Why do hospitals still use fax machines? Jefferson’s Bon Ku has no answers for a popular medical comedian.

Dr. Glaucomflecken, a popular comedian who skewers doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies, had some fun on his podcast the other day with guest Bon Ku, director of the health design lab at Thomas Jefferson University.

Ku was discussing a serious subject — ways for hospitals to improve health care with better design — but he burst out laughing when the medical comedian asked this question:

“Can we design away fax machines?”

Ku, an emergency medicine physician at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, was temporarily at a loss. But he quickly recovered, playing along with Glaucomflecken and his wife, Kristin Flanary, cohosts of the podcast Knock Knock, Hi. (Dr. Glaucomflecken is a stage name. In real life, he’s Will Flanary, an ophthalmologist in Oregon.)

The trio discussed how hospitals and doctors’ offices continue to require patients to send paperwork via fax machine, ostensibly because the aging technology is so secure. Yet as patients everywhere have discovered, the devices can be hard to use, and in the 21st century, even harder to find.

Kristin Flanary, who styles herself as Lady Glaucomflecken, said the health-care industry seems stuck in the past.

“I feel like the rest of the world, the rest of the industries, have figured this out,” she said. “So what’s the problem?”

“Yeah,” Ku replied. “I don’t know.”

For Dr. Glaucomflecken, whose comic takes on medicine routinely go viral, that answer wasn’t good enough.

“You’re the director of the health design lab,” he said. “If you can’t figure this out, nobody can figure this out.”

Ku’s lab at Jefferson has explored such topics as reducing the number of alarms in hospital rooms and designing emergency departments to have better traffic flow. On the podcast, he agreed that the industry’s continued use of fax technology was another opportunity for improvement.

“We don’t have a technology problem, right?” he said. “We have a design problem. We have the technology to send secure patient information over many other mediums beside a fax machine, but we still use fax machines routinely.”

The outdated technology is a puzzle not just for patients, but for younger physicians, he said.

“It’s funny because our medical students nowadays, the first time they’ve seen a fax machine is their third-year clerkships in the hospital,” he said. “They literally don’t know how to use a technology that this is the first time they’ve encountered. They’re like, ‘What is this?’ I’m like, ‘I am old. These kids do not know what a fax machine is.’”

During the rest of the 65-minute episode, the trio discussed how to help patients get better sleep, and why Ku goes surfing after a long shift, among other topics.

Watch the episode here: