Gary Spurge wrote:
> Accreditation demands we have a fax. This is not a problem. The
> standard does not, to my knowledge, dictate that it be turned on at
> all times.
snip

> I am still a long way short of being paperless. I have run into
> opposition fron an unexpected quarter with a lawyer at MDA National
> have reservations about shredding redundant paper based records. 
I didn't know there was an accreditation requirement to have a fax,
although it does not surprise me. It's hard to know what to make of
that. I expect many here were early adopters of fax machines. Having
access to the right information, faster is a quality improvement driver.
Faxes were a great idea when you needed information for paper based
files. Admittedly, in the early days, the thermal paper used to fade
after a year or two. The decay rate of clinical information usefulness
is high so it was not crucial but would present a medicolegal problem in
today's environment.

In today's environment we print to plain paper but also have electronic
medical records and secure electronic communications. Once again it
seems appropriate to abandon old technology and embrace the new.
Manipulating tiff files (or worse paper) is error prone, difficult to
process, not searchable and there is the risk of losing important
information. Perving at pictures is inappropriate in this digital age.
It seems almost pornographic.


> PS. Our fax, an HP 3150 was capable of saving incoming faxes to disc.
> I could then open the message and save it as a TIFF. This could then
> be imported into a patient file. Seemed like a good idea at the time.
> WOTAM.
>   
We have refined our system to make it as painless as possible. However,
it still hurts.

I'm with you Brother Spurge. Hail the Anti-Fax League.


> PPS. I will for completion past an abridged answer to OxDocIT
>   
That would be the hexadecimal list?


David

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