undefined | Better HN

0 pointscknight7y ago0 comments

All our fax machines are already using Cisco ATAs to connect to our VoIP system anyway. Only problem I've ever had with that aspect was a dud ATA.

I know many practices use eFax though, even though it uses email and hence is against accreditation standards. Small one- or two-practitioner clinics don't have the means to trudge through the RACGP's information security standards like we do.

I did trial a local Australian eFax competitor who offered a fax-to-my-server-via-SFTP method, and was accredited with several government health agencies. The PDF image quality sucked so badly though, I couldn't run with it. Illegible. Even if it worked well though, it's still just faxes as image files, which is painful. OCR doesn't look like it'd help much, even before you think about doctors handwriting.

I've got 30 practitioners and I need incoming messages to be directed to their respective inboxes in the practice management system so we don't all go crazy.

0 comments

tomjen37y ago

Would a physical fax machine that saved the incoming faxes as a searchable PDF on a network drive make sense? It could literally just have a folder you put things in and then you could select the recipient on some webmanager.

cknightOP7y ago

At the moment we have non-searchable PDFs coming in to a network drive. These are manually reviewed and sent to the relevant GP's inbox (or to nursing or to management) as necessary, with the relevant patient selected so all the doctor has to do is read it and hit "accept" or "seen". They're not willing to do more than that, of course.

Adding in OCR to make the documents searchable doesn't help a lot on its own. Just because one of our GP's names is listed on a fax doesn't mean it's actually for them, nor does another name mean it is the patient in question. A lot of names get put on these documents. Every fax we get is laid out differently, there's no consistency of any kind. Faxes being unreliable means we are sent plenty of duplicates, half-sent documents, and upside down ones too.

Nothing can beat an electronic message that contains the recipient doctor's ID, the patient's name and birth date (we have plenty with same names), and all the other relevant info. It's the only way forward.

ocrcustomserver7y ago

If this is important to you (extraction of information like ID/name/date from non-searchable PDFs), you could send me an email and we could discuss it further.

I might be able to help you with this.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse