We’re so excited to share the first of many podcasts we’ll be conducting with our Director, Product Marketing and various customers. We hope to inform, educate and give you a peek inside MyFax.
Our first podcast features how Chris Prescott of Coldwell Banker, who uses MyFax to streamline his real estate business operations.
Listen, and let us know what you think of our first run at a podcast, and what topics you’d like to see covered in the future!
Thursday, July 09, 2009
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
The Heart of MyFax
Typically we use this blog to share tips and tricks about MyFax and small business communications. Today I’d like to do something a bit different and give you a personal look at all of us at MyFax and at our company Protus.
I am really proud of the people I work with. We provide great products. We all get great satisfaction from hearing this from our customers. But at MyFax, this isn’t all we live for. Our company has chosen to work with the Canadian Cancer Society and its Relay for Life program. We’ve been involved for the past five years, donating time, money and as of this year, sponsorships. This year we raised over $30,500 for the Canadian Cancer Society.
We began fundraising several weeks prior to the annual 12-hour relay at the Nepean Sportsplex on June 12, 2009. The company raffled off retreats with executives. We paid to throw pies at our bosses and watch the accounting department shave their heads. We had a lot of fun voting with loose change on daily opinion polls that often pitted one department against another. And we held silent auctions, a garage sale, cook-offs and all sorts of other food-related fundraising. As a result, Protus raised the most funds as a team, totaling nearly $150 per employee. In fact my co-worker Pat Risdon raised the most money by an individual for the Ottawa-Nepean community.
Personally, something really struck me this year as we celebrated our efforts at our picnic. Protus has retained its personal approach and commitment to this annual event. This effort started from humble beginnings based on a very personal journey of one employee. Despite our growing size, everyone still embraces the company’s charity of choice as their own. I am really honored to be a part of this professional family. There truly is a heart behind the company.
Relay For Life is a celebration of survival, a tribute to the lives of loved ones and an opportunity to fight back in the battle against cancer. Teams of 10 take turns running, walking or strolling around the track in this non-competitive 12-hour relay. Taking part in this heart-warming event creates a strong community of people striving to reach a common goal – to beat cancer. The Canadian Cancer Society is the largest charitable funder of cancer research in Canada. The funds raised by Relay For Life are used to support life-saving research, provide information on cancer prevention and to offer support services to those living with cancer.
I am really proud of the people I work with. We provide great products. We all get great satisfaction from hearing this from our customers. But at MyFax, this isn’t all we live for. Our company has chosen to work with the Canadian Cancer Society and its Relay for Life program. We’ve been involved for the past five years, donating time, money and as of this year, sponsorships. This year we raised over $30,500 for the Canadian Cancer Society.
We began fundraising several weeks prior to the annual 12-hour relay at the Nepean Sportsplex on June 12, 2009. The company raffled off retreats with executives. We paid to throw pies at our bosses and watch the accounting department shave their heads. We had a lot of fun voting with loose change on daily opinion polls that often pitted one department against another. And we held silent auctions, a garage sale, cook-offs and all sorts of other food-related fundraising. As a result, Protus raised the most funds as a team, totaling nearly $150 per employee. In fact my co-worker Pat Risdon raised the most money by an individual for the Ottawa-Nepean community.
Personally, something really struck me this year as we celebrated our efforts at our picnic. Protus has retained its personal approach and commitment to this annual event. This effort started from humble beginnings based on a very personal journey of one employee. Despite our growing size, everyone still embraces the company’s charity of choice as their own. I am really honored to be a part of this professional family. There truly is a heart behind the company.
Relay For Life is a celebration of survival, a tribute to the lives of loved ones and an opportunity to fight back in the battle against cancer. Teams of 10 take turns running, walking or strolling around the track in this non-competitive 12-hour relay. Taking part in this heart-warming event creates a strong community of people striving to reach a common goal – to beat cancer. The Canadian Cancer Society is the largest charitable funder of cancer research in Canada. The funds raised by Relay For Life are used to support life-saving research, provide information on cancer prevention and to offer support services to those living with cancer.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Want to reach your doctor? Try faxing!
I originally heard this fact from a customer of ours, but since then I’ve heard it from other sources as well: doctors don’t like to give out their email addresses. They don’t like to give them to hospitals. And they don’t like to give them to patients.
The reason is they’re afraid their inboxes would be inundated with email on a wide variety of subjects – most of which are of no interest to them. For example, it may be good to know that the hospital they’re associated with now has healthier choices in the cafeteria, but they don’t want to see it in their inbox. Same with the change in their pharmaceutical representative – they’ll find that out during the next sales call.
But what happens if they need to receive information on a patient being referred to them? It’s certainly important to know the patient’s history, any medications they’re already taking, any preliminary diagnoses, etc.
Most likely they’re going to receive that information via fax. It’s just the way many doctors prefer to work.
