Healthcare Fax and Secure Email

The use of Fax is prevalent in some of the older processes in Healthcare. Technical upgrades in the last several decades made the automatic email to fax services prevalent. There are services like metrofax.com that we integrated wherein a user can purchase a fax number with them, for example 999-999-9999 and then all faxes received on this fax number 999-999-9999 can be viewed online on a web interfaceofmetrofax.com.

Faxes are sent using API services that are available by providers such as Twilio. Several factors need to be taken into consideration when a fax sending system is designed. The fax machine at the other end can be busy in receiving another fax, so our program needs to wait or retry until the fax machine at the other side becomes available for receiving our fax transmission. Otherwise the fax sending fails and a retry has to be done. These retries of sending the fax need to be tracked accordingly. In case there are many faxes to be sent out, then the software program design has to be built accordingly in a parallel manner to be capable of sending several faxes simultaneously. For this to happen multiple outgoing lines are needed for parallel sending of faxes or the API that is uses has to be capable of handling multiple parallel connections.

Fax has been replaced in most places by Email. The challenges posed by email and their solutions are discussed next.