Fax: Sangoma FAXstation
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@scottalanmiller said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@dashrender said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
We'd need a way to send faxes. Sure we could use the email gateway service, but most users wouldn't find it easier or more convenient than the current bellying up to a machine, load paper and hit send.
Boy that sounds like a lot of work. Print, get up, walk, remember number, stand around, make call to verify fax is working and received, deal with secure paper to be destroyed, go back to desk.
Email
Which of those sounds like more work?
While those are great in principal - no one does that.
And as I mentioned, we are faxing less than 100 pages a day, and really it's probably more like 100 pages a week.
Dealing with digital to paper to digital or even digital to digital - it's all a pain in the ass.
Plus in our case, most of the things being faxes are already in paper form. -
@scottalanmiller said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@dashrender said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@scottalanmiller said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@dashrender said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@scottalanmiller said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@dashrender said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@scottalanmiller said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@dashrender said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
in your email
Email would just be a file server in that case. What do you have now, how do the files get to your NAS?
As a reminder - having the faxes go to email would be an extra step for those that process our faxes that isn't needed 95% of the time.
Why would that be an extra step? You just have a script that pops them into the NAS.
I'm completely unfamiliar with that - OK so that gets rid of that.
But the cost is still 5x greater.
Yes, if the cost is that much higher.
What service are you using now?
I'm not sure I understand the question.
Today we have two POTS lines from Cox at $35/ea for a total of $70. The mopiers have built in fax machines, they answer the calls and dump the faxes into the network share.
I'm not using any fax service today.
Oh right, and no cost on the fax lines? It's unlimited minutes beyond the base cost?
Correct.
That's why i don't understand these faxing solutions. If the solution costs more than $40-50 a month, they are a complete rip. You can get a POTS line for around that with unlimited incoming and outgoing, and then you can buy a fax server for around $500 (or setup a FreePBX box with an attached modem). Depending on your volume, you could see an ROI in the first year. -
@dashrender said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@scottalanmiller said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@dashrender said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@scottalanmiller said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@dashrender said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@scottalanmiller said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@dashrender said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@scottalanmiller said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@dashrender said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
in your email
Email would just be a file server in that case. What do you have now, how do the files get to your NAS?
As a reminder - having the faxes go to email would be an extra step for those that process our faxes that isn't needed 95% of the time.
Why would that be an extra step? You just have a script that pops them into the NAS.
I'm completely unfamiliar with that - OK so that gets rid of that.
But the cost is still 5x greater.
Yes, if the cost is that much higher.
What service are you using now?
I'm not sure I understand the question.
Today we have two POTS lines from Cox at $35/ea for a total of $70. The mopiers have built in fax machines, they answer the calls and dump the faxes into the network share.
I'm not using any fax service today.
Oh right, and no cost on the fax lines? It's unlimited minutes beyond the base cost?
Correct.
That's why i don't understand these faxing solutions. If the solution costs more than $40-50 a month, they are a complete rip. You can get a POTS line for around that with unlimited incoming and outgoing, and then you can buy a fax server for around $500 (or setup a FreePBX box with an attached modem). Depending on your volume, you could see an ROI in the first year.Well, there are lots of assumptions that might be pretty likely, but don't always work.
Some reasons why these remain important:
- Not every market has reliable POTS service. Rochester does not. Faxes are pretty unreliable there, even on POTS.
- POTS lines are not portable. What if you want your company to handle multiple markets or be flexible in physical location?
- What if you have a normal volume of faxes? You get an absurd number, most people only get a small amount. Paying by the minute or getting a different service might make that very cheap. A lot of people could make due with just a few dollars of pay by the minute faxes a month.
- Just because voip.ms makes their unlimited "meant for residential" doesn't mean that everyone does. Our commercial lines at NTG are unlimited incoming and handle fax. So we have 400$ your capacity at a fraction of your cost today.
- Not everyone wants to deal with paper and paper processes. Especially if their staff are not physically in an office.
- People might need to fax from home, not just the office.
- Not everyone owns fax machines. So that's added cost.
- Not everyone uses local storage in the office.
- You have to figure the costs of paper, waiting on faxes and such into the total cost.
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@scottalanmiller but the points @Dashrender are referencing are specific to his case. He has never stated otherwise.
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@jaredbusch said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@scottalanmiller but the points @Dashrender are referencing are specific to his case. He has never stated otherwise.
I was responding to him saying that he didn't understand these solutions. As if they had no reason to exist.
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@scottalanmiller What solution does NTG use for faxing?
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@fateknollogee said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@scottalanmiller What solution does NTG use for faxing?
Nothing, we just discussed it like two days ago, we have literally zero faxing needs and have no way to send a traditional fax. But as we only need to do it once a year or so, we normally can find some way to do it easily - just emailing something to @Dashrender to fax, for example.
Being a tech firm, faxing really has no reason to come up.
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By just discussed it two days ago, I mean the team internally. We wanted to test a fax for something and no one even has a fax machine to test with. No matter what we do, it originates on a computer as we've been paperless for over a decade.
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@scottalanmiller said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@jaredbusch said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@scottalanmiller but the points @Dashrender are referencing are specific to his case. He has never stated otherwise.
I was responding to him saying that he didn't understand these solutions. As if they had no reason to exist.
I get why you see what I said to say that, but that's an extreme version of what I was saying. Sure, those other solutions have their place. But as noted, they would significantly increase our costs.
