed up for the benefit program in the first place. We are slowly but surely dragging governments into the 21st century and they are seeing the benefit in timelier and more direct communication that doesn't take days to get to the recipient. In fact, we've had to pace our relays just to keep their call centers from becoming overwhelmed with respondents.
The thing is, fax is a very useful vehicle to get your message across. It works and doesn't come with troubles like receiver doesn't show the html "right", which doesn't belong in an email anyway, the file you sent as an attachment cannot be read for this or that reason, like getting scrubbed by antivirus or simply not having a specific application installed, or the email you clicked on is "wrong" and now has taken over your computer. Oh and it doesn't require expensive data bundles but works on a normal unadorned POTS line. That it doesn't work so well over VoIP is because premature optimisation for voice: FoIP networks exist and do work.
Me, I'm very annoyed at the inability of even "smart" cellular phones to send or receive faxes. Receiving should be trivial: It's a black-and-white (or even colour) picture of a sheet of paper. Sending, well, take a picture of a sheet of paper, or perhaps a whiteboard. Show what it'd look like when faxed, then fax that.
That way you'd have the old integrated with the new. But the phone companies instead tried to push "MMS", since they could charge a bundle for that at much less technical expenditure for them. But that didn't take off so it fell by the wayside of "progress". Fax on the other hand used to have a very wide installed base and linking the old and the new there would have made for lots of fax calls to and from mobile phones and thus revenue.
And that is the thing: We run forward to each time a new gimmick, incompatible with everything else. A new app, a new chat, a new thing, a new mayfly. For infrastructure you instead want to have things that you can depend on, and that work together. Fax was a pretty solid proposition that "just worked" right up until our obsession with the new broke it.
The sad thing is that you can make sure every workstation has a tiff fax viewer and do the sending and receiving over FoIP entirely in software, say connected to a fax in/out box in your email setup, so it's not like you need an extra device on your network to have your office be able to do fax. It should be entirely turn-key-able, so can be and ought to be trivial to maintain for offices and such, making it available when suddenly needed.
>How many of those doctors, service workers, and others are required by law or regulation to use FAXes?
Due to HIPAA, fax remains very important in the healthcare field. It is considered a "secure" transport/channel, just like the US mail. Meanwhile, Email is not considered "secure", unless it and/or the attachments are encrypted (and with no PHI in the subject or unencrypted body). And there is no "good" (good = easy, quick, standardized, compatible, universal) standard for Email encryption, unfortunately.
Faxing is annoying and slow. But it "just works."
Some VoIP providers have FAX capability as part of their package. SMS even.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Most of them are STILL unaware of the ESIGN Act, passed eighteen years ago. It recognizes digital signatures.
Tthe ESIGN Act was passed eighteen years ago. It recognizes digital signatures. Adobe makes it really easy to sign a PDF, which you then email back.
>"Do you happen to know if that has changed? and if so, what the current reasoning is?"
Due to HIPAA, fax remains very important in the healthcare field. It is considered a "secure" transport/channel, just like the US mail. Meanwhile, Email is not considered "secure", unless it and/or the attachments are encrypted (and with no PHI in the subject or unencrypted body). And there is no "good" (good = easy, quick, standardized, compatible, universal) standard for Email encryption, unfortunately.
Fax "just works", meets the regulations, is easy, is well-known, is relatively fax [now], is universal [in the industry], has one standard, and they all have it already. It will be difficult to unseat faxing for transmission of PHI between disparate parties.
More properly, an industry that still uses fax is doing things the old, inefficient way because it can’t be bothered to change. From legal protocols that use low-security handwritten signatures rather than PGP to stubborn old bastards in the medical world who won’t digitize, the fax users are a cavalcade of obsolescence.
When your doctor sends you to get blood drawn, those results come back to him as a fax. They are also sent via electronic data, but a shocking number of medical facilities still do everything by fax, and not because of anything having to do with the government.
And that test results page is packed with medically needed information that arrives as a goddamned image, as though it were a wedding picture. Someone in the doctor’s office has to sit down and transcribe that information into storable form. You better hope that person doesn’t miss a digit or transpose two fields.
Faxing is annoying and slow. But it "just works."
Except when faxes get sent to the wrong place or get hacked
If you don't have a touch screen (a phone), a mouse works just as well today as it did 18 years ago.
It's even worse than that. The test results are actually stored as digital data, and in fact, they are available on the portal for the doctor's office even before the doctor gets them. He gets them in digital form, but for some reason, the faxes are still sent, and received, and filed. Which makes no sense at all.
If you tell the lab that you would like the results sent to, say, your specialist, they will tell you that they need a fax number. Because who the hell knows why. And if god forbid, you should move to a new place and have different insurance, you will learn that the only way your previous doctor can send your chart to your new doctor is via fax (or they will make a copy for you so you can carry them by hand).
