[Chickensoup]

Fax machines are the only accepted way of transmitting medical records. that or the mail.

[ichabod1]

Well, we can see from the PIAPS debacle the dangers of doing this stuff via email.

[some tech guy]

“Fax machines are the only accepted way of transmitting medical records. that or the mail.”

Actually, this isn’t correct.

Medical records can be transmitted over the internet if they’re FIPS140 AES256 encrypted. The systems sending and receiving the medical data must be HIPAA compliant, which is a very strict set of rules about how the data is treated. The data must be encrypted at rest (e.g. in a database) or in transit (ANY transmission, even machine-to-machine over a closed, private network). Any machine which does processing of the data CANNOT be on a shared-resident system, e.g. a shared-tenancy AWS instance.

It’s very hard to do, very strict, and the fines if you mess it up are high.

Source: I’m the HIPAA security officer for my company, and built our HIPAA compliant software and AWS server infrastructure.