this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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Fax machines are still used in healthcare!
There is an overwhelming amount of healthcare admin where software could help.
Computers are designed for messaging, data manipulation, deduplication... stuff that people are drowning in because the existing software sucks or doesn't exist.
Yet we see pie-in-the-sky "AI" (LLMs? who knows?) projects being funded.
(I worked as a manager at an Australian general practice. Assuming the US is similar? )
@technology @throws_lemy
Recently had a "incident" when I found out one of my doctors didn't have email and I needed to get a form to them to complete and send back before another different doctors appointment. Normally I'd just sigh and drive back but this doctors office would have been another 1hr round trip.
Ended up signing up for a free efax trial then worrying all day as I didn't get the form back. Call in the morning and they had decided to just fax it to the other doctor for me, and did so shortly after they received the form, but didn't think it important to tell me. Murder definitely crossed my mind a few times that day.
If I remember correctly, fax machines are still used because they’re a “secure” method of transmitting sensitive patient information. Regulations are keeping that inefficient dinosaur alive.
They’re of course not secure, but people who are tech literate rarely draft this kind of legislation.
They are point to point communication devices with no intermediate storage along the way.
So from a point of view of "don't store copies of this data except at the sender's and receiver's locations, which are already set up to handle sensitive data", they meet requirements in a simple to implement manner.
Absolutely!
Although… snail mail is also legislated to be secure. It’s not used as often because there is a more convenient, better(?) alternative: fax. I wish some funding for so-called “AI” projects could be used to develop even more convenient/better alternatives to fax. There are messaging protocols but they seemed crazy.
Payment systems are crazy too. Stripe did all the boring work and now there is a convenient interface for payment processing: Stripe’s HTTP API.
@technology @Car