Vienna hospitals need new fax system

Since the beginning of the year, patient data may no longer be transmitted by fax in Austria for data protection reasons. The fax ban is causing chaos in the Austrian healthcare system. In the midst of the excitement, the City of Vienna issued a call for tenders: it wants to buy a new fax system for its hospitals and care facilities. heise online found out what this is all about.

The invitation to tender is called “AUS24N005 — FAX Server” and reveals that the system may cost a maximum of 200,000 euros per year, plus inflation and tax. The company is looking for a network of fax servers that must be geo-redundant and distributed with a load balancer to two data centers of the Viennese healthcare system. At least 10,000 user accounts are planned, additional user licenses must be available in increments of thousands. At least 60 faxes should be able to be transmitted simultaneously, and twice as many if ordered in addition.

“The tendered fax server infrastructure is the replacement of an internal communication system in the Vienna Healthcare Association, which uses fax as a backup solution,” heise online has learned from the Vienna Healthcare Association. However, health data has no longer been faxed since the beginning of the year due to the fax ban. Faxes would still be permitted within a hospital or care facility, but they are prohibited between different facilities. However, the healthcare association now generally uses special software to transmit patient data. “However, invoices, data on orders or printed materials etc. can be sent by fax.”

And for this, the Vienna Healthcare Association needs new fax servers. However, it is not just a matter of inserting labeled paper into fax machines, but the focus is on direct connections to Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft 365, SAP and renderZ from the Swiss provider VMX. Perhaps a form for ordering printed materials can then be faxed from SAP EHS, which is then received elsewhere in an Outlook mailbox.

Microsoft stays

The contract runs for at least two years and can then be terminated at the end of each year with six months' notice. “The application must be able to run on one of these server operating systems,” says the tender, which ended on Valentine's Day, “Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2020 (sic), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 or 9, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15”, all virtualized with VMware. Although mainstream support for Windows Server 2019 expired over a year ago, Microsoft will continue to provide security updates until the end of 2028 for an additional fee.

After all, there are also open-source alternatives with the Linux servers mentioned. After all, “the strategic use of open-source software” is a declared goal of the City of Vienna, “to create transparency, increase security and promote young talent through cooperation with open-source communities, but also to avoid 'vendor lock-in' situations.” The city administration has been using open-source software (OSS) in the server sector since 1990. In 2004, the “gentle product introduction” of OSS also began at PC workstations. From 2007, Microsoft Office was only to be installed at selected workstations; in 2009, the Vienna City Council decided to promote open-source software more strongly at workstations. However, in the same year, 1.5 million euros flowed from Vienna to Redmond for new MS Office licenses for three years.

In addition to fax cover sheets and various image formats, the new fax system now being sought should support the file formats RTF, PDF, TXT, HTML, XML and “all MS Office file formats”. Despite the open-source initiative, file formats of the open document standards are not mentioned. “When communicating with citizens, great care is taken to ensure that open-source formats are also processed,” says the health association. The fact that a new fax system without support for open document files makes the internal upgrade to open-source software more difficult does not seem to bother the decision-makers.

Faxes received must be sent by e-mail with TIFF or PDF/A-1 file attachments. According to the tender, any web applications for the fax system must support two browsers: Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, both based on the open-source Chromium browser, but both only on Windows systems. The vendor lock-in remains.

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