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by robertnn
2173 days ago
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Working as a software developer in the medical industry, I'm not at all surprised. Fax machines are everywhere in hospitals. In some sense I see it almost as a failure every time a fax is being sent.. but from a more objective view, the fax is really a very reliable form of communication. Of course, it doesn't scale very well, as the article describes. (Note that I'm not in the US, but in Sweden.) |
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I agree with you, but.
When healthcare professionals use fax machines they normally have a protocol that they work to. This lets them know that their telephone line is working, that the fax machine dialled the other number, that the other number picked up, and that the fax was sent. Some of them for urgent stuff include a final "make a call and make sure they got, and read, the fax".
The problem is that these protocols were created when fax machines were on POTS lines. Now many machines are using weird fax-to-email and back again gateways, so we get all the disadvantages of fax combined with the flakiness of email.
Fax is everywhere in healthcare, and someone designing a better safer communication tool that addresses the reasons fax is used could make a lot of money.