Every October 7, the global health community observes One Health Day – a reminder that human health is deeply connected to the world around us. Outbreaks, environmental changes, and public health threats do not respect institutional boundaries. They move fast, cross systems, and demand coordinated action.
The principle is simple: no single organization, whether hospitals, public health agencies, or labs, can tackle emerging threats alone. The reality is more complicated. Effective collaboration depends on how quickly critical information moves. And too often, that is where healthcare still struggles.
Even today, vital data often moves through slow, siloed channels like paper forms, manual handoffs, and fax machines. By the time labs, health systems, and agencies exchange information, valuable hours or days may already be lost. In a world where speed determines outcomes, slow information is not just inconvenient. It is dangerous.
The One Health Imperative: Breaking Down Silos
The core idea behind One Health is about connected action that links data and decisions across healthcare delivery, public health, environmental monitoring, and research. It is not enough to treat individual patients; we need to see the larger patterns that signal risk and guide response.
But operationalizing that vision is harder than it sounds. Many organizations still rely on manual workflows, disconnected systems, and legacy technology that slow detection and delay response. During a public health event, those delays can mean the difference between containment and crisis.Modern healthcare requires systems that can move information quickly, accurately, and securely across institutions. The better we connect data from labs and clinics to health departments and monitoring networks, the faster we can identify threats, coordinate response, and protect communities.
Fax: The Silent Bottleneck in Health Collaboration
It is hard to believe, but even in 2025, fax still moves roughly 75% of medical information. Lab results, referrals, prior authorizations, discharge summaries, and other documents are still transmitted over phone lines or virtual fax servers every day.
Fax remains because it is secure, compliant, and deeply embedded in healthcare workflows. But persistence is not progress.
Traditional fax workflows are manual, error-prone, and slow. Documents sit in queues waiting to be read, sorted, and re-entered into EHRs. They get misfiled. They get delayed. And in moments where coordination is critical, those delays have real consequences:
- A lab flags a potential public health concern, but the faxed report is not processed until hours later.
- An urgent update is sent to a regional health system but routed incorrectly and never reaches the right team.
- A key early warning signal is buried in a backlog of unstructured documents.
Each breakdown shares a root cause: outdated workflows built for a slower era.
Turning Fax From Liability Into Advantage
The problem is not fax itself. It is how organizations handle it. Modern cloud fax platforms and intelligent document processing (IDP) are transforming fax from a bottleneck into an asset.
At Documo, we automate the entire lifecycle of a faxed document:
- Incoming faxes are instantly digitized and made machine-readable.
- AI extracts key information such as patient data and test results in seconds.
- Documents are automatically routed to the correct department, system, or workflow.
- Data is matched to existing records or flagged for review without human intervention.
The result is information that once took hours or days now moves in minutes. And when information moves faster, collaboration accelerates, whether that is between a hospital and a public health agency or across a multi-site health network preparing for an emerging threat.This is not just an efficiency gain. It is a public health imperative. Faster workflows mean faster detection, faster reporting, and faster response.
Why This Matters for One Health
One Health Day is more than a symbolic observance. It is a call to modernize how healthcare organizations connect. If clinical data still moves by fax, public health reports are stuck in email attachments, and lab results live in isolated spreadsheets, collaboration will always lag behind the pace of real-world challenges.
Modernizing foundational workflows unlocks measurable benefits:
- Faster reporting: Labs, clinics, and agencies share critical data in near real-time.
- Better data quality: Structured extraction reduces errors and ensures nothing is lost in transit.
- Improved surveillance: Seamless data movement makes it easier to spot trends and respond early.
- More time for impact: Teams spend less time on admin work and more time on prevention, treatment, and response.
It is not the most glamorous work, but it is the infrastructure that powers healthcare’s ability to act.
Moving Forward: Collaboration Starts With Connection
One Health Day is an opportunity to ask tough questions about the workflows that underpin our healthcare system. Are they designed for the complexity and urgency of today, or are they slowing us down?
Every piece of healthcare infrastructure, even fax, plays a role in how quickly and effectively organizations respond to emerging threats. The leaders in this space will treat information as a strategic asset, not a byproduct.
At Documo, that is the future we are building toward. By automating the way information moves, we help healthcare organizations do more than keep up. We help them lead, with systems ready for the speed and interconnectedness modern health demands.Because when health is connected, our workflows have to be too.
