News to Use

Today more than ever, healthcare organizations grapple with the dual challenge of tightening security while eking out higher operating margins.

Traditional fax systems, once the foundation of healthcare communication, no longer suffice. Even on-prem fax servers—to say nothing of legacy paper-based systems—may grow limited in scale, rigid in architecture, and burdensome in administration.

Security and privacy are table stakes in healthcare communications, your org may still aspire to more scalable, modern, cloud-centric infrastructure. Cloud and hybrid fax solutions, like our Private Fax Cloud®, are here to bridge the gap between your operational realities and your IT objectives.

Among myriad healthcare cloud fax offerings in 2024, Private Fax Cloud (PFC) stands out for its sophisticated security, high reliability, ease of management, and broad integrations. Below, we’ll look at its place in the fax solution landscape and explore how it positions customers to capitalize on new technological opportunities in 2024 and beyond.

Private Fax Cloud in the healthcare fax landscape

Privacy considerations aren’t remotely unique to healthcare, but in the era of HIPAA, they’re arguably more sweeping and visible than in any other industry. This makes paper faxing uniquely problematic, above and beyond its high costs, minimal throughput, and antiquated user experience.

Although paper remains common in some corners of the industry, larger providers have generally migrated their own fax infrastructure to some form of electronic service. On-prem servers predominate, and public-cloud SaaS solutions are also gaining traction. Those two architectures make opposite trade-offs between extent of control and ease of administration. But as we demand more flexibility and tighter security of every application, there’s increasing need for the middle ground of managed, hybrid solutions like Private Fax Cloud.

	Public Cloud SaaS Fax	RightFax (Standard Implementation)	Private Fax Cloud
Security Measures	Basic encryption at rest and in transit; limited audit features	Top-tier security protocols with multi-layer encryption; comprehensive audit features	Top-tier security protocols with multi-layer encryption; comprehensive audit features
HIPAA Compliance	Generally supported, but varies by vendor	Fully supported, but implementation depends on in-house IT	Tailored compliance to exceed healthcare-specific regulations
System Integration	Moderate, varies by vendor	Extensive native on-prem + SaaS + custom connectors	Extensive native on-prem + SaaS + custom connectors
Operational Scalability	Highly scalable with potential vendor limitations	Scalable to an extent with significant IT input	No practical limit; minimal impact on infrastructure
Cost Efficiency	Subscription-based, potentially higher long-term costs and less economy of scale	Higher initial costs with lower ongoing expenses	More economical over time due to bundled best practices and reduced administrative overhead
Reliability and Uptime	Generally reliable, subject to provider	Dependent on in-house IT	Highest reliability, with optional service level agreements (SLAs)
Maintenance Overhead	Minimal, handled by provider	Regular IT involvement needed	Significantly reduced, with maintenance and updates managed by our team

Trends to watch: cloud faxing in context

Enterprise-grade cloud faxing is one small part of rapid and sweeping technological evolution. Beyond solving immediate pain points, Private Fax Cloud is uniquely positioned to help customers seize broader digital trends.

1. AI and automation: The future of healthcare involves significant automation of routine tasks. PFC integrates seamlessly with AI-driven systems for more intelligent and creative workflow automation.
2. Enhanced data analytics: Faxes hold a wealth of information in complex and oft-changing formats. Recent advances in AI data extraction and analysis make it possible to find insights without monumental human effort or a rigid, template-bound data extraction system.
3. Adaptability to regulatory changes: PFC’s flexible architecture allows for quick adaptation to evolving regulations, helping your org remain compliant without extensive system overhauls.
4. Telehealth expansion: As virtual services redefine care delivery, they also necessitate secure faxing from more places and devices than ever before. PFC extends comprehensive security and centralized management to today’s distributed healthcare environment.

Setting the stage for the future of healthcare

For healthcare organizations, Private Fax Cloud is the top cloud fax offering in 2024. It not only meets stringent demands in terms of security, compliance, and efficiency, but creates a foundation for tomorrow’s AI-driven workflows.

As a fully or partially managed service, PFC is easily aligned with your existing IT capabilities and desired level of involvement. Either way, the solution is delivered “out of the box” with built-in best practices based on decades of solution architecture, implementation, and support for major regional and nationwide providers.

Contact us today to take the first step toward more secure, scalable, and seamless fax communication.

Fax as you’ve known it is a thing of the past.

