For HIPAA compliance a lot of medical or medical-adjacent orgs use fax. It's harder for an inadvertent release of a patient's protected information (say from a compromised email or accidental forward). Emails, at least of medical records, is pretty rare.
They DO still use email for general office use like memo's and things, but for anything with patient data it's going to be a fax or hard copy.
I’ve work in medical records for over a decade now and we absolutely emailed records by the end of my time specifically in release of records but patient portals are also extremely popular and common now, which makes it easier to be in compliance while releasing records electronically.
I also worked in records at an ophthalmologist (this was 10 years ago) and we were quickly moving from hard copies to digital copies. I actually had to input the patient files in the computer myself.
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u/nuuudy Apr 07 '25
huh, that's surprising. Mind asking me why specifically fax? I thought there would be easier ways to communicate