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EHR Cloud Fax Integration: How to Streamline Workflows Without Sacrificing Compliance

Author: Phil Charron
July 9, 2025
documo vs etherfax

Introduction

In the world of healthcare document management, faxing is, unfortunately, still a necessity. Just because it’s a necessity doesn’t mean it has to consume as much of your team’s time and bandwidth as it does. Most faxes need to end up in your systems of record – EHRs, Revenue Cycle Management Systems, etc. Faxes are essentially pictures of documents. Identifying the patient and purpose of a fax is time consuming, expensive, and has the potential to introduce HIPAA violations.

One of the biggest challenges of staying compliant in healthcare document management is leaving traces of patient records during their journey from the source of the fax to your EHR. Whether you’re still scanning paper-based faxes or saving cloud-based faxes on your desktop, your team has to send those traces to the shredder bin or your computer desktop in order to stay compliant. Penalties for HIPAA violations can run from hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars for each instance.

One way to ensure speed, efficiency, and compliance is to switch to a cloud fax solution that’s integrated with your EHR. There are two main ways to integrate a cloud fax service with your EHR: directly, or through a cloud fax portal.

Table of Contents

Integrating Cloud Fax Directly with EHRs

If you are sending and receiving faxes from a fax inbox inside your EHR, you’re using Direct EHR–Cloud Fax integration.

EHR users who have Direct cloud fax integration with their EHR may think their EHR is their cloud fax provider, but that’s very unlikely. Technology companies stay focused on a narrow set of competencies, and managing telecom operations is far from the core competency of electronic medical record keeping. Trust me, you want it this way.

Think about a Swiss Army Knife with 8 other components in it. The knife does exactly what you expect it to, but the saw and the screwdriver are only useful in a pinch. You wouldn’t use either of these tools to build a handmade chair or rebuild the engine in your ‘68 Mustang. This is the same with technology. Your EHR vendor knows medical health record management very well. If they tried to build a fax service, it would be about as useful to you as that saw in your Swiss Army Knife.

There are two ways Direct EHR–Cloud Fax integration can work, either natively or where you pick-your-own cloud fax service.

Native EHR Cloud Faxing

If you have Native Cloud faxing within your EHR, they have contracted with one or more cloud fax providers and have built a faxing feature set around what their vendors offer. Your faxing costs are either bundled into your EHR fees as part of the service or you have a fax plan as an add-on to your EHR fees. Bundled fax services are typically offered when your EHR services specialties that have very low fax volumes. Add-on fax services are reserved for EHRs that cater to medical services that have a variety of volumes, or very high volumes.

Pros
  • Built in functionality – no switching between platforms
  • Volume pricing – due to the sheer volume your EHR is purchasing on your behalf, they’ve been able to negotiate a price on your behalf. The cost of faxing will either be absorbed into your EHR fees, or you’ll get plans that are close to market rates
Cons
  • Little or no pricing flexibility – they’re working on thin margins to compete with outside cloud fax vendors, so there’s very little room to negotiate with them regardless of how much volume you’re dealing with
  • Little or no feature flexibility – they’ve built their features into the platform and will only make accommodations if a large set of customers demand the feature
  • Minimal innovation – their innovative juices are being spread across the entire product, so they may not have the bandwidth to focus on fax
  • You may need a secondary fax tool – Sending and receiving faxes for purposes other than what happens in your EHR is challenging or impossible… if Finance needs to send a fax to your 401k vendor, you may need to use a separate fax service

Pick-your-own EHR Cloud Faxing

Some EHRs allow you to select from a collection of fax providers either directly inside your EHR or through a hybrid integration. You still get to use their inbox and faxing services inside the EHR, but they don’t have to absorb the cost of fax or manage your plans and billing.

Pros
  • Built in functionality – no switching between platforms
  • Rates and packaging – Your EHR has likely negotiated packages for you that are better than retail rates and you get to pick a package that’s convenient for you. High-volume customers may be able to negotiate better rates beyond what they see in the accepted packages
  • Secondary fax platform availability – because you’re buying direct from the fax vendor, you likely have access to their