It’s finally possible to quit shuffling papers, physically restricting access for HIPAA purposes, and watching transmissions vanish into the ether.

We designed Private Fax Cloud®, powered by RightFax, to bring secure healthcare communication up to 2024 standards.

• Secure transmissions to/from any device, any time, any place.
• Reliable, cost-effective IP telephony with our battle-tested best practices built in.
• A more modern, intuitive user experience that integrates with all key applications.
• Total control and transparency that public-cloud SaaS faxing can’t provide.

Traditional faxing burdens healthcare orgs

Traditional fax systems were once the backbone of healthcare communication. Today, they’re bottlenecks.

• Cost and inefficiency: Physical fax machines and dedicated lines rack up expenses, while manual document handling leads to errors and inefficiencies.
• Compliance risks: Stringent privacy standards, namely HIPAA, raise the stakes of patient information security. Safeguards on traditional faxing rely heavily on physical handling and individual human behavior. There is little to no audit trail, and virtually no way to automate the enforcement of privacy practices.
• Impact on patient care: Traditional faxing is prone to reliability issues like failed or delayed transmissions. Not only are they difficult (or impossible) to troubleshoot, but they can directly impact the speed and quality of patient care.

Private Fax Cloud customers can leave these headaches behind, avoid years of struggling with in-house fax solutions, and implement today’s best practices from day one.

What Private Fax Cloud means for you

Private Fax Cloud (PFC) is our virtualized RightFax architecture, packaged for rapid implementation, with decades of fax and telephony fine-tuning built in.

Unlike traditional fax systems or even public cloud fax services, it’s an inherently secure, efficient, and fully integrated solution that works across all major cloud vendors.

A Private Fax Cloud implementation can be fully managed by the Paperless Productivity® team or partially managed by your own staff. In either scenario, users can expect:

• Enhanced security and compliance: PFC builds on RightFax’s proven security framework to ensure end-to-end encryption that supports HIPAA standards.
• Cost reduction and ROI: The cloud-based model minimizes the financial and operational burdens of traditional faxing. If you have existing RightFax licenses, then look forward to even lower overhead and a quicker return on investment.
• Improved efficiency and reliability: Reliable fax transmissions, natively integrated with virtually all standard EHRs,  enable timelier communication with minimal manual intervention.
• Integration and scalability: PFC architecture can handle unlimited fax volume, for all practical purposes. And with several integration modules and techniques available, your fax resources are easily extended to every application you rely on.

Real-World applications in healthcare

Private Fax Cloud, powered by RightFax technology, is transforming healthcare communication in every department. It offers unparalleled security, reliability, and ROI, all wrapped up in an intuitive user experience.

• Finance and Billing: PFC ensures secure, timely transmission of highly sensitive financial documents. This not only aids in compliance with financial and privacy regulations, but also streamlines billing processes, reducing errors and improving cash flow.
• Human Resources (HR): HR departments handle sensitive employee data daily. Private Fax Cloud’s secure transmission and reliable delivery of HR documents protect privacy and streamline personnel management, from recruitment to retirement.
• Medical Records and Patient Accounts: Patient information is any provider’s chief privacy concern. Many customers use additional tools like the RightFax Enrcyption Module to encrypt fax and database images and provide and even more granular audit trail.
• Purchasing and Supply Chain Management: In fast-paced healthcare procurement, operational efficiency demands secure and efficient order processing. From automated PO transmission to invoice routing workflows, PFC eliminates the headaches of paper purchasing docs.

The future of healthcare communication

Unsurprisingly, as we move farther into 2024, healthcare communication isn’t slowing down. If your team is feeling the strain of scattered docs, burdensome privacy measures, and costly paper processes, then it’s time to explore RightFax via Private Cloud Fax.

Beyond addressing today’s challenges, it also sets the stage for tomorrow’s tech. For instance, the value you’ll ultimately get from emerging AI tools depends on the quality and comprehensiveness of the digital documents it “reads.”

Whether you’re laying the groundwork for AI capabilities or simply trying to spend less time shuffling files, it all starts with digitizing paper processes.

To start your fax modernization effort on the right foot, reach out today for a free, no-obligations talk with a veteran solutions engineer.

In 2024, OpenText RightFax is the leading fax solution for the enterprise market. Its long-standing reputation, flexible architecture, robust security, and extensive support have cemented its position in compliance-heavy sectors like healthcare and finance.

