Healthcare still depends on fax. This isn’t because leaders missed the memo, but because it remains one of the most ubiquitous ways to share health information. What’s critical today is how faxed information is handled so that clinical data doesn’t sit unstructured, unseen, and unprioritized while patients wait.
Why Fax Data Still Shapes Radiology Workflows and Patient Experience
Roy Vincent, Vice President of Sales & Marketing at medQ, who offer imaging workflow automation and AI solutions along with Marianne Soucy, Solutions Engineer at Consensus Cloud Solutions, makers of the industry leading eFax® platform and advanced digital transformation solutions, joined Healthcare IT Today to unpack a familiar, stubborn problem: unstructured data in healthcare. The conversation centered on how fax data flows through radiology and intake workflows, and what changes when that information is made easily visible, searchable, and actionable.
Key Takeaways
- Fax Isn’t the Problem, Unstructured Data Is. Fax remains deeply embedded in healthcare, but the real issue is leaving critical data trapped and untriaged. Leaders should stop trying to eliminate fax overnight and instead focus on extracting, structuring, and acting on the information it contains.
- Speed is a Patient Safety Issue. Faster document processing isn’t just about efficiency—it directly impacts patient safety and outcomes. Delays in reports or intake data can cascade into delayed care, missed diagnoses, or patients leaving untreated.
Why unstructured fax data remains a hidden bottleneck in healthcare IT
“About 70% of healthcare is still utilizing fax today,” said Roy Vincent. “We haven’t moved past that [technology].”
The challenge, according to Vincent, is not the transmission method, but the volume of documents landing in queues with no context.
Processing a bloated fax inbox is one of the least desirable administrative tasks in healthcare. With nothing more than a sender name, date, and time, staff are forced to open documents one by one just to determine what they are and where they belong. As Soucy described it, “You’ve got a list of faxes. That’s just A, B, C, D, E. You have no idea what’s in them. You are clicking through five, six pages of results, looking for the facts that the person is waiting on the phone to talk to you about.”
That lack of visibility is where structure begins to matter.
“Our technology is all about making fax actually useful in healthcare,” Soucy explained. “When you receive a fax, you need to know what is it, who is it for, and what do we need to do with it. That’s really what it’s about.”
Vincent described how that intelligence changes downstream workflows once documents arrive inside medQ: “They’re parsing that data for us. They’re looking at, is it in order? Is it just documents supporting the exam? Is it just notes from the doctor? What is it that’s happening? What’s coming in? Where do we need to put that?”
Once documents are understood, they can be routed, attached, and prioritized rather than parked in a queue waiting for manual review.
How delays in data processing affect outcomes and trust
Turnaround time is often discussed as an efficiency metric, but both Soucy and Vincent framed it as something more consequential.
Vincent share a simple, powerful axiom: “If you don’t get a report turned around in time, you’re not treating a patient in time.”
Soucy added that the patient perspective often gets lost in systems discussions: “Think about when you need healthcare. You’re sick, you’re worried, you are not really all that interested in waiting.” Especially for your health information or treatment details to get from one physician to another.
When intake data, orders, or supporting documents stall, the delay shows up as anxiety, missed care, or patients leaving before they are seen.
Shared Focus, Faster Care
The collaboration between medQ and Consensus reflects a shared focus on solving real operational pain. Instead of treating fax as a bolt-on problem to be managed at arm’s length, the two teams are aligned around listening to customers, understanding where workflows break down, and responding with practical improvements that reduce burden. That kind of partnership matters to organizations stretched thin by imaging staffing shortages and growing volumes. Even small gains in clarity and speed can improve the timeliness of care, while also reducing the administrative burden.
Operational Clarity Starts Upstream
Healthcare’s continued reliance on fax is not a failure of awareness. It is a signal that information still needs a reliable path into clinical workflows. As volumes grow, we must get past our obsession that fax is still used and focus instead on how make fax information visible, prioritized, and understood before they slow care. In that sense, the fax queue becomes a mirror of the system itself: when data is clear, care can move; when it is not, patients wait.
Learn more about medQ at https://www.medq.com/
Learn more about Consensus Cloud Solutions https://www.consensus.com/
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