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TIL - HIPAA doesn't protect data from being shared between organizations without consent
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this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
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You know doctors offices are still one of the main users of facsimile transmission, right?
Actually I do know that. Pharmacies, too. You do know they are not FAXing giant datasets with millions of patients in them, right?
I'm not disagreeing with you, but the fax loophole does need to be closed.
You're right to point out the problem. Using a rhetorical tone was a bit sarcastic / condescending, so I mirrored it.
I think it's a question of perspective. Your doctor faxing something to a pharmacy or specialist is archaic at this point, and I agree it's not great. If they are using FOIP and not POTS, one would hope it's encrypted with TLS or something (if it's not, it's possibly a HIPAA violation if there's PHI in the FAX). But the blast radius is pretty small.
I suppose if a hacker compromised a hospital system's FOIP they could harvest a lot of medical records that way. But at that point, they are already in and they'd likely be more interested in fatter & juicier targets on the network. Bigger datasets with less effort (versus pulling from a trickle of FAXes going in and out).
Bottom line: yes, FAX is dumb, and it's a problem but it's very small compared to other things.
Point of fact, I'm not bobs_monkey, the originator of the rhetorical tone. Fax in healthcare continues to survive well past its prime because there is an inherent loophole: analog data transfer is functionally unsuited to encryption. This allows fax to be operated at a "best effort" level of security. There are handling protocols that are meant to keep traditional fax transmissions as private as possible, but these are layer 8 processes with limited enforceability. Beyond that, traditional fax represents a pathway around requirements on encryption while still meeting HIPAA compliance standards.
FOIP is an improvement, but it still allows for interoperability with a traditional fax machine connected to a POTS line in some GP's office that they're unwilling to part with. That means the FOIP user can only be confident of the transmission being secure on their side. I can't speak to the overall adaptation of FOIP in hospital systems, but I do know that there are non-isolated instances of hospitals still relying on traditional fax as opposed to adopting a cloud-fax solution. Hell, there are still major hospitals using SL-100s as their primary phone switches.
I don't even want to get into codec mismatches, because that falls out of scope when it comes to a privacy discussion.
Long story short, achieving HIPAA compliance is a low bar with regards to fax, and if that were to change I believe we'd see fax disappear (finally!) shortly thereafter.