Interview: How ETHERFAX and DirectTrust are Guiding Security Standards for Cloud Fax Providers

John Lynn: Hi everyone. I’m John Lynn, the founder and chief editor at Healthcare IT Today. We’re excited to bring another in our series of interviews with top leaders and health IT. We’re here at the DirectTrust conference and our guest is Ken Romo, Director of Global Sales at ETHERFAX. Welcome, Ken. 

Ken Romo: Thank you. Thank you for having us. Really appreciate it. 

John Lynn: Yeah, I’m excited to dive into a lot of the work you’re doing with DirectTrust and a number of efforts around next level fax, I would kind of describe it, but before we go there, tell me about ETHERFAX. 

Ken Romo: So, I’ve been in this business now for over 25 years and I’m sure you’ve interviewed other people in the space and they all probably said the same thing. Never thought I’d be in the space for 25 years, so being here at DirectTrust really extends our reach and with what they’re trying to do here. So the secure exchange network is an ETHERFAX solution. And what our CTO likes to say is we’re both the voice and the data company. And so what that allows us to do, John, is when we have employees that are on ETHERFAX, we can exchange information, not just fax. It’s our baseline because we do have an intelligent network. And what we’re able to do is the first thing we do in the process is do a dip and see where that endpoint is and what we’re able to do, send it through the Internet with 100 percent reliability and we have a lot of options we can do because we can send fully encrypted, full-color fax, and at the high speeds available out on the market. 

John Lynn: Nice. I mean, I think it shows how far we’ve come right from the black-and-white factor, like 100% reliability or even reliability issues over the years, right? 

Ken Romo: Correct. Yeah, absolutely. 

John Lynn: Tell me about the work ETHERFAX is doing alongside other cloud fax providers in the DirectTrust Interoperable Secure Cloud Fax standards body.  

Ken Romo: I’ll give you a little bit of history, especially on my background and why I think it’s crucial in answering this question is, you know, I worked for one of the on-premise fax servers for years, 17-plus years. Probably the largest one. And when I left them a lot of my colleagues were saying, you know, are you really going to another fax company? My answer was no, I’m not. I’m going to cloud infrastructure as a service, the most secure cloud, the most dynamic cloud service.   

And so, the reason I mentioned that is what we are doing with other fax vendors – we’ve always been purpose-built to do what we call a federation. We’ve asked the partners, our competitors, do you want to be part of our federation? DirectTrust has done an excellent job of getting everybody together. The standards you know, they act as a mediator, and now we’re talking about what the standards should be. And with DirectTrust, it comes down to patient care.   

Granted, it is technology, but, at the end of the day, I think we’re all participating with DirectTrust because we do care about patient care. 

John Lynn: Yeah, I mean, it’s good to remember. Why don’t these vendors come together and create a standard across each other? 

Talk to us about what the proposed standard will accomplish. Is it this new infrastructure or is it a replication of the old?  

Ken Romo: Yeah. So again, you know, we’re here at DirectTrust and their standards, so to speak, are always about Direct Messaging, right? Trusted messages. They’re putting that in, as I would say, the framework. You know, I’m not on the committee, but what I’ve been told is, you know, some of the three major factors that they’re looking for are identity, encryption, and metadata.  

Watch the full interview for more!