"Matt Hancock has banned the NHS from buying fax machines and has ordered a complete phase-out by April 2020.
NHS trusts will instead be required to invest in new technology to replace outdated systems.
The ban on buying fax machines takes effect from January 2019. They will be phased out by 31 March 2020. NHS organisations will be monitored on a quarterly basis until they declare themselves ‘fax free’.
A freedom of information request revealed in July that more than 8,000 fax machines are still being used by the NHS in England
From April, NHS organisations will be required to use modern communication methods, such as secure email, to improve patient safety and cyber security."
Fax is a legally-valid method of sending a signed document, hence their continued use in healthcare and legal fields, rather than email communication adopted elsewhere.
Now for Australia, the USA and no doubt many other countries to catch up...
Neil
Photo: End of the (fax) line
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I have not heard of any spam/scam with faxing, so wonder at the cyber security and patient safety claim. But, there may be ways that are actually private and safe to communicate electronically, just not being talked about while the flavor lasts.
Fax spam and scams moved into the digital age last century! Companies would get faxed invoices for goods/services not provided and the Nigerian scam started out with snail mail letters and facsimiles. Nowadays with health records, the bigger issue is faxes not being delivered to the correct recipient, so sensitive, personal records can go anywhere!
(One annoying fax scam before received faxes were stored in fax machine memory, was joining a few sheets of paper into a loop and sending it to a victim, thereby emptying their paper tray. )
I’m incredibly relieved to hear this because it’s a technologically antiquated way to do health business, expensive (compared to email) and has safety issues if documents are faxed to a wrong number or the wrong person walks by and picks up the fax.
You also need a separate telephone line to run it.
The NHS have been awfully keen on faxing up to now so I’m glad they’re being dragged into the modern age by the Health Secretary!
Ahh memories. You could use a fax/phone switch to direct an incoming call to the appropriate device - phone or fax and combined fax/phone devices were available for small businesses.
A common annoyance was receiving a fax call on your phone line, particularly if the fax was programmed to keep sending until received. I remember learning how to redirect such calls to the fax machine number on the company PABX. The most annoying fax problem I've heard of was where a vending machine was set to send a fax report on what stock needed replenishing. It was programmed to send the report at 2AM and the number was incorrectly entered, waking a poor recipient nightly until the cause was discovered and remedied.
Down memory lane.... I first used a FAX in 1970. It took at least 10 minutes for a page to get through. You had to use special paper in a round drum that spun as the data had the machine draw out the document. It was kind of hysterical given the technology today. But that was almost 50 years ago.
"Writing in 1863, Jules Verne imagined that the Paris of the 1960s would be replete with fax machines, or as he called them, "picture-telegraphs." The technology did eventually lead to a revolution in communication, though it didn't happen until years later. It first became known to many Americans after the 1939 New York World's Fair, where a fax machine transmitted newspaper images from around the world at a rate of 18 minutes per page -- lightning speed for the time.": tech.slashdot.org/story/18/...
80 years is an incredibly long run for a communications technology. I wonder how much longer fixed line phones will be around?
I don't know that anything is secure anymore. The accounts of one medical center, and that of another doctor were both hacked, as were the accounts of many using my insurance company. Then, of course, there's equifax!
The NHS need to join up the IT systems and all the staff need to have a secure NHS email account and then everything could be transferred electronically from system to system or person to person. That's where the hard work and investment needs to go. These interfaces sometimes need to be bespoke and can cost a lot of money to maintain.
Some hospitals still choose to use non secure and non NHS email, not sure why.
I spend a lot of time at work helping people who do not use current technology. Mainly seniors (more senior then me). It's very hard for them to start from scratch (email account) and work their way to dealing with medical info. One can't assume that everyone can use or have access to current tech. There really needs to be a non-tech procedure for them. Maybe not faxing but something-
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