The healthcare industry landscape in 2026 and beyond is growing and evolving, with investment in technology rapidly expanding as well. Given that, you might be surprised by the one technology that virtually every healthcare provider still has in common – and it’s not electronic health records, computers, mobile devices or even the internet. Incredibly, it’s fax. Yes, that’s right – fax. The communication modality that has gone the way of the VCR is still alive and well in healthcare. According to the Electronic Health Reporter1, over 9 billion pages are exchanged each year in the healthcare industry, with cost estimates of over $125 billion. Processing these faxed documents places a significant administrative burden on staff, with care coordination across healthcare organizations driving much of the volume.
Let’s examine a fairly common occurrence related to the transition of care of a patient with multiple medical comorbidities from one setting of care to another, and how the current administrative process to manage that transition is largely manual, paper and fax-dependent, slow and potentially error-prone. Further, we will explain how Konica Minolta can help healthcare organizations digitally transform these processes and minimize provider friction, expedite patient admissions and reduce operational costs, while reducing anxiety for the patient and their family.
The Real-World Impact of Fax on Patient Care Transitions Consider Sheryl, an 87-year-old with dementia, heart disease, and a fractured pelvis from a fall at her assisted living facility. Sheryl is transported by ambulance to the hospital ER, where her medical records are sent to admissions via analog fax. Her medication record was not included, preventing the hospital from reconciling it with the EHR and increasing the risk of under or over-medication or dangerous drug interactions. This has obvious implications with the clinical staff’s care plan for Sheryl – all because a fax was lost in transmission, or was illegible or simply didn’t get attached by the sender to begin with. If the family is present, they may be asked to provide their mother’s meds – if they know it – or to reach out to the senior care center, all while a nurse in the ED may already be doing the same thing. All of this results in multiple calls back and forth, redundant efforts, frustrated and worried family members, overtaxed clinical staff, wasted time and costs. And this is a single instance of a very specific use case at a single hospital. This, and many other instances, where care is initiated by antiquated fax technology (i.e. analog fax or low-end e-fax), is experienced tens of thousands of times per day, across the county. The question is – how does this get solved?
The good news is that healthcare organizations have dramatically increased their digital transformation. A survey of healthcare IT leaders by KeyPoint Intelligence2 found that 76% of survey respondents indicated that they are prioritizing workflow automation, and shifting away from “compliance-driven digitization to operational automation focused on reducing manual steps and accelerating revenue cycles. Priority areas include patient intake, registration, and records routing.”
Effective transformation starts with reviewing care transition workflows including intake, discharge, transfers, and referral communications, often across disparate EHR systems. A key focus area is PHI exchange, still largely driven by fax and the manual processes required to receive, review, and store documents. Through engagement with CHIME members, Konica Minolta found that while organizations are increasingly prioritizing automation, many still struggle to efficiently manage care transition workflows.
As part of our engagement with CHIME members, we conducted a survey focused on Intelligent Document Automation, and found that nearly half of the respondents stated that staff within their healthcare organizations are spending 10-15% of their time on manual and/or paper-based processes, and another 27% stated that staff are spending up to 50% of their time on similar processes. Back office (AR/AP, HR, etc), as well as patient intake (admissions, registration and discharge planning) were departmental functions most impacted by manual, paper and faxed-based workflows, as illustrated here:
In our focus group discussions, most organizations still rely on fax for inbound referrals, even as some begin implementing e-referrals through EHRs like Epic and Oracle Health. However, fax remains unavoidable, as providers outside their systems continue to send referrals and orders via fax. When asked to describe their experience managing inbound referral processing, the responses were similar, and unfortunately, fairly typical for healthcare organizations across virtually all care settings from acute to ambulatory and extended care:
“All of our external referrals are coming in via fax, and then our access team is manually transcribing those faxes. The team who works the referrals can then start to…follow their process to ultimately get the patient scheduled. So, you can imagine, the impact or delay that that could have on access to care.” University Medical Center
“…pretty soon we’ll be going live with Care Everywhere Referral Management. We’re an Epic shop, so all of the Epic-to-Epic referrals will start to flow electronically, which will be helpful, but it still doesn’t address all of the administrative burden that manually transcribing, you know, a million faxes a year or more is causing.” Medical Center
“We still have a process, and it’s… it’s old. It’s getting inbound orders from some community practices. They get faxed in, and they go to an electronic fax queue. And then from there, they’re printed out and then scanned back into Oracle. And we know it’s horrible. That’s just where we are right now. We’re in the middle of doing some bi-directional order and results interfaces with some of our large practices to kind of reduce some of that burden.” Hospital
As noted, these experiences are not unique – they are actually part of a much larger issue. As reported in Medical Economics4, 88% of healthcare providers relay negative impacts on patient care due to fax, and that 33% of all documents sent to healthcare facilities are transmitted via fax, with at least 50% of those documents requiring some level of manual processing.
