The crazy story of why the fax machine is the way all doctors talk to each other

"The Obama administration spent upward of $30 billion encouraging American hospitals and doctor offices to switch from paper to electronic records. The program was a wild success, in one respect. The number of hospitals using electronic records grew from 9 percent in 2008 to 83 percent in 2015, a huge change in less than a decade. 

But the program didn’t account for a critical need: sharing. Hospital and doctor offices generally remain unable to transfer electronic information to other hospitals and doctor offices. Billions of dollars later, they are left printing out documents and faxing them."

From the article The Fax of Life.

I was wondering how fax machines were doing since Office Space!

The article is a fascinating look at yet another hunk of waste that fills our health care, helping to make the U.S.A.’s health system one of the most expensive on the planet. (I’ve written about another waste, called coding.) You know this particular waste from visiting a new doctor and filling out those endless forms, but let's lay it out:

1. You enter your patient information on one of their faded clipboard forms

2. Someone in the office types what you wrote into a computer 

3. When another provider requests your info, they print it out and fax it

4. The other provider enters that info into their computer by hand — or with a "fax reader"

Expensive to retype all that? You bet. But even worse, I'd suggest, is that I count at least three chances for something to be entered wrong. If there's even a slight chance of entering any particular piece of information wrong, the sheer amount of data to be entered and the times it must be re-entered means the likelihood of something on your medical record being incorrect is pretty darn high. I'd say it's nearly certain. Hopefully it's not something critical. 

This is how you can have a health care system like ours that is both more expensive AND worse than almost any other industrialized nation. Or, as my CFO Ron Maurer might put it, "You can get better health care, but you can’t get more expensive."