You would think it's 1980.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I've been in the copier/printer/fax business since 1981. In the mid 80's, fax machines really took off, but, we had a hard time getting people to use them. The excuse was always "but I can't get rid of my messenger...I've always had a messenger". Now, I get the same complaint. "I can't get rid of my fax, I've always had a fax". I learned WAY MORE about the telephone system (USA) than I ever wanted to know, to figure out why fax transmissions/receptions would flake out over the decades. Now, with VoIP, as long as the ATA box is T.38 compliant, 99% of the time I can get them to work, but, most of the time, I have to turn off the V.34 modem, ECM, slow them down to 14.4k because of network problems, ATA boxes with sucky cache and what not. We sell more fax cards that go into multifunction copier/printers now, than we ever did with a stand alone fax. It's funny when I tell one of my users...ummm, you do know that you don't have to print it, then fax it. Just "print" the document, select the fax machine as a printer, select the number from your address book or type it in, and it goes from your PC direct to the fax? It's like I told them they have this new feature called SLICED BREAD. I wish they would kill off faxing, but we have a ton of hospital type accounts and they won't budge on email, even with encryption. Too worried about HIPAA violations.
If my bank can run an online banking website that prevents anyone but me getting into the data (using a combination of both strong authentication and the latest HTTPS standards, why cant medical providers do the same thing? Diagnostic lab makes the data available via a secure portal, doctor logs onto the secure portal and downloads it. Need a different doctor to get the information, easy enough to authorize that different doctor to get it as well.
>"Except when faxes get sent to the wrong place [bbc.com]" or get hacked [wired.com]"
Indeed. But that also happens with:
1) Phone calls
2) US Mail
3) UPS/Fedex
4) Email
No need for sloppy transcribing: The scanner compression can do that automaticaly for you: http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blo...
>"why cant medical providers do the same thing? "
Because we have a business to run and can't afford to deal with the money or time assigning, verifying, maintaining, using every human a separate "login" to every single proprietary "portal" for every business. They often barf on certain browsers, or if you don't use java, too. Sometimes they are incompatible with greylisting. Often they have no help when they break. They can severely delay access to the information, too. I speak with first-hand knowledge as to how much of a pain in the a** this new concept has become in practice.
They can be a great tool for a limited set of entities that often communicate with each other, but replacing fax completely- nope.
Early implementations of anything need work. You as a practitioner should be part of the process of specifying electronic medical records interfaces that suit your type of practice. Work towards a world in which EMR interaction is a benefit to you, rather than being mostly for the benefit of ‘coding’ and billing.
We WILL have EMR. If you pull back into your burrow and insist on staying with quill and vellum, all it means is that you will have had no input into whatever EMR system is imposed on you.
Who works with BB phone provider - no one uses faxes any more, not small businesses nor private citizens.
Yes, it is that assumption that is, as always, the weak link in the chain. Long strings of digits and human fallibility mean that thousands of documents are sent to the wrong destination every day... if not every hour.
But hey, that's okay, "It was a accident". :facepalm:
mnem
Fax are obsolete, just like the organizations which rely on them.
The revolution in Fax was getting TODAY.
Fax's irreplaceable undeniable delivery produces physical documents that someone must handle.
Fax is the only medium that guarantees delivery AND that someone will see it.
Those attributes remain its most significant. For government whether battle plans delivered to the field, signatories or legal its remains admissible evidence. For business it is simple, cheap and ubiquitous communications. For politics piles of fax can be measured, categorized and vouchers.f
Because it is often difficult to get different parties to cooperate enough to get more modern IT systems to integrate.
For example, I recently worked on a project where several hospitals and primary care facilities outsourced their laboratory services to a 3rd party laboratory serving multiple hospitals and clinics. They wanted to connect their individual EHRs and orders/results systems to transmit orders and receive the results electronically instead of by paper. The major obstruction was the IT vendor supplying the laboratory.
The laboratory IT solution vendor insisted on an initial set up fee of $80k and a $10k per year annual licensing fee, for each individual site interfacing with the lab. On top of that, it was impossible to get appropriate signoff on transport security (TLS over public internet was not considered adequate for regulatory compliance) so VPNs were required, which were compatible with the laboratory server software's static IP authentication. On top of that, there were additional software licencing costs at each site (generally more reasonably, typically in the $10k setup and $1-2k per year maintenance), VPN setup and maintenance costs, etc.
One of the sites balked just at the cost of getting in some networking consultants to design a compliant and workable solution. By the time we had a technically acceptable solution designed and quotes obtained, the setup costs, networking costs and licencing costs, the costs were considered unmanageable, so everyone decided to stay with paper and fax. We even toyed with the idea of replacing the laboratory IT system, as it potentially would have been cheaper, but we decided that the project risk was unacceptable given that the costs would only have been marginally less.
>"We WILL have EMR. If you pull back into your burrow and insist on staying with quill and vellum"
I am not sure who the "you" / "your" you are addressing, but if it is me, I already deal with an EMR every day. But that means nothing, because every EMR is different and there isn't that much communication between them and lots of PHI requests are from people and entities who have no access.
and so are processes in place that still require a fax to be used.
Q: Can you send me the form, filled in, by fax?
A: No, i can't because of where i live
Q: Really, where do you live?
A: in the 21st century.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
>"An E-mail getting sent to the wrong place is useless to the recipient if it's encrypted, you simpleton."
Wow, I could never have figured that out without your obvious and hostile/rude comment.
There are lots of technologies that have been superseded by newer technologies. But very often, the newer technologies don't cover well certain specific use cases.
Pagers are still in use in some locations, like hospital basements, where cell towers don't reach. The printing press is still better at printing very large numbers of copies, than computer printers. Paper is still easier to hand out at a lecture or meeting.
Faxes are not regularly hacked, making them more secure for the medical and legal industries, than email.
Many older technologies aren't COMPLETELY replaced by their newer counterparts.