Major backlogs in processing patient data during the pandemic are forcing the healthcare sector to reassess its relationship with fax machines.
As coronavirus cases surged in the city of Austin, Texas, last June, beleaguered public health officials instructed anyone with symptoms to act as though they had Covid-19. The reporting and tracing of new cases had slowed to a crawl, officials explained, partly due to an unexpected culprit: the fax machine.
The machines had kicked into overdrive as the pandemic tightened its grip on the city, spitting out printout after printout of results from Covid-19 tests. "We were probably getting thousands of cases a day that we were responding to. It was madness," says Janet Pichette, the chief epidemiologist for Austin Public Health. "You cannot fight a pandemic using 19th-Century technology."