“It gets back to the question of where are the standards? Where are the mandates? Where are the business cases?” Dr. Halamka said. “For all the talk about faxes being unsecure, unreliable, 1980s tech, at least across [healthcare] disciplines, it does seem pretty universal.”
As healthcare providers, payers and pharmacies all have the telephone end nodes to enable faxes, fax still remains one of the main modes for transmitting patient records and prescriptions.
Likewise, mandates for interoperability such as the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement and the Qualified Health Information Network aren’t standardized.
“Remember that skilled nursing facilities aren’t covered by TEFCA, and pharmacies use e-prescribing versus insurance paperwork. … And then you have payors — there’s a whole other set of regulations for them,” Dr. Halamka said. “The bottom line is there’s not a comprehensive set of regulatory constraints and standards around all these providers.”
According to Dr. Halamka, post-acute care, the pharmaceutical industry and payers are still relying heavily on fax versus EHRs for information exchange.
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