AUSTIN, TX – To most physician practices and home healthcare agencies, the fax is a nightmare. The very word connotes minutes, maybe even hours, spent alongside the ubiquitous machine, preparing documents, punching in phone numbers and hoping everything is sent correctly.

And yet, the fax is essential. It’s estimated that 80 percent of a patient’s medical record is data accumulated outside the doctor’s office, and that those offices send and receive anywhere between 1,000 and 4,000 pages a month by fax – or about 15 billion fax pages a year.

Enter SecureCare Technologies. The Austin, Texas-based firm offers Sfax, an Internet-based fax management system that’s designed to help physician practices and home health agencies save up to 95 percent in administration time and up to 80 percent in the cost of manual faxing. Sfax is marketed through resellers and electronic medical record (EMR) vendors, and will soon be coupled with an e-prescribing vendor.

Dennis Nasto, SecureCare’s CEO, says physicians’ offices overlook the fax machine when they consider ways to reduce paper and improve the healthcare process, while EMR vendors “don’t want to be in the fax business.” Implementing Sfax, he says, is a good introduction to turning paper records into an electronic format.

“Some of our EMR vendors look at the faxing solution as the first step toward an EMR,” he said.