For legal reasons, LuxSci’s HIPAA customers are required to physically sign a “Business Associate Agreement” and return it to us.  While this is a simple and commonplace request, it creates a lot of busy work on the part of the customer and LuxSci!

The customer has to

• Download the file
• Print out the 14 pages
• Sign the agreement
• Fax back all pages, or scan it and return electronically

Then, LuxSci has to

• Locate the document
• Sort out faxes that are in the wrong order, upside down, blank, or missing pages
• Figure out who sent the document
• Verify that pages are not missing or changed
• Counter-sign the document and attach them to the customer account
• Contact customers who have not sent in their documents properly or at all which is crucial to the HIPAA certification process

Multiplied by lots of customers, this creates a lot of unproductive busy work for everyone — and this time costs money.

LuxSci has found that it can use its own SecureForm and Ink Signatures technologies to make submission of signed contracts a snap for customers, as well as to eliminate most of the busy work LuxSci itself has to do to manage the process.

In this post, we describe how both technologies work.

Read the rest of this post »

We have previously discussed how it may be OK according to HIPAA to send and receive FAXes with ePHI over standard analog phone lines.  See: Is a FAX document HIPAA-Secure?

However, we have observed that customers more and more wish to integrate FAXing with their computers, taking advantage of the “paper-free” office that is arriving most places.  Why should they have to print and manually fax things or receive FAXes on an old-fashioned FAX printer, when their computers have FAX capability?  Can that capability be used in a HIPAA-compliant way?

The answer is “Yes, you can”.  This article explains how and points out things to watch out for.

Read the rest of this post »

LuxSci offers solutions for secure and HIPAA compliant email and web services,  so we are often asked about secure FAXing.

Many organizations, especially in the healthcare industry, have an urgent need to send important and sensitive information, like protected health information (PHI), to  organizations via facsimile. Why?  Because this is how it has always been done, and everyone is “set up” to be able to handle FAXes quickly and efficiently.

However, with HIPAA security regulations ever-present, our clients are concerned that their use of FAX is compliant, similar to making sure that their email and web sites meet HIPAA security standards.

Update – for electronic FAXing options, see: HIPAA Faxing: How to Send and Receive FAXes i na Secure and Compliant Way.

Can data sent via FAX be “secure enough” for HIPAA?

Read the rest of this post »