Transcript
Jay Volk, Chief Growth Officer at ETHERFAX, discussed the impact of technology, particularly artificial intelligence (AI), in the healthcare sector with Ian Khan on the “The Futurist” podcast.
Host: Hey friends, we’re at HIMSS25 in Las Vegas. We’re talking healthcare transformation and the future I have with me, Jay from ETHERFAX. Jay, tell us about what do you guys do and how is that changing everything we know about healthcare?
Jay Volk: That’s a great question. At ETHERFAX, we do secure document delivery, so people can call it fax, but really we’re taking the telephony from point to point and securely delivering the document. Now, two things that we are showing here at himss. First is our FedRAMP certification, which is a much higher standard of security in documents. We think security is really the future in healthcare, and the other is our new partnership with Weave Cloud Solutions. So what Weave Cloud Solutions does is it takes the documents that are delivered and indexes them, tells the practice or the health system what they are, and then allows the practice to act on those documents very quickly. The goal with all of this is better outcomes for the patient. And I can give an example if you’d like me to.
Host: Absolutely. We’ll get into the example, but I have tough questions right now.
Jay Volk: Oh, perfect.
Host: They say that a lot of people might have the misconception that facts is a very old technology. It’s been there for, I don’t know, 70, 80 years. But a fact of the matter is that because of its reliability and the fact that fax is used worldwide in every healthcare system until now, right now as well, it’s considered to be a very reliable mode of transmission of information. And that’s a very pivotal point because it has redundancy, it has all of those things. And we’ve typically come from a paper based industry, what is new with fax faxes, of course, digital faxes. Now of course electronic tell us these things that have the reliability, but then it’s also looking at current era needs of everybody within city healthcare industry.
Jay Volk: And really what is new is that delivery increased quality of the facts. People can think back 10, 15 years of fax coming through
And having it have the lines and different things, having a very difficult time reading any of the data that’s coming through on that fax. And what we’re doing is we can send faxes through that are DICOM quality, that are X-ray quality that doctors can read and do their findings off of that facts. So it’s an extremely high quality of facts that we’re delivering, but the quality is only available at the last step that the fax comes through. So there are people who are still using telephone lines and things like that to receive a fax. And thankfully telephone companies are at a point where they’re tearing those out. They don’t want to support this anymore. And that’s increasing the opportunity for us as a fax company to deliver a cleaner product that really improves patient outcomes.
Host: Of course, fax being an industry standard, it is an industry standard like four wheels on a car, right? Yeah. Like four wheels in a car are absolutely necessary. You can have a vehicle with six wheels as well, or eight or 20. I don’t know. I’m just trying to be creative here, but I think that’s a fundamental aspect of the industry that we need to understand. How are you guys looking at the lack of a better word? AI. AI is everywhere. AI is changing everything. We need a lot of data to work with ai. Kind of another area within industry. How are you looking at AI though?
Jay Volk: Yeah, so AI, we see on a spectrum. We’re using AI to see a document coming in and looking at that document and saying, it’s a referral request, it’s a lab report, it’s other types of information coming into the practice and using the AI for the application of telling you what kind of document is what patient it’s for, what the issues are in that document. We are not storing that data. We are not building a large language model because we feel like that crosses the line into using personal health information to build something that may enrich ourselves or not really advance the outcomes for the patient. We think we can just replace that task of indexing the document and that provides a lot of value for a medical practice all the way up through a health system.
Host: In terms of the technology that ETHERFAX has. Tell me more about workflows. Help us understand how does a workflow, how has workflow changed in the last 10 years when it comes to faxing, right? It’s not just you get a fax in a machine and it’s in your hand, but there’s very complex workflows that happen in the backend when that transmission is done, made, sent, or received.
Jay Volk: That’s right. I actually ran a company called workflow.com for 12 years. So I’ve spent many hours at the front desk and at the back office of health systems watching those workflows. And I understand and ETHERFAX understands that there are customized workflows for every medical function, and we don’t want to gloss over any of the importance of any of those. But the most important being when a document comes in, where does it go? Who’s acting on that document? And if it’s coming in and sitting in a folder on somebody’s desktop and that person misses a few days of work, that could be a life changing event for somebody whose information is coming across. So what we want is to provide AI technology and usher that document through the proper workflows so that it gets into the hands of the person who can act on it.
Watch the interview for more!