By Jeffrey Sullivan, Chief Technology Officer for Consensus Cloud Solutions.
Many experts predicted 2024 would be the year of digital health maturity as companies across industries, like financial services and healthcare, modernized their use of core systems, adapted to AI in all its forms, responded to consumers’ desire for digital experiences and more.
In the rush to innovate, however, I’ve found that some leaders are denouncing pragmatic technologies, like fax, as signs of the obstacles to digital transformation that remain. It’s a view that fails to recognize that fax is also now digital and a missed opportunity to view fax as one tool in an organization’s multichannel arsenal for communication.
It’s time to let go of old perceptions of fax.
For many, the word “fax” conjures stodgy old machines and outdated technologies. In healthcare alone, some stakeholders view fax—or the healthcare industry’s overreliance on it—as an obstacle to seamless information exchange. In the legal industry, it’s still a secure, inexpensive and even preferred option for document transmission.
Certainly, fax has a long history—probably longer than most people could imagine. When Alexander Bain invented the first fax machine in the 1840s, it was used to scan images—both photographs and handwritten text—and send them over telegraph lines.
Why does the image of a paper-based, desktop fax machine prevail when cloud fax, or internet-based fax technology, has been around since the early 2000s?
Perhaps because it’s what many Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers remember most vividly from their days of primarily office-based work. Perhaps because it’s an easy tool to bash as we laugh at what used to be considered modern while acknowledging how far we’ve come.
Take a closer look, though, and you’ll see a cloud-based tool that exchanges data more quickly, efficiently, securely and cost-effectively than its paper-based predecessor. Moreover, pairing digital cloud fax with AI can achieve intelligent data extraction—the ability to pull data from scanned images, PDFs and even handwritten text.
Digital cloud fax is more secure than email and even hybrid fax environments—part cloud-based technology, part on-premises—due to the ability to wrap encrypted technology around every piece of communication sent. Even if bad actors intercept a fax, end-to-end encryption keeps them from reading the information, ensuring compliance with data privacy regulations in industries like healthcare and banking.
Deploying such technology in the cloud can also give organizations access to software updates in real time, adding an extra layer of protection in an era of increased cybersecurity attacks. That’s in addition to its cost-effectiveness, scalability, remote accessibility and seamless integration with other applications.
However, fax struggles to shed its perception as a technology relic from the pre-internet age. Digital cloud fax is the next evolution of a tool that still holds value for modern business. A decade ago, businesses in Japan found fax difficult to let go of, even as the United States’ Smithsonian Institution planned to add two fax machines to its collection of technology artifacts. Now, digital cloud fax can be viewed as a tool that can close gaps in interoperability across industries in ways that are both inexpensive and highly reliable.
With digital comes fax’s superpower.
To achieve digital maturity, we must look for ways to transform all forms of data—including unstructured data, or data that isn’t captured or stored in a standardized format—into actionable intelligence. Cloud fax can offer a pragmatic approach for achieving this state for all organizations, including those that can’t afford more advanced technologies for sharing information.
In healthcare, for example, organizations struggle to unlock data intelligence to make decisions related to clinical care and operations. Data breakdowns typically stem from challenges in transforming unstructured data (e.g., handwritten comments in patient charts or text in open-note fields of the electronic medical record) into structured intelligence. The risk that patient care will be compromised rises with every piece of inaccessible data.
When AI is applied to unstructured documents like digital cloud fax, organizations can gain the ability to pull the data needed from these scanned documents. From there, organizations can apply the data to structured fields in the electronic medical record, where those involved in a patient’s care can see it most easily. It’s an instance when AI is speeding access to clinical intelligence directly within clinicians’ workflows, strengthening care decision making.
This type of innovation doesn’t readily come to mind when we think about fax, but it should. It’s the type of digital superpower that is easily accessible even to organizations that fall lower on the digital maturity scale, not only because it’s affordable, but because it uses a technology most organizations still possess: digital fax.
Letting go of the Flintstones mindset for fax.
As tech leaders face pressure from boards to close the digital maturity gap, including with AI, it’s time to give up old notions of what fax is and where it stands as a digital communication tool. Embracing cloud fax’s potential to uplevel information exchange as part of a multichannel communication strategy is a good place to start.
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