Referrals, results and records arrive by fax. Make that a workflow instead of a pile.
Most clinical documents still arrive on a fax number, and most of them need to reach a specific person within a specific amount of time. VitalFax turns the number a document arrived on into a routing decision, and records who touched it afterwards.
The situation
What this usually looks like
One inbox, many owners
Referrals, lab results, prior authorizations and records requests land in the same place, and someone has to sort them by hand every morning.
No reliable record of who saw what
When a document goes missing, the honest answer is often that nobody knows where it went or who opened it.
Numbers spread across locations
Each site or department has its own fax number, and each one has different expectations about where documents should go.
Onboarding and offboarding is manual
A departing staff member still has the fax machine code, the shared mailbox password, or both.
With VitalFax
What changes
Each number routes to the team that owns it
The referral line goes to the referral queue. The results line goes to clinical staff. Configured once, applied on every document.
A task exists for anything that needs action
Workflows can create and assign a task, set its priority and give it a due time, so nothing depends on somebody remembering.
Every access is recorded
Views, downloads, sends and permission changes are written to an append-only audit trail your administrators can read directly.
Access ends when employment does
Remove a member and their sessions end. There is no shared code, machine or mailbox to rotate.
Routing
Rules you would actually write
Workflows are built from triggers, conditions and actions in the product. Nothing here requires custom development.
When
A fax arrives on the referral line.
Then
Route to the Referrals queue, tag it "referral", create a task due in 4 hours, and notify the referral coordinators.
When
An inbound fax has more than 40 pages.
Then
Route to the Records queue and set the task priority to high — long packets are usually records requests.
When
An outgoing fax fails.
Then
Notify the person who sent it and create a task so the failure is chased rather than discovered later.
When
A fax arrives outside business hours.
Then
Route to the on-call queue and notify only the users assigned to it.
Straight answers
Questions we get asked
- Will you sign a Business Associate Agreement?
- Yes. A versioned BAA is presented inside the product and acceptance is recorded with the exact text that was shown, who accepted it and when. Note that VitalFax is designed for HIPAA-regulated workflows but does not claim any certification it has not completed — the compliance page sets out exactly where that work stands.
- Can we keep our existing fax numbers?
- Porting depends on the carrier behind each number and is handled during onboarding. Until a number is ported, it can forward to a VitalFax number and routing works the same way.
- Do VitalFax staff see our documents?
- No, not as a matter of course. Support access requires an explicit grant that your organization must enable first, carries a written reason, expires automatically, and appears in your own audit log.
- Does it connect to our EHR?
- Not today. The connector layer exists and the FHIR modelling is in place, but VitalFax has no integration agreement with any EHR vendor, so nothing is connected. We will say so plainly rather than imply otherwise.
Something not answered here? Send us the question and we will answer it plainly, including when the answer is “not yet”.