Germany has announced the end of the doctor’s-office fax so many times that the sentence has become its own genre. This one is different in a specific and interesting way. On 16 July 2026, the German federal cabinet approved GeDIG, the Gesetz über Daten und digitale Innovation im Gesundheitswesen (Law on Data and Digital Innovation in Healthcare). As Heise reports, the bill puts autumn 2029 on the calendar as the last season of the surgery-room fax, with electronic referrals scheduled to go live on 1 September 2029.
What GeDIG actually does
GeDIG is co-sponsored by Federal Health Minister Nina Warken and Federal Digital Minister Karsten Wildberger, both from the CDU. The bill has two headline moves. The first is expanding the elektronische Patientenakte (ePA), Germany’s national electronic patient record app, so it becomes what Warken calls “the crucial gateway to a complex healthcare system.” Citizens will be able to request prescriptions, book referrals, get vaccination reminders, and store digital vaccination records inside the ePA without an in-person visit.
The second is the fax deadline itself. In place of the paper referral scanned into a fax machine, doctors will use KIM, a national secure email service, to talk to each other. Patients will hear from their doctors through TIM, a secure messenger that lives inside the ePA. The projected annual saving from the whole package is around €445 million, most of it in documentation and reporting time that clinicians will get back. The bill also aligns Germany with the European Health Data Space, allowing de-identified data from clinical practice to be reused for cross-border research, with an opt-in for insurance data.
Why this deadline reads differently
Every previous German push to retire the healthcare fax has run into the same wall. Phasing out a workflow does not remove it. Something has to carry the referral, and until something did, the paper-and-fax loop was the workflow doctors trusted. In 2021, Germany missed its own deadline for the e-prescription rollout for exactly that reason. In 2023, a federal agency was still tendering for a fresh round of fax services. As recently as autumn 2025, Baden-Württemberg held on to 1,400 fax machines mid-digital-push, and Germany’s Catholic parishes only wrote fax out of their church data law in March 2026.
GeDIG names the replacement. Warken’s summary of the moment sounds almost impatient: “We have discussed saving a lot, but fundamental structural changes must finally happen.” The interesting phrase there is structural. Previous rounds tried to phase out the fax without touching the structure around it. This one builds the referral rail first and lets the fax fall away once the rail carries the load.
What could still slow it down
A three-year runway is a long calendar in coalition politics. Adoption of the ePA has been uneven from region to region. Physicians who never wired up KIM and TIM have three federal budgets, and quite possibly a change of government, to argue with before autumn 2029. Public reporting on GeDIG so far carries no pushback quotes, likely because the pushback has not started.
For readers outside Germany, the piece to watch is the substitution model. Germany is not the only country whose healthcare fax survived because nothing solid had replaced the referral rail. If GeDIG lands, it will be because ePA plus TIM plus KIM worked as a bundle, not because a ban worked on its own.
For the everyday version of the same problem, a clinic or office that has to send one urgent document without setting up new hardware, a send fax from computer service still bridges the gap the way it always has.