COVID-19 & Cloud Faxing: How Online Faxing Serves Essential Industries

In the era of COVID-19, remote communications are becoming all the more important. As such, the online fax industry has been thriving in the face of this new crisis, particularly as it causes people to think about the long-term impacts of social distancing guidelines.

While the healthcare industry has relied on HIPAA-compliant online faxing for years, this technology is most recently being observed by a new type of user: the remote worker.

With this technology serving the ever-critical "essential industries" that continue to operate during this crisis, it's important to highlight how exactly it aids workers in these industries, and how it can be innovatively used going forward.

In the Healthcare Industry

Many cloud faxing solutions are HIPAA-compliant, meaning that they obey privacy and confidentiality regulations surrounding patient data.

Often, healthcare patients require that their data be transferred to other medical professionals for consultation or analysis. For years, sending this data through traditional fax machines was the industry standard. More recently, cloud faxing has become a popular solution as it imitates the most widely used communication methods, such as email.

It is important to keep healthcare organizations streamlined, especially during the COVID-19 crisis. In some situations, communication could be hindered by the fact that some institutions will have moved on from traditional fax machines, while others continue to rely on them.

Whether it's to relay COVID-19 test results to providers, obtain a patient's medical history to assess how COVID-19 could impact them, or even just fill vital prescriptions during this time, online faxing is helping with the healthcare industry's high-demand and suddenly remote nature.

Bringing all healthcare providers onto the same level of data security and data transfer through cloud faxing would only be beneficial for vital institutions during this time. Lab results, medical records, and other sensitive documentation is sent through encrypted, HIPAA-compliant online fax systems to ensure speedy delivery and a guarantee of privacy for patients.

In the Remote Office

The onset of COVID-19 across the world has pushed all lines of work into better remote communication amongst team members. Cloud faxing has stepped up to provide a secure communication method for teams who have previously been reliant on physical fax machines located in an office.

Due to social distancing guidelines surrounding COVID-19, cloud faxing has also become a go-to solution for offices looking to help work-from-home employees without a fax machine still have access to faxing services.

There are a number of reasons that traditional fax machines are a poor solution for the modern workplace:

• The average employee spends 15 seconds walking over to the fax machine in order to send a document. This quickly adds up to lots of wasted time, and if there is a queue for the fax machine it takes even longer.
• Physical fax machines are known to be insecure and vulnerable to cyber attacks. This compromises the data of any organization using a fax machine.
• Simply misdialing a fax number can mean that your document ends up in the wrong hands, and this human error can be costly in terms of data security.
• When a document is sent through a fax machine, anyone else in the vicinity can access the same fax machine to view the document. Unless your office is a high-security environment, this could spell trouble.

Even when remote work is not in the picture, more and more offices have transitioned to online faxing because of its improved security. Whether it's to transmit secure client files or credit card authorizations between remote workplaces, an online fax solution is certainly conducive to the work-from-home lifestyle.

Cloud faxing offers end-to-end encryption and each employee only needs to connect to WiFi from their personal device to send a document. This solution reduces time spent sending documents as well as offering a more secure method of delivery.