Vital Stats
Relevant Product Characteristics
- This product does not appear to have been designed specifically with healthcare in mind. Note that many products that are useful and appropriate for health care professionals are not designed specifically with health care in mind.
- The features and/or settings for this product are different for health care customers as compared to general customers.
- Often this means the product adjusts for health care customers in order to meet HIPAA requirements, and/or to offer features that are only useable by health care practices (e.g. Square only allows health care customers to run HSA and FSA cards.)
What Is This Product?
8×8 is a cloud-based VOIP (“Internet phone”) company that offers many options. We tested and reviewed their VOIP phone (telephone and SMS texting), internet fax, and videoconferencing options. They also offer physical phone connections through their VOIP service, and virtual routing/phone tree options, but we did not test those.
8×8 also offers a mobile app for iOS (iPhones and iPads) and Android that allows SMS, voice calls, and faxing.
Our Impressions
8×8 was highly responsive to all of our questions, and forthcoming with information and documents. When we called to cancel our test account we were connected with a human in less than a minute, and she was quite helpful.
The mobile app for iOS and Android means that 8×8 can act as a “second phone line” that allows to keep separate business and personal phone numbers without carrying two phones.
Caveats
Caveats are criticsms of the company or product that we feel are relevant to your risk management or other important considerations.
1) Quality of Service
We have received input from several members that the quality of service at 8×8 can be poor. There are some users who have reported outages of service, texts that disappear and then reappear long after the message was sent, the inability to fax certain numbers, and texts being sent to incorrect numbers.
Loss of data and messages being sent to incorrect numbers both effect a user’s ability for compliance and security.
Notes
Notes cover points where the product can’t ensure compliance or ethical action for you. These help you know what your part of the compliance puzzle looks like when using this product. A high note count usually correlates with a feature-rich product, and not necessarily with a product that has problems.
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