The industry is responding to these administrative challenges. In April 2026, CMS introduced standards to promote electronic document exchange and reduce fax reliance; however, these rules primarily target claims-related communications between providers and payers, leaving most provider-to-provider fax use in care transitions largely unchanged. The standards took effect in May 2026, with enforcement expected in 2028.
So where does that leave healthcare organizations that are looking for solutions to the challenges expressed by the CHIME members in our Focus Group? As indicated in the graph below, we posed that question as part of our survey and found that many are moving towards digital fax (either on prem or via the cloud), so at a minimum they can get documents into a digital format, which makes it easier to automate processing. Some are using Intelligent Document Automation tools like Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and automated routing, to more effectively extract usable insights from unstructured content and get patients and procedures scheduled more rapidly, while others are using e-forms and similar tools to reduce reliance on paper and lessen time spent by patients and staff during registration. And finally, healthcare providers are beginning to implement AI to augment various processes, whether they be ambient AI for EHR documentation, chatbots for patient / customer service, as well as agentic AI for more rapid document/data access.
Konica Minolta Business Solutions is rooted in over 150 years of document imaging technology and solutions. We help customers manage critical business processes such as referral management through solutions developed to improve efficiencies, reduce operational costs, minimize referral (and revenue) leakage, and improve staff and patient experiences.
We have assisted customers in transforming their EOB (explanation of benefits) processes in the Revenue Cycle Management department, helped hospitals digitize their manual lab order referral process, expedited backfile conversions for health centers who recently migrated to a new EHR, and implemented digital and cloud fax solutions for healthcare organizations to begin their digital transformation journeys, among many other workflows, use cases and administrative challenges. Konica Minolta is dedicated to improving the work experiences of our healthcare customers, and proud to assist in solving problematic manual workflow, reducing costs, improving security and most importantly, giving staff back more time to devote to patient-centered care.
Learn more about Konica Minolta’s Workflow Automation Solutions here.
Fax referral automation is the use of intelligent document processing and workflow automation tools to capture, extract, and route incoming faxed referrals into electronic systems like EHRs. It replaces manual tasks such as sorting, indexing, and data entry, improving efficiency and accuracy.
Automating fax referrals reduces administrative burden, minimizes errors, and speeds up patient intake. It also helps healthcare organizations lower operational costs, prevent lost or delayed referrals, and improve patient experience.
Intelligent document automation uses technologies like OCR and rules-based workflows to extract patient data, validate it against EHR systems, and automatically route documents. This streamlines referral processing, reduces manual handling, and ensures faster access to patient information.
Manual processes can lead to delays, lost documents, high labor costs, and poor visibility into referral status. These inefficiencies negatively impact staff productivity, revenue cycle performance, and patient satisfaction.
Yes, modern fax automation solutions are designed to integrate with EHR platforms. They can match patient data, attach documents directly to records, and ensure seamless information flow across departments without disrupting existing systems.
