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Cake day: March 13th, 2024

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  • Point of fact, I’m not bobs_monkey, the originator of the rhetorical tone. Fax in healthcare continues to survive well past its prime because there is an inherent loophole: analog data transfer is functionally unsuited to encryption. This allows fax to be operated at a “best effort” level of security. There are handling protocols that are meant to keep traditional fax transmissions as private as possible, but these are layer 8 processes with limited enforceability. Beyond that, traditional fax represents a pathway around requirements on encryption while still meeting HIPAA compliance standards.

    FOIP is an improvement, but it still allows for interoperability with a traditional fax machine connected to a POTS line in some GP’s office that they’re unwilling to part with. That means the FOIP user can only be confident of the transmission being secure on their side. I can’t speak to the overall adaptation of FOIP in hospital systems, but I do know that there are non-isolated instances of hospitals still relying on traditional fax as opposed to adopting a cloud-fax solution. Hell, there are still major hospitals using SL-100s as their primary phone switches.

    I don’t even want to get into codec mismatches, because that falls out of scope when it comes to a privacy discussion.

    Long story short, achieving HIPAA compliance is a low bar with regards to fax, and if that were to change I believe we’d see fax disappear (finally!) shortly thereafter.




  • “Landmine has taken my sight, taken my speech, taken my hearing…”

    I guess someone forgot to tell Metallica when they were writing the song that it wasn’t about a landmine.

    And I guess someone previously forgot to tell Dalton Trumbo when he wrote Johnny Got His Gun that it wasn’t an anti-war novel.

    And then they forgot to tell him again thirty-two years later when he directed the movie adaptation, Johnny Got His Gun.

    And then, worst of all, they forgot to tell the directors of the music video that “One” was anti-war and Johnny Got His Gun was about a landmine and that using scenes from the film in the music video wouldn’t be thematically appropriate.

    Damn, there were a lot of missteps! Good thing you set it all straight!


  • To add to your point regarding additional functions inherent in smartphones: pagers do one thing. They’re relatively simple devices. Simplicity means that there are fewer things that can cause the device to function incorrectly or fail to function altogether. In hospital communications use-cases, this is a huge benefit.

    Additionally, pagers are relatively inexpensive. Therefore, it’s much more effective to have multiple spares available for distribution compared to smartphones. If a pager is inoperable, it can quickly be swapped out with a backup while the original is repaired or replaced. Smartphones do not carry that benefit.