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We’re a Medical Center Cardiology dept using WinFax 10 to fax reports generated by a Cardiology Reporting application called Xcelera. To fax a report, we click “Print” from within the application, then select WinFax as the “printer” on which to print the report. The problem is that a few times a day, other patients’ reports are faxed along with the report we intended to fax. This is a serious breach of patient confidentiality. Has anyone found this kind of problem with WinFax? Any suggested solution would be welcome. thanks
Is this an automated process? Does your Xcelera application link directly to WinFax via the SDK? Does it automatically pass any information to WinFax? like a fax number, name etc. ? When you print a report, then select WinFax as the printer driver, and click Print, you should be presented with the WinFax Send Dialog box to fill in your Fax recipient details – if this is not displayed, and your fax immediately sends then the Xcelera application is using SDK or DDE functions to communicate with WinFax.
If you’re a Premium Subscriber I’d recommend the following:
Start WinFax Tools
In WinFax Tools, click WinFax No Pages Fix button.
Click Yes to check for Compatibility.
If you get the message “Done processing, Changes have been applied. You can now try to send a fax in WinFax.”
Then you are done.If you get the message “Done processing, No problems were found.” , then you’ll need to provide more details on how the faxes are generated.
Thanks John.
No this is not automated. When the user clicks Print in Xcelera, we get the WinFax Send Dialog box. We select the correct fax number from the Phone book, and the document goes out. The problem is that one or more other documents go out as well. Ever heard of that?
WinFax is only going to fax the print job(s) you selected to print to the WinFax printer, nothing more unless you added the optional attachments, or a cover page. So if your original print out included the incorrect pages, WinFax will fax them. As you enter the fax number & recipient name, there is also preview window at the bottom left corner where you can see thumbnail pages of the faxes that are going to be transmitted. If you’re manually printing to WinFax (that’s why I asked if it was automated) you should verify your faxes before you send them. I am 100% sure these pages aren’t added after you click send, they were already there when you clicked Send.
If its not the application that is adding these pages to the print job, then where are these other pages coming from? Its possible there is some sort of failure occuring during a previous print job to WinFax. There could be a spooling problem, or failed attachment problem. Are the incorrectly attached pages failed print jobs from a previous print job to the WinFax printer?
An example would be where you want to fax a report for Patient A, so you print out the report, but while you’re printing it you relalize its the wrong report, so you abruptly cancel WinFax and start over (while it was processing the pages). Now you re-print the correct report to WinFax, and go ahead and enter the proper fax details to send the fax and click Send (without actually verifying what you’re sending) Patient A gets their report, plus some other pages from a failed print job. The problem here is WinFax still has the “old” print job in memory because you failed to allow WinFax to properly dump the old pages in temporary memory.
I see WinFax users do this all the time, and eventually “the garbage builds up” and it causes problems with printing to the WinFax printer driver where no documents are attached, which is why we recommend using the No Pages Fix in WinFax Tools to clear out this problem.
I’m not sure if this describes what may be occuring to you, but its entirely possible.
I can’t say for sure if there are a lot of “changes of mind” that might account for extra reports being added to a given Send job, but your explanation makes general sense, and it’s very heartening to know that something like what we’re seeing has been seen before. The thumbnail preview sounds like exactly the thing we need to train people to check *before* they press Send.
Is there any way to clear out the extraneous unsent documents that are floating around looking for a likely job to attach themselves to?
Many Thanks for your help.
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