Two-thirds of Canadian doctors say their primary means of communication with other physicians is by fax.
Medical clinics in this country, on average, send and receive a mind-boggling 24,000 pages of faxed information annually. Only about one-third of family physicians and specialists e-mail their colleagues for clinical purposes, never mind patients.
These data, from a 2017 survey of clinicians by Telus Health, remind us that, in the digital age, health care continues to cling desperately to the facsimile machine, a clunky technology that most industries have long ago relegated to the scrap heap.
Health care is slow to change. Medicine has an intrinsic (verging on pathological) aversion to risk. If a bank introduces a new technology and it flops, that’s an inconvenience for customers; if a hospital does so, it can be deadly. The stakes are higher.
