Fax rarely gets credit in tech circles. In healthcare, it is still part of daily work, and for some providers it is necessary.
A MedCity News article makes the case for small, low-budget providers, such as post-acute care facilities, substance use disorder clinics and birthing centers. The article calls them healthcare’s ‘digital have-nots.’ Many of them could not get government help to buy an electronic health record (EHR) system, the software that stores patient charts, and cannot pay for one themselves. For them, digital fax is how patient information moves in and out.
Critics say ‘ax the fax.’ For these providers, fax is not an old habit. It is the tool they can afford, and it works. An often-quoted figure says healthcare faxes more than 9 billion pages a year. Fax fills the gap between providers that have full EHR systems and providers that do not.
Change is slow in healthcare because of strict rules and because many systems do not connect to each other. The article points to an affordable step: AI tools that read incoming faxes, even handwritten notes, and turn them into structured data that an EHR can use. That gets information to clinicians faster, without asking a small clinic to replace its fax.
So before you judge a clinic for its fax machine, look at what it does for them. For many small providers, it is the most reliable way to share patient information.
Part of: Which industries still rely on fax?