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UK Just Banned the National Health Service From Buying Any More Fax Machines (qz.com)
The UK's NHS will be banned from buying fax machines from next month -- and has been told by the government to phase out the machines entirely by 31 March 2020. From a report: More than 9,000 fax machines are in use by the NHS, a July survey found. All will be replaced by email, according to a report from the BBC. The shift, ordered by UK health secretary Matt Hancock, is intended to improve patient safety and make communications more secure. Rebecca McIntyre, a cognitive behavioral therapist, told the BBC that using fax machines made it difficult to ensure patient's information was actually sent to the right place, and that it wasn't being seen by non-authorized people. "You would not believe the palaver we have in the work place trying to communicate important documents to services (referrals etc)," she said. "We constantly receive faxes meant for other places in error but this is never reported." Further reading: The Fax is Not Yet Obsolete.
The fascinating part is that, at least in the health care facilities with which I am familiar, the explanation given for not using fax machines in the UK is the same reason for not using email in the US: Just change "using fax machines made it difficult to ensure patient's information was actually sent to the right place, and that it wasn't being seen by non-authorized people" to "using email made it difficult to ensure patient's information was actually sent to the right place, and that it wasn't being seen by non-authorized people."
The privacy of a phone call used for a fax is seen by these institutions as greater than the multi-hop routing of Internet email. (It used to be true that one knew (or could find out) a defined physical location for the ends of a phone call, but that, of course, is no longer true.)