I’ll admit, I’m pretty frustrated right now lol. me and my doctor have been trying to submit a referral to a specialist but for the last several weeks, when i call them, they still haven’t gotten it yet. they told me it’s because they only have one fax machine so it refuses any incoming faxes if it’s in the middle of printing a different one.
my problem is, why haven’t we come up with a more modern and secure way of sending medical files?!?! am i crazy for thinking this is a super unprofessional and unnecessary barrier to care?
luckily I’m mobile enough to drive a physical copy to their location, but not everybody who needs to see this type of doctor can do that, nor should they have to.
I work in a particularly niche area (home infusion/home medical equipment) and while HL7 and FHIR are indeed things, practically no software that was built for those lines of business had any sort of module for that. We have a FHIR interface now and…no one uses it. They prefer faxes.
That’s likely a peculiarity of the niche you’re in. HL7/FIHR are the norm for enterprise-level systems. Hospitals couldn’t function without it and at any given time we typically have multiple HL7 integration projects rolling just as a mid-size regional.
Definitely less defined in the small-practice and patient-side space. Though, like I said, the big problem there ends up being data normalization anyway.