I wonder how this squares with the NBN, given that, once activated, the traditional phone line ceases to exist, and you use VoIP instead. And that the POTS will be entirely deactivated (in theory) once rollout is complete.
Talking more about citizens phone lines than medical stuff now, but...
Surprise, surprise, all of a sudden there's no warrant necessary for wiretapping.
Wonder how many of our elected representatives are working long hours to fix that curious oversight?
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.
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.
I might be able to help you with this.