Fax or Fiction: It’s Perception vs Reality With This Essential Veteran Technology

Imagine a technology of bygone days that’s still a vital communications tool today, relied upon by businesses of all shapes, sizes, industries and regions worldwide, and still needed in today’s digital transformation. No, it’s not the automobile or the lightbulb. It’s fax communications. Consider this: The latest 2017 IDC Fax Trends survey confirms the vitality of fax and its continuing growth and relevancy today.  In the survey, 75 percent of total respondents expect fax usage to grow or remain the same in the next two years while in North America it’s expected to be an even higher 88 percent!

In three markets – healthcare, legal and government – traditional fax has retained its importance. Healthcare still relies on it as a great way to exchange protected health information (PHI) in a HIPAA-compliant manner, from one physician to another. Konica Minolta’s healthcare business solutions, including its multifunction printers, can be equipped with OpenText RightFax.

In fact, the IDC survey showed that participants in healthcare expect fax usage in the coming two years to grow an average of a whopping 25 percent.

Legal environments using law firm technology and solutions like fax is a great way to keep track of all different kinds of documents sent and received, and since it’s legally binding in a court of law, it can be used as evidence when litigating cases for my clients. Not only does fax provide users with an audit trail which can track when a document was sent and received, fax documents are legally binding, too, so submitting them into evidence can be part of a very effective defense.

When dealing with government records management, federal and state agencies can process and transmit claim forms and collection notices,  and process RFIs, RFQs, RFPs and invoices with the OpenText RightFax bEST certified connector on Konica Minolta bizhub MFPs. Agencies use fax as an integral part of their business workflow since it’s universally accepted and integrated with many back-end applications.

While technology has evolved to fundamentally change how organizations interact with each other, fax technology has similarly evolved, providing the market with digital solutions that are easy to use, cost effective and enables the integration of fax with enterprise applications while still maintaining secure, trackable and auditable information possible.
According to the IDC survey, three reasons why fax volume will continue to grow in the coming years are:

• Its ease of use. Digital faxing makes it easy to track document transmission and integrates with popular business applications like email making it easy to use.
• Enterprise security and compliance. With increased risk of security breach of other communication methods, fax provides a high level of confidence that a document is sent and received with an auditable trail and supports compliance with industry regulations like HIPAA and SOX. And besides, when was the last time you heard about a fax server security breach? Probably never.
• Fax is an integral piece of many business workflows. As for business workflow integration, fax is integrated with many back-end systems, too, including ERP, CRM, EMR, document management, it has ubiquitous acceptance in almost every business and is a well-established communication method.

While some of this growth in the use of fax may be attributed to the recent economic recovery and the growth in the sheer volume of business being conducted, the results are clear and also attest to the staying power of fax technology. And that’s not fiction, that’s a fact!