Not Just Faxes

I missed it when it was first announced in Japan, but fortunately the U.S. mainstream media has finally picked up on the story, with articles in both The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal: Japan’s new Administrative Reform Minister Taro Kono has “declared war” on fax machines, among other paper-based traditions.  

Wait, what?  “Administrative Reform Minister?”  The U.S., or at least the U.S. healthcare system, has to hear about this. 

Mr. Kono is a well known Japanese politician, including stints as Defense Minister and Foreign Minister.  He is thought of as something of a maverick, at least by Japanese political standards.  New Prime Minister Suga installed Mr. Kono in mid-September, making overhaul of bureaucracy a top priority: “Wherever there are problems, I want all of them brought to Mr. Kono for handling on behalf of the nation.” 

Mr. Kono set up a hotline for people to report government red tape, which was quickly overwhelmed with thousands of examples.  It soon reopened.

It didn’t take long for Mr. Kono to start calling for significant changes.  “To be honest, I don’t think there are many administrative procedures that actually need printing out paper and faxing,” he said in a press conference in late September.  “My job is to clear the road of obstructions to allow the Ferraris and Porsches of digital innovation to speed through.”

I wonder what Honda and Toyota thought about that.

Part of the problem in Japan is the hanko, a personal stamp that is routinely used for authentication (and which thus requires paper.)  He’s now at war with that as well, tweeting:

We checked 800 most often used government procedures with hanko, or name stamp or seal, and found few of them need to continue with hanko. This is the first step to make those procedures online.

One ally, futurist Morinosuke Kawaguchi, pointed out:

More than 97 per cent of the documents that are produced in companies and government offices presently need a hanko, but these are hanko that can be purchased in a convenience store, so there is no meaning to this habit.  It makes no sense, it’s completely ridiculous.

If you’ve ever envied Japan for its bullet trains, its early adoption of robots, or its broad use of consumer electronics, you may be surprised to hear that more than 95% of Japanese businesses still use faxes, and 34% of Japanese households have a fax.  Mr. Kawaguchi admitted: “It may be 1970s technology, but it is extremely secure and very difficult for someone on the outside to hack…Digitisation may make things more efficient, but there is clearly a trade-off when it comes to security.”

Jonathan Coopersmith, a Texas A&M professor who is an expert on faxes, told WaPo: 

The primary mode of writing is by hand, and this is a technology that fits this perfectly.  One of the reasons it’s still there is that you have an older generation that’s never really wanted to use computers, and a lot of small businesses that never adopted computers and didn’t need to.

Not surprisingly, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a big driver in the anti-fax initiative.  Health care professionals were overwhelmed by the amount of reports that had to be prepared by hand and then faxed.  “Come on, let’s stop this already,” one physician tweeted.  “Even with corona, we’re handwriting and faxing.”  Mr. Kono quickly retweeted it, even though he was still in his former position as Defense Minister – and within a week the health ministry announced a system of online filing (which, not surprisingly, has not entirely succeeded).

An independent report on Japan’s response to the pandemic found that their system “made it difficult to grasp the spread of infection in real time nationwide, and exhausted health center staff.  The new coronavirus crisis was also Japan’s ‘digital defeat.’”

We don’t have hankos in the U.S., and we’re not as reliant on faxes as Japan is, even in our healthcare system.  But red tape, inefficiencies, and antiquated technology?  Yeah, we’ve got all that, especially in healthcare.  But where’s our Secretary of Administrative Reform?  Where are our Chief Administrative Reform Officers? 

Heck, where are our hotlines to report red tape? 

Even now, well over six months into our pandemic response, we have a slapdash, state-by-state (or even county-by-county) system of reporting, with hospitals and HHS still struggling to figure out what and how to report.  We’re driving by looking in our rearview mirror, and images – data -- may be distorted.  They certainly aren’t real-time.  Dr. Ashish Jha, director of Harvard’s Global Health Institute, lamented: “The CDC during this entire pandemic has been two steps behind the disease,”

“We are woefully behind,” one senior CDC official said.  She likened the state of U.S. public health technology to “puttering along the data superhighway in our Model T Ford.”  Where are those Ferraris and Porsches Mr. Kono is expecting? 

And, to be fair, it’s not just the U.S.  Jen Spahn, Germany’s federal minister of health, admitted:

Faxes are still the most used way of communication in our health system, at least when it comes to communicating between the different players. Within a hospital, that might be very much digitised, but as soon as you want to communicate with another hospital or another player in the healthcare system, it’s very much like the 1990s and not like 2020.

Yoshimitsu Kobayashi, chairman of Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings, sees the pandemic as an opportunity: “The very negative damage it has inflicted on Japan has in turn served as a powerful accelerator.  If we miss this chance, we won’t be able to do it next time.”

Economist Paul Romer is usually credited with the quote, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”  Well, we certainly have a crisis, and I’m worried we’re going to waste it.  Using it to just get rid of faxes would be a waste.  We’re already using it to streamline development of therapeutics and vaccines, although not without problems.  But will we use it to solve fundamental problems in our healthcare system, such as inequities, inefficiencies, and infrastructure? 

Maybe we could recruit Mr. Kono to do the job.