What that means to you is that doctors (or their office staff) check faxes more frequently, and with more interest, than they check email. So if you need to get some information to your doctor, or you want to make sure a message gets the attention it deserves, forget email and instead send a fax. Otherwise your message may do what most of us often do at the doctor’s office – sit around waiting forever.
Have any of you tried contacting your doctor via fax? And if you’re a doctor, has this been your experience too?
Thursday, April 30, 2009
The most popular ways for businesses to grow green
Saw this post today while poking around the Internet doing a little research. It quotes a survey performed by CareerBuilder.com looking at what the most popular environmentally-related jobs are. While surveying, they also asked the companies surveyed what green programs they have been latching onto in the last year. A whopping 70 % of those polled said they had taken some measures to go green in the last 12 months.
The top 2 green initiatives had to do with paper use. First was recycling. Of the companies surveyed, 50% said they were now recycling. Right behind that was using less paper, at 45 %.
Now, there’s no doubt that using less paper is a better measure than recycling. After all, there is an environmental “cost” to the recycling process. Put into simple terms, it’s better not to have to print a fax (as with MyFax) than to print it on a fax machine and then recycle the paper. But either is preferable to your faxes winding up in a landfill.
Number 4on the list, by the way, was powering down computers at the end of the day, which 30% of the companies said they’d started doing. That’s one of those cases where convenience and environmental responsibility kind of fight each other.
The reason a lot of people leave their computers on at the end of the day is they don’t want to wait for them to boot up the next morning. We as a society don’t have much patience, and waiting a minute or more for a computer to come seems like an eternity. Yet energy is being wasted every second a computer is running with no one in front of it. All you really need to do to help the planet is get into work one minute earlier, let the computer boot up, and get a cup of coffee or say hi to your co-workers. Is that really so hard?
Of course, anyone who’s even considering turning off their computers at the end of the day to save energy really ought to be looking at replacing their fax machines too. Because they have to be ready to receive at any time, fax machines are always drawing power – 24/7/365. It may not be a lot at a given minute, but over time it adds up.
A MyFax account allows you to eliminate the machine entirely. You send and receive faxes through another device that’s already on – such as that computer you’re powering down at night. As a bonus you also won’t be tossing another machine (and its toxic materials) into the waste stream.
When you really think about it, a MyFax account allows you to comply with 3 of the top 4 most popular green measures. That’s a pretty good deal. Sorry, you’ll have to figure out the lights on your own.
The top 2 green initiatives had to do with paper use. First was recycling. Of the companies surveyed, 50% said they were now recycling. Right behind that was using less paper, at 45 %.
Now, there’s no doubt that using less paper is a better measure than recycling. After all, there is an environmental “cost” to the recycling process. Put into simple terms, it’s better not to have to print a fax (as with MyFax) than to print it on a fax machine and then recycle the paper. But either is preferable to your faxes winding up in a landfill.
Number 4on the list, by the way, was powering down computers at the end of the day, which 30% of the companies said they’d started doing. That’s one of those cases where convenience and environmental responsibility kind of fight each other.
The reason a lot of people leave their computers on at the end of the day is they don’t want to wait for them to boot up the next morning. We as a society don’t have much patience, and waiting a minute or more for a computer to come seems like an eternity. Yet energy is being wasted every second a computer is running with no one in front of it. All you really need to do to help the planet is get into work one minute earlier, let the computer boot up, and get a cup of coffee or say hi to your co-workers. Is that really so hard?
Of course, anyone who’s even considering turning off their computers at the end of the day to save energy really ought to be looking at replacing their fax machines too. Because they have to be ready to receive at any time, fax machines are always drawing power – 24/7/365. It may not be a lot at a given minute, but over time it adds up.
A MyFax account allows you to eliminate the machine entirely. You send and receive faxes through another device that’s already on – such as that computer you’re powering down at night. As a bonus you also won’t be tossing another machine (and its toxic materials) into the waste stream.
When you really think about it, a MyFax account allows you to comply with 3 of the top 4 most popular green measures. That’s a pretty good deal. Sorry, you’ll have to figure out the lights on your own.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Faxing is still a core technology in healthcare
Here’s something that may surprise you: Despite the impression we’re often given by Hollywood, most doctors and hospitals aren’t using ultra-sophisticated electronic systems with really cool, colorful images to document, manage and share patient information. They’re still using handwritten notes, the phone and faxes.
That’s a fact that is reinforced in this post from The Health Care Blog. In it, author Margarlit Gur-Arie says that doctors currently transfer data everyday using common tools like the phone and fax. While there has been a lot of talk about moving to electronic health records (EHR), so far there’s more talk than movement in a lot of quarters. And a lot of skepticism.
The extensive use of faxing is certainly a reality at Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) Medical Center. According to MyFax customer Sujit Kar, IT manager for business development and marketing at MUSC, the Medical Center processes 50,000 inbound fax pages and another 10,000 outbound fax pages each month. When you do the math, it adds up to nearly three quarters of a million faxed pages each year!
