Paubox new hires: It's frustrating to send a fax

Fax machines are still a staple in modern-day healthcare.

But at Paubox, the fax machine is our mortal enemy.

Faxes are slow, clunky, and can become costly with maintenance and sustaining office supplies.

Compare that frustrating experience to the seamless nature of sending an email: sleek, fast (I'm sure you can type a subject line on a keyboard faster than you can write a cover letter and type on a phone pad), easy to use, and environmentally friendly.

The days of sending a cover letter, ensuring you're faxing the document upright, and entering the exact fax number are over.

At least, that's our goal for redefining how to send PHI between healthcare providers.

Paubox New Hire Induction

To feel our customers' pain, every new hire of Paubox must send a fax using the ancient fax machine.

The most common response to this task: "Fax machines still exist?"

Yes they do, and in outdated industries like healthcare, they're still as important as ever.

Over the past few months, Paubox has been experiencing wonderful growth, resulting in a few new faces joining our team. 

This recent faxing exercise included: Tyler Dornenburg, Robby Huang, Seiji Iwasaki, and Sean Ho'okano-Briel.

 
Robby Huang made sure to remember the +1 United States area code when entering the fax phone number 

After realizing that fax machines still exist, the next question is, "Where can you find a fax machine in San Francisco?" Thankfully, the FedEx office at the Marriott hotel in downtown San Francisco came to our rescue.

However, sending a fax is not cheap. 

Anything outside the San Francisco 415 area code is considered long distance. Ouch.

The last time we did this fax-sending exercise as a team, many of us (being millennials) had not seen a fax machine before. But even for the most experienced of faxers, sending a fax still took approximately 2 minutes and 21 seconds.

For this round of fax-sending, many of our new hires had used a fax machine before, but only in a short time. It still took each person an average of 2 minutes to send a fax message, which included writing a cover letter, entering the designated phone number, and waiting for a confirmation receipt.  

Sean Ho’okano-Briel takes a minute to write a cover letter when filling a "To" field and an email subject line would take seconds.

In work time - or worst case scenario, a medical emergency - those two minutes might as well be two hours.

READ MORE:  Fax Machines Are Terrible for Healthcare - Here's Why (New Data)

No one needs to send a fax anymore

It's 2018. Last year, at our first annual Paubox SECURE conference, we held a wake for the fax machine. We believe that wake was long overdue.

Healthcare is one of the last industries where faxes remain a dominant means of communication. But it doesn't have to be that way anymore. You can be wasting up to $80,000 sending faxes as opposed to sending secure HIPAA compliant emails.

Read the hard-hitting data for yourself in our Kill the Fax whitepaper, and join us when we say, "No More Fax!"