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Believe me, I wish faxing would just go away...
Unfortunately, folks in the medical field love to fax...it's like they're stuck in a bad dream. -
In my office, we are going to look at having our EHR company receive all faxes directly. This would remote the upload process we currently have - move onto associated incoming faxes to the correct patient, etc. Non patient faxes would then be downloaded from our EHR and distributed internally.
At that point we could move to worrying about outbound only faxes, and one of these solutions might work, at minimum, we could reduce to a single faxline. -
@fateknollogee said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
Believe me, I wish faxing would just go away...
Unfortunately, folks in the medical field love to fax...it's like they're stuck in a bad dream.If only direct messaging would really work.
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@fateknollogee said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
Believe me, I wish faxing would just go away...
Unfortunately, folks in the medical field love to fax...it's like they're stuck in a bad dream.One of the many reasons that I don't trust doctors. Intentionaly insecure, inefficient... doing things that would be considered incompetent and unprofessional in any other field.
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@dashrender said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@fateknollogee said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
Believe me, I wish faxing would just go away...
Unfortunately, folks in the medical field love to fax...it's like they're stuck in a bad dream.If only direct messaging would really work.
What do you mean? It works really well.
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@scottalanmiller said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@fateknollogee said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
Believe me, I wish faxing would just go away...
Unfortunately, folks in the medical field love to fax...it's like they're stuck in a bad dream.One of the many reasons that I don't trust doctors. Intentionaly insecure, inefficient... doing things that would be considered incompetent and unprofessional in any other field.
You can't just saddle this on medicine.. Lawyers seem stuck here too. Perhaps not as bad as medicine.
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@dashrender said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@scottalanmiller said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@fateknollogee said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
Believe me, I wish faxing would just go away...
Unfortunately, folks in the medical field love to fax...it's like they're stuck in a bad dream.One of the many reasons that I don't trust doctors. Intentionaly insecure, inefficient... doing things that would be considered incompetent and unprofessional in any other field.
You can't just saddle this on medicine.. Lawyers seem stuck here too. Perhaps not as bad as medicine.
Yeah, but you don't have HIPAA to protect a lawyer. You catch a lawyer doing this with your data, you've got them in court. A doctor has HIPAA to justify not following industrial minimal standards.
That said, I've never seen a lawyer do this and, unlike doctors, you can just drop a lawyer. Lawyers aren't a monopoly.
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@scottalanmiller said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@dashrender said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@fateknollogee said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
Believe me, I wish faxing would just go away...
Unfortunately, folks in the medical field love to fax...it's like they're stuck in a bad dream.If only direct messaging would really work.
What do you mean? It works really well.
You're probably right from a pure tech solution (here is info on Direct Messaging - https://www.healthit.gov/policy-researchers-implementers/direct-project).
But like HL7, DM rarely ever seems to just work. Those using it have to create convertors to get data into different systems.We get DMs now and then, and they don't integrate correctly into our system without intervention.
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@dashrender said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@scottalanmiller said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@dashrender said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@fateknollogee said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
Believe me, I wish faxing would just go away...
Unfortunately, folks in the medical field love to fax...it's like they're stuck in a bad dream.If only direct messaging would really work.
What do you mean? It works really well.
You're probably right from a pure tech solution (here is info on Direct Messaging - https://www.healthit.gov/policy-researchers-implementers/direct-project).
But like HL7, DM rarely ever seems to just work. Those using it have to create convertors to get data into different systems.We get DMs now and then, and they don't integrate correctly into our system without intervention.
But there are SO many ways to handle this. If you want centralized, you have big players like Google. If you want peer to peer, that's all email is.
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@scottalanmiller said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@dashrender said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@scottalanmiller said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@fateknollogee said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
Believe me, I wish faxing would just go away...
Unfortunately, folks in the medical field love to fax...it's like they're stuck in a bad dream.One of the many reasons that I don't trust doctors. Intentionaly insecure, inefficient... doing things that would be considered incompetent and unprofessional in any other field.
You can't just saddle this on medicine.. Lawyers seem stuck here too. Perhaps not as bad as medicine.
Yeah, but you don't have HIPAA to protect a lawyer. You catch a lawyer doing this with your data, you've got them in court. A doctor has HIPAA to justify not following industrial minimal standards.
That said, I've never seen a lawyer do this and, unlike doctors, you can just drop a lawyer. Lawyers aren't a monopoly.
Other than emergent situations, you can drop a doctor. It's very likely that a fax will be relied upon during an emergent situation.
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@scottalanmiller said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@dashrender said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@scottalanmiller said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@dashrender said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
@fateknollogee said in Fax: Sangoma FAXstation:
Believe me, I wish faxing would just go away...
Unfortunately, folks in the medical field love to fax...it's like they're stuck in a bad dream.If only direct messaging would really work.
What do you mean? It works really well.
You're probably right from a pure tech solution (here is info on Direct Messaging - https://www.healthit.gov/policy-researchers-implementers/direct-project).
But like HL7, DM rarely ever seems to just work. Those using it have to create convertors to get data into different systems.We get DMs now and then, and they don't integrate correctly into our system without intervention.
But there are SO many ways to handle this. If you want centralized, you have big players like Google. If you want peer to peer, that's all email is.
DM is based on email. There are "trusted" email hosts that EHR vendors have on a list. They then send emails to those trusted email addresses with XML data to send data between EHRs.