That’s a lot of information to manage, especially given the stringent requirements of the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Mishandling just one of those faxed pages could put MUSC Medical Center at risk of a HIPAA violation, which wouldn’t be good for anyone. In fact, reducing HIPAA violations is one of the major reasons MUSC Medical Center got rid of its fax machines and switched to MyFax. You can read more about it here.
Perhaps someday reality will measure up to Hollywood. Until that time, it’s good to know there are alternatives like MyFax that can protect your information and make the whole process more efficient.
That’s a fact that is reinforced in this post from The Health Care Blog. In it, author Margarlit Gur-Arie says that doctors currently transfer data everyday using common tools like the phone and fax. While there has been a lot of talk about moving to electronic health records (EHR), so far there’s more talk than movement in a lot of quarters. And a lot of skepticism.
The extensive use of faxing is certainly a reality at Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) Medical Center. According to MyFax customer Sujit Kar, IT manager for business development and marketing at MUSC, the Medical Center processes 50,000 inbound fax pages and another 10,000 outbound fax pages each month. When you do the math, it adds up to nearly three quarters of a million faxed pages each year!
That’s a lot of information to manage, especially given the stringent requirements of the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Mishandling just one of those faxed pages could put MUSC Medical Center at risk of a HIPAA violation, which wouldn’t be good for anyone. In fact, reducing HIPAA violations is one of the major reasons MUSC Medical Center got rid of its fax machines and switched to MyFax. You can read more about it here.
Perhaps someday reality will measure up to Hollywood. Until that time, it’s good to know there are alternatives like MyFax that can protect your information and make the whole process more efficient.
Monday, April 13, 2009
Taxes and Faxes
Yikes! For those of us who dread doing our taxes (and thus put it off as long as we can), it’s coming down to crunch time. The US deadline is April 15, so the pressure is on.
That’s where MyFax comes in handy. If you already have a MyFax account, you can use it to fax over your documents to your tax preparer’s fax machine – a device most still use regularly. A quick fax will get the document(s) in his or her hands so your taxes can be filed on time. Incidentally, faxes are generally considered to be more secure than email anyway!
What if you don’t have a MyFax account? That’s a good reason to try MyFax Free, the no-cost version that allows you to send two faxes of up to 10 pages each per day. Remember, the IRS looks on tardiness about the same way as your third grade teacher did. Get your taxes done now and you won’t have to worry about them for another year. Hopefully!
That’s where MyFax comes in handy. If you already have a MyFax account, you can use it to fax over your documents to your tax preparer’s fax machine – a device most still use regularly. A quick fax will get the document(s) in his or her hands so your taxes can be filed on time. Incidentally, faxes are generally considered to be more secure than email anyway!
What if you don’t have a MyFax account? That’s a good reason to try MyFax Free, the no-cost version that allows you to send two faxes of up to 10 pages each per day. Remember, the IRS looks on tardiness about the same way as your third grade teacher did. Get your taxes done now and you won’t have to worry about them for another year. Hopefully!
Friday, April 03, 2009
Out in the Midwest is the city I love best – MyFax is speaking at HIMSS in Chicago!
MyFax’s Director of Global Sales, Dinesh Kandanchatha, will be a featured speaker at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Annual Conference to be held in Chicago April 4-8. HIMSS is the healthcare industry's membership organization exclusively focused on providing global leadership for the optimal use of healthcare information technology (IT) and management systems for the betterment of healthcare.
MyFax will also exhibit at the conference and if you’re there please stop by booth #675 and say hello.
Following are details for the event:
What: New Solutions: Fax Evolution for Healthcare IT
IT Healthcare managers are looking to target shrinking healthcare dollars towards mission fulfillment and privacy protection instead of administrative costs. Fax machines and servers sit front and center in this debate. The case will be presented on how a leading hospital evolved their faxing infrastructure significantly reducing their technology costs while enhancing their positions on electronic medical records, patient privacy, and legislative compliance.
When: Sunday, April 5, 4:15 PM - 5:00 PM
Where: McCormick Center, New Solutions, Room 5049
Oh and can anyone name the musical I referenced in the title? Bonus point if you can tell me who played the title role(s)–hint hint- in the movie!
MyFax will also exhibit at the conference and if you’re there please stop by booth #675 and say hello.
Following are details for the event:
What: New Solutions: Fax Evolution for Healthcare IT
IT Healthcare managers are looking to target shrinking healthcare dollars towards mission fulfillment and privacy protection instead of administrative costs. Fax machines and servers sit front and center in this debate. The case will be presented on how a leading hospital evolved their faxing infrastructure significantly reducing their technology costs while enhancing their positions on electronic medical records, patient privacy, and legislative compliance.
When: Sunday, April 5, 4:15 PM - 5:00 PM
Where: McCormick Center, New Solutions, Room 5049
Oh and can anyone name the musical I referenced in the title? Bonus point if you can tell me who played the title role(s)–hint hint- in the movie!
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