Paperless Faxing for Healthcare and NHS | eFax Corporate
Healthcare professionals will be all too familiar with the data security procedures involved in patient confidentiality, but your office’s technical equipment may unintentionally putting your
Are You Meeting NHS Fax Policy and Healthcare Regulations?
Article overview:
The Risks of Physical Fax Machines for the NHS
Physical fax machines provide a backbone for NHS communication and document transmission. However, they also have a number of associated risk factors that present problems for patient data.
Submission of fax documents through physical fax machines creates opportunities for:
Unauthorised access- Theft or loss of sensitive information
- The potential for transference to unintended parties through misdialing.
These risk factors put you at odds with data protection acts, HIPAA and GDPR. Failure to meet the requirements established by these laws can result in major financial and legal consequences.
In order to achieve better compliance, a change is required. But what can the NHS do?
How Online Cloud Faxing Provides a Paperless Solution
eFax online cloud-faxing solutions remove the need for physical fax machines, thus lowering
By upgrading your faxing services to eFax, you will:
- See improvements to document sharing security
- Boost your compliance with GDPR, HIPAA and data protection acts
- Achieve level 3 NHS Digital compliance for fax transmission.
Our solutions have other benefits as well, such as reduced costs of operation and increased productivity.
eFax is simple to integrate into your current IT systems and affordable, too. Prices start at just £11.00 per month. Join today and experience unlimited access to all our services free for 30 days. Discover how we can transform your fax processing. No contracts; no commitments; cancel anytime
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Patient information and confidentiality
Because of this, it is important to keep your office’s fax infrastructure NHS compliant and as secure as possible.
The Problem With Fax Machines in the NHS
One of the main security issues with traditional desktop fax machines is the physical sending and receiving of sensitive paper documents, which are often left sitting on or around community fax machines and can be viewed and accessed openly
These newly-created paper documents could fall into the hands of individuals not
Even fax servers present security issues. For example, when an enterprise fax server’s hard drive reaches capacity, standard procedure is for an administrator to “purge” the contents — which often means printing out the
Another issue is that many fax servers do not encrypt their hard drive’s data effectively, which creates another security weak point for the company. This can be particularly troublesome if the server is connected to the
Using eFax Corporate, our secure paperless faxing service, all faxes are protected with TLS encryption and are fully compliant with NHS Digital and other industry privacy standards.
The HIPAA Compliant Fax Solution for Healthcare
Dealing with international faxes is an everyday occurrence for many companies, but for members of the NHS who liaise with American hospitals or medical institutions, it is important that they understand and adhere to HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act).
This act places importance on the protection of sensitive patient information. For this reason, all correspondence between British and American medical
For companies that work on the periphery of the NHS, eFax Corporate offers an efficient and secure method of communication. For example, a doctor’s office may need to liaise and forward documents to NHS institutions or to pharmacies, whilst also requiring out-of-office access to these faxes.
Online faxing means that faxes can be access via email at any time from any device so staff members do not need to be at work to receive or send faxes.
eFax Corporate and NHS Fax Compliance
The Information Governance Toolkit is a Department of Health (DH) Policy delivery vehicle that the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) is commissioned to develop and maintain. It draws together the legal rules and central guidance set out by DH policy and presents them in a single standard as a set of information governance requirements.
eFax Corporate has completed the IG Toolkit Assessment and achieved Level 3 – the highest level attainable, meaning our faxing services and our privacy and security policies meet the standards and requirements as outlined by the NHS Digital.
eFax Corporate Secure Encryption: Protecting Patient Confidentiality
Unparalleled security is one of the main reasons why eFax Corporate has become one of the most trusted brands in
And in light of the recent Ransomware attacks on the NHS and other medical institutions, it’s never been as important to make sure that your patient data is completely secure.
Besides
- Lower business faxing costs.
- Increase staff productivity.
- Boosted security, in terms of fax transmissions and stored documents.
- Reduced machine maintenance and improved IT team efficiencies.
With the ever-rising threat of cyber-hacking, your organisation can’t afford to leave communication protocols open to threats. The sending or receiving of ePHI (Electronic Protected Health Information) might leave your practice vulnerable to hackers or NHS security violations.
To learn more about how eFax Corporate can help with your business’s communication efforts, watch the above video or contact us to receive a free custom quote.
