Member Article

Facing the Fax: Siilo Announces to Support NHS Ban with Digital Fax Machine Alternative

Medical messaging platform Siilo has launched an in-built solution for secure faxing in the healthcare sector, for a smooth transition to a paperless era.

The popular app, which is designed specifically for healthcare professionals, now contains a secure, digital fax assistant, eliminating the need for physical fax machines. This development follows an NHS wide ban on both buying and using fax machines by March 2020. By simply announcing a ban without a replacement service in place, there is a huge risk that it will negatively impact critical information-sharing between healthcare professionals, who rely on them for patient care on a day-to-day basis.

Although fax machines may seem like relics in most professional settings, they are still frequently used across the NHS, and in wider healthcare organisations. Joost Bruggeman, CEO of Siilo, said: “It’s easy to jump on the critical bandwagon, but before we ‘axe the fax’, let’s just think about it for a minute.”

“The fax machine is still widely used in the NHS, because it meets a very specific communication need, which is not easily replaced by email. Fax communication is usually not between two individual professionals, but between two organisations without the need for a ‘personal’ connection between the people sending and picking up that fax. The information just needs to get across and the sender needs a confirmation upon receipt. Today, lives still depend on fax communication.”

“As a med-tech company, we feel it is not very empathetic to simply ban critical communication tools from healthcare professionals that are already under tremendous pressure. It would be better to wean from a fax machine and not completely break critical communication flows. If professionals are interested in our solution, they can register on our website and get access to the fax assistant for free” Bruggeman adds.

Siilo is currently used by over 120,000 healthcare professionals globally, with over 7.5 million messages processed per month. The digital fax machine functionality will enable healthcare professionals to use the platform as a one-stop shop for communication and collaborative working across the entire healthcare sector.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Siilo .