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?

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.

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.

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!

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!

Making Earth Hour last the whole year ‘round

This past weekend was Earth Hour, the annual event sponsored by the World Wildlife Federation where everyone around the world is asked to turn off their lights for one hour to show their support for the planet. While the actual results varied, the point wasn’t really to hit a specific number. It was to get people thinking about ways they can reduce their own carbon footprint and environmental impact on the Earth.

I guess the first question I have is did you participate? Assuming you knew it was going on (due to all the media coverage about it), did you actually turn off your lights at 8:30 PM Saturday night? And if you did, did you leave them off or turn them back on at 9:30? I did participate, and felt pretty good about it.

Still, Earth Hour was largely symbolic. People like events, and being part of a global movement. So my other question is what changes will you make to carry forward the “spirit” of Earth Hour throughout the year?

Hopefully one is to think about your use of lights overall. The easiest change you can make is to follow your Mom’s yells to turn off the lights when you leave a room. While Mom was probably more interested in saving on the family electric bill than saving the planet, it works for both.

You can also think about whether you need to turn on the lights at all – or which lights you turn on. If you’re working or playing in a room with ample natural sunlight, why not leave the lights off? Switching from incandescent bulbs to compact fluorescents (CFLs) can also help.

Of course, electricity consumption isn’t just about lights. Another easy thing you can do is turn off your computer when you’re done using it. Sure, it might take an extra minute or so while the computer boots up, but you’ll be making another contribution to the planet. I just saw an article that says half of all office workers still leave their computers powered up when they leave work. Shutting them down is an easy way to help save the planet. You can always get your morning coffee while it boots up.

Then there’s the fax machine. It’s constantly consuming power 24/7, even when it’s not doing anything. In fact, the US EPA says fax machines are the biggest power-wasters among all office equipment, even referring to them as “energy vampires.” Replacing fax machines with a green technology such as MyFax Internet fax service can have a positive effect not only on energy consumption but also on paper consumption and e-waste.

The point is, there are lots of little things we all can do to carry forth the spirit of Earth Hour. If enough of us do enough of them, those little things will add up to a significant impact. Best of all, doing them is pretty painless.

MyFax Introduces Winter ’09 Enhancements

Yesterday we announced our latest enhancements, which include several new features that we feel provide customers with increased productivity. Many of these features are based on MyFax customer feedback representing businesses of every size.

The new MyFax release includes the ability to save commonly faxed documents within MyFaxCentral, (our web-interface). Additionally, contacts to whom a fax is sent can be automatically added to the Contact Book, a feature similar to many email programs. Both of these features save MyFax customers time and increase productivity. Another time-saving feature, intended for customers with larger MyFax deployments, is the ability for account administrators to search and efficiently find users.

MyFax sends and receives faxes using an email account, removing the need for a dedicated phone line and fax machine. The service, which fully integrates with Microsoft Office, IBM Lotus Notes and ACT!, enables users to manage their fax communication and corresponding document management work flow more efficiently and at a lower cost than traditional fax servers or fax machines, regardless of physical location.

“These new enhancements make MyFax even more intuitive to use,” said Joseph Nour, CEO of Protus, the provider of MyFax. “We rely extensively on customer feedback for product improvements, and do our best to make sure we give our customers what they want. These enhancements are the latest example of that philosophy in action.”

The top new customer inspired features and enhancements include the ability to:
· Save frequently faxed documents for easy retrieval
· Automatically add new recipients to the Contact Book
· Retrieve context sensitive help at MyFaxCentral
· More efficiently locate users with search functionality on the Admin page
· Generate enhanced activity reports for enterprise customers allowing admins to generate reports by billing code

MyFax offers an uncomplicated price structure. The basic service is $10/month, includes 100 outbound and 200 inbound faxes and one year of fax storage. There is no setup fee and no hidden charges. MyFax pricing is based on usage.

MyFax recently earned its fourth straight #1 ranking Gold Award from TopTenREVIEWS, an Internet publisher of expert technology and entertainment reviews seen by millions of consumers.

Have an enhancement idea for MyFax? I’d love to hear about it!