ENTERPRISE HIPAA COMPLIANT FAX

We evaluated many fax platforms. We signed for a trial account when possible using random associates and colleagues. We evaluated each platform on several key metrics.

Since we are evaluating HIPAA Compliant Fax platforms there were several requirements which were required to make it to this list.

For the purposes of our evaluation HIPAA Compliance means that the fax platform:

• -Will sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with no additional charge
• -Supports (or requires) TLS 1.2+ Security on their API, Portal and other tools. (why this is important)
• -Supports Storage of fax data and logs up to 7 years.
• -Stores fax data utilizing encryption (at rest) and encrypted transmission during upload / sending fax.

Each platform satisfied these requirements based on our analysis.

Pricing

Let’s be honest. A lot of weight is put on price here. We found pricing to be straightforward for some vendors and other vendors had a price on the website but when we wanted a BAA or needed other tools there were add-ons and other pricing. Also, not all vendors had a 10k (10000 page volume) plan. We had to look at the closest plan and extrapolate the cost based on overage (overage is the price of a fax page after the allowed plan fax usage had been exceeded). In some cases the overage made the monthly price much higher. At the time of this article these were the prices we could identify on the website:

Winner: WestFax (Clear pricing, No extra charges)
Runner Up: SRFax (Clear Pricing, No extra charges)

Fax Deliverability

You don’t really think about deliverability as you expect that the fax gets routed just like making a phone call. It just works every time right? Well, with Fax it is usually that way but fax lines are a bit different. You have fax lines that are “normal” and some are digital fax lines or “SIP Fax”. You’d think Digital is better but in this case digital is actually worse. SIP fax has been the bane of the fax world for the last few years with low speeds, low completion and incompatibilities with larger enterprise fax services.

Several of the platforms we reviewed utilize SIP fax in some capacity. WestFax was the exception. They actually promote the fact they don’t use sip. None of the providers showed us the fax connection speeds which was interesting but we could tell which service was faster and that gave us an indication of their use of SIP. We utilized a 10 page test fax document to benchmark the tests. The rule of thumb is one minute per page.

Winner: WestFax (Fastest completion time, No failed faxes)
Runner up: Concord (Just a minute slower)

Customer Support

Good support is hard to find these days and even when everyone has moved their support desks overseas and the typical “Unplug and plug it back in response” is the norm we found that the support from all of the vendors on our list were acceptable. Most had US-based support and 3/4 of them had a queue system we had to navigate through. One of them didn’t have a queue system but had a real person answer. 24/7 Support is available for all 4 vendors if needed and usually that was with a contract and SLA agreement.

Winner: WestFax (Person answered every-time)
Runner Up: Concord (Fairly easy to get someone on the phone)

Tooling

When it comes to tooling we saw a lot of interesting tools and utilities. Some were useful, some were clunky but we were looking at it from the point of view of what tools can we use to send a fax and what tools can we use to get a fax. All of the fax providers had the popular “Email to Fax” functionality where you send an email to ##########@faxcompany.com with the attachment and it sends. They all had some version of a print driver that allows you to fax from any print-enabled application. Some had FTP access (Push/Pull) and some had advanced workflow tools. We judged them by how easy they were to use, did they cost extra and did they work.

Winner: Concord
Runner Up: WestFax