Even in 2025, fax remains at the heart of healthcare communication because it ensures compliance while moving critical documents between providers, labs and payers. The problem isn’t the technology - it’s the way it’s used. Fragmented, manual workflows slow teams down, increase compliance risk and pull staff away from what really matters: patient care.

Documo’s 2025 Stuck in the Fax Lane survey highlights the scope of these challenges and reinforces the urgency for healthcare teams to modernize workflows with automation and Intelligent Document Processing (IDP).

Manual workflows are slowing care and adding risk

The survey reveals that 88% of hospital administrators report that fax delays negatively affect patient care. Many documents, even routine ones, are delayed or mishandled, requiring staff to intervene repeatedly. On top of that, 52% of faxes still require staff intervention, often escalating to IT helpdesks when routing fails. This leaves clinical and administrative teams juggling compliance requirements, patient care priorities and workflow bottlenecks.

Almost half of all faxed documents (44%) are time-sensitive, meaning delays or errors can have significant consequences for patient treatment and scheduling. Only 29% of organizations report fully automated workflows, leaving the majority of healthcare teams relying on manual, resource-intensive processes.

Operational and financial impacts

Manual workflows don’t just slow processes; they carry tangible costs:

• Patient Care Risk: Misrouted, delayed or incomplete documents can lead to misdiagnoses, delayed treatment or skipped authorizations.
   
• Staff Burden: Administrative and IT teams spend countless hours handling document exceptions, correcting errors and verifying routing instead of focusing on higher-value work.
   
• Revenue Cycle Impact: Slow or incorrect handling of authorizations and claims can delay reimbursement, with hospitals experiencing nearly twice as many fax-related claim delays as other facilities.
   
• Confidence Gap: The survey found that automation correlates with higher confidence - automated teams report better routing accuracy, faster turnaround times and fewer errors.
   

Even facility type matters: clinics report that 61% of faxes are still reviewed manually, while agencies and residential facilities struggle most with multi-page faxes and tracking challenges.

Why legacy fax systems fall short

The survey also identifies the main gaps in current workflows:

• Incomplete or unclear information: Many faxes arrive missing key details, requiring staff or IT to intervene.
   
• Routing delays: Documents often sit in bottlenecks, leaving administrators uncertain about status and accountability.
   
• Visibility challenges: Teams struggle to track where documents are in the workflow, creating compliance exposure and staff frustration.

Across the board organizations consistently point to the need for automation (90%), speed (75%), accuracy (65%) and visibility (55%) as top priorities. Yet cost, security concerns and integration complexity remain barriers for many teams.

Automation and IDP: A solution to workflow friction

The problem isn’t fax itself - it’s the manual, outdated processes built around it. Cloud fax combined with IDP transforms how healthcare teams handle documents:

• Automatic Routing: Documents are delivered to the right team, system or patient record without human intervention.
   
• AI Classification & OCR: Faxes are categorized by type (referrals, labs, authorizations) and critical data is extracted automatically for accurate and fast entry into EHRs.
   
• Reduced Staff Intervention: By automating the 52% of faxes that currently require human processing, teams can reduce repetitive work and reallocate time to patient care.
   
• Compliance & Security Built-In: Automated workflows maintain HIPAA and SOC2 compliance while providing tracking and audit trails.

Organizations that implement automation report measurable improvements: faster processing, fewer errors and higher confidence that documents reach the right destination. Staff stress is reduced and clinical operations become more efficient.

From statistics to strategy

Fax remains an essential communication tool, but legacy workflows are holding healthcare teams back. With 21 billion healthcare documents processed annually, $257 billion in administrative complexity costs and $1.5 million average HIPAA fines, the stakes for efficient, compliant document handling have never been higher.

The Documo survey demonstrates that automation is more than a convenience - it’s a strategic imperative. By modernizing fax workflows with AI-powered automation and IDP, healthcare teams can minimize manual work, accelerate patient care, reduce errors and maintain compliance.

From bottlenecks to breakthroughs

Healthcare organizations no longer need to accept workflow friction and manual bottlenecks as inevitable. By combining cloud fax with Intelligent Document Processing, teams can create faster, more reliable and fully digital document workflows. Modernization transforms fax from a source of operational friction into a workflow advantage - allowing staff to focus on what matters most: patient care, not paperwork.