[maxander]

If someone has a reasonably high-level position in a major medical services organization, and wants to help us advance as a species, here's something to push for; get your company to throw out all its fax machines.

Every office in the world can use non-fax communication technologies; they just have policies that prevent them. If they encounter a sufficiently large healthcare entity that simply shrugs at them and says "we don't do faxes," those policies won't matter, for precisely the reasons stated in the article. People will do what needs to be done to get things to happen, policy or no (if they care; if they don't, it won't get done, regardless of the number of fax machines involved.)

One organization making a stand could start the process of getting us past that particular perverse element of the medical system.