We believe RightFax will remain the first choice of enterprises aiming to digitize their paper-centric communications.

An established leader

RightFax can be cost-effective for smaller organizations and branch offices, but enterprises remain its core user base. Ever since its release in the early 1990s, it has prioritized sophisticated telecom capabilities, complex security implementations, and broad third-party integrations.

OpenText eventually acquired Captaris as well as two competitors—EasyLink and XMedius—further consolidating its fax server leadership while expanding its cloud offerings.

Today, RightFax customers span all industries, but the solution is the most visible in healthcare. It boasts native integrations with major EMR/EHR vendors (including Epic, Cerner, and MEDITECH) while supporting more secure and efficient faxing for the 7 out of 10 hospitals that still send or receive paper summary of care records.

Modern enterprise architecture

Fax itself is by no means disappearing. As always, it’s well understood, highly secure, and simply trusted.

That said, fax implementation is changing rapidly. Modern workflow requirements and escalating analog telephony costs are pushing enterprises toward cloud-centric faxing.

OpenText has consistently embraced new architecture as it matures, from VMs for fax server virtualization to cloud technology for today’s hybrid telephony.

Enterprise-grade security

Security is a main reason—perhaps the reason—that enterprises continue faxing in this day and age. But between mounting cyberattacks and broad regulations (e.g., HIPAA), it’s perpetually more difficult to secure sensitive information.

RightFax equips customers to uphold best practices in fax and telecom security.

• Active Directory sync automates user management.
• Granular audit trails and retention policies are audit-ready.
• The Encryption Module  (optional) applies 256-bit AES encryption to all fax images.
• Secure FoIP channels (optional) enable TLS 1.2 over SIP, further securing data between RightFax services and components.

A mature product with long-term support

While new SaaS fax products emerge (and often vanish) out the blue, RightFax is a mature and stable application with decades of refinement. After so many years at the forefront of enterprise faxing, each new RightFax version upholds best-in-class reliability and support.

The backing of OpenText, itself a perennial leader in information management, means customers can count on a deep support organization and a long-term roadmap that puts enterprise customers first.

Setting the standard in 2024 & beyond

At Paperless Productivity®, we implement cloud-friendly fax solutions that deliver ROI quickly and sustainably.

In 2024, as in so many years past, RightFax remains the sole platform we trust with our clients’ most critical fax workflows.

If you’re ready to learn more about RightFax and our managed Private Fax Cloud™ implementation, then reach out today to schedule time with a solutions architect.

Fax plays a pivotal role in digital transformation. This seemingly dated technology can make or break a bevy of IT trends, from cloud initiatives to remote work enablement.

We speak every single day with document-intensive businesses that are torn between a pressing need for digital transformation on the one hand, and a familiar but costly legacy fax environment on the other hand.

Below, we’ll highlight five key ways that RightFax brings secure, intuitive faxing into our age of digital, automated, cloud-first enterprise systems.

1. Remote work flexibility

Increasingly, remote work isn’t an option so much as a necessity. Whatever the reasons—accommodating staff preferences, minimizing office expenses, expanding aggressively—traditional fax machines get in the way.

Missing important faxes on a WFH day isn’t acceptable, but implementing home fax machines and dedicated lines for remote staff isn’t realistic. Not to mention sales or on-site teams that seldom spend two days in the same place!

RightFax removes these basic physical constraints. Whether at home, in the coffee shop around the corner, in a remote office, or in the airport between site visits, it’s all the same: RightFax provides a fully secure way to stay on top of critical communication.

2. Disaster recovery

Physical documents are precarious. They’re susceptible to a myriad of disasters, namely office fires (which likely number in the thousands annually) and floods.

They’re also easy to misplace.

Whatever the cause, catastrophic data loss is the result. Mitigation is possible but costly, since it revolves around physical copies, transportation, and even third-party storage.

RightFax makes it cheap, simple, and essentially instantaneous to back up faxes. That includes not only the faxes themselves, but valuable metadata like transmission info, workflow states, and even extracted text.

Calamities happen in minutes. With RightFax, so does recovery.

3. Cost-effectiveness

We’ve referred to cost several times already, but exactly which costs does RightFax reduce, and by how much?

Many direct analog fax costs vanish immediately and permanently. Think fax machines and accompanying hardware, outdated fax telephony, dedicated floorspace, document storage rooms, and consumables such as paper and toner.

