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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.
My company has a big bank of fax machines in a locked room with badge-controlled access and all they are getting is customer orders. Surely something as sensitive as patient medical data could be physically secured as easily.
As someone who now works in health care (not the UK), I can say that this is dumb. Fax machines are actually very convenient since most documents are still filled at least partially by hand. In order to email, I would have to log onto a computer, wait for it to secure-boot then scan the doc in then open email, attach and send. For privacy reasons every time I walk away from a computer, it must be logged off. The other issue with sites that use email is that any documents with personal information (that would be all of them) must be encrypted using a unique password that must be pre-arranged with the recipient. Therefore, before I can email someone their document, I must call them and work out a password with them This would not be any great burden if it was only once a day but with the amount of documents flying around, the simplicity of dropping a document in the feeder and pushing a single button is invaluable.
The other reason that email is frowned upon in the healthcare industry is that it's far too easy to print multiple identical copies of documents. Patients more and more often want their prescriptions emailed to them and I have to tell them no. How great would it be to get a prescription for Oxy over email and then print a hundred copies, one for each pharmacy in the city?
eFax would make their heads explode.