Most of these costs simply fall away. As for telephony costs, estimation is more complex, and beyond the scope of this article. That said, there’s tremendous economy of scale when fax is onboarded to existing enterprise telephony. And even when dedicated RightFax telephony is still necessary, it serves many users simultaneously, so the marginal cost of any one user falls to virtually nothing.

Indirect analog fax costs tend to diminish with time and adoption. Staff time is the largest: even small teams can lose hours per day to collating paperwork, chasing down missing documents, waiting for confirmations, and inevitably addressing errors.

And that’s not to mention the costs of burdensome disaster recovery or geographical constraints, as discussed above.

These indirect costs are harder to measure but may be the largest source of savings in the long run—all the more so as labor expenses remain on the rise.

4. Overall efficiency enhancement

The point of digital transformation, by definition, is to replace manual and/or analog processes with more streamlined digital alternatives.

Paper document workflows impose massive costs, inconveniences, and risks. The examples we’ve covered above are just some of the most salient ones.

Digital workflows create efficiency both within processes (e.g., time and effort to complete) and around processes (e.g., tracking and monitoring interconnected workflows).

The key is to digitize as far upstream as possible. Ideally, that’s the moment a fax arrives. Instead of printing, physically distributing, filing, and so forth, RightFax enables immediate and auditable digital distribution. From receiving documents to triggering complex workflows, all processes become as hands-off as stakeholders desire.

5. Tracking, auditing & reporting

These days, compliance, security, and transparency are non-negotiable—and often carry huge risks in money and reputation alike.

The ability to track, audit, and report on every action is indispensable. As a centralized, enterprise-ready application, RightFax offers thorough logging, granular permissions, and comprehensive audit trails that are categorically impossible with paper-based systems.

Whether it’s for internal reviews, regulatory compliance, or simply to understand workflow patterns, RightFax provides invaluable depth and breadth of tracking.

Your next step in digital transformation

Gone are the days of faxing as a clunky, costly, paper process. With the maturity of tools like RightFax, it’s ripe for digital transformation.

Granted, different industries are collectively at different stages of fax modernization. However, odds are at least one of your competitors is currently using RightFax to transform fax from a money sink to a competitive advantage.

If digital fax transformation isn’t already table stakes in your industry, then it’s only a matter of time until it will be.

To see how RightFax or a managed Private Fax Cloud® solution can move you forward, please reach out today.

The days of analog, copper lines are numbered, according to FCC Order 19-72A1. The Commission’s August 2019 order not only releases carriers from their obligation to maintain antiquated lines, but also mandates the complete replacement of copper-based services with “alternative voice service arrangements” by August 2nd, 2022.

Although the deadline is fast approaching, it comes as no surprise to carriers or their customers. Since the late 2010s, telcos have rapidly increased rates to offset escalating maintenance costs and to push copper customers toward alternatives like fiber, LTE, or even 5G.

Newer, more cost-effective technologies—namely voice over IP (VoIP) and fax over IP (FoIP)—are well into their second decade of widespread corporate use, and adoption still seems to be picking up steam. Some industry analysts foresee IP PBX sales more than doubling in the next few years, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 14% through 2027.

The digital future of enterprise faxing

Few firms still rely on the T1-based protocols (let alone POTS lines) that were once the backbone of enterprise faxing. Long before Order 19-72A put an expiration date on traditional telephony, the business case for digital faxing was clear.

As enterprise faxing consultants, we at Paperless Productivity® have had a front-row seat to the transition from copper to IP faxing. Every new implementation in the last several years—whether for a household name or a single office—has relied on IP telephony for cost-effective communication, along with security and uptime that meet or exceed analog standards.

An enterprise-grade digital fax solution (or managed service) like RightFax also makes it relatively simple to integrate faxing into everyday tools and processes, and even extend faxing to remote workers and mobile devices.

Odds are your own organization has already migrated to IP telephony—perhaps even several years ago. In doing so, you may have discovered that there is a world of difference between a serviceable IP fax environment and a resilient and efficient one.

And that is where our consultants enter the picture. From ROI and SLAs to user experience and regulatory compliance, we specialize in building (or optimizing) RightFax solutions that keep users productive, Finance delighted, and Legal satisfied.

If you’re contemplating an IP fax implementation, or looking to get more from an existing one, then contact us for a no-obligations chat with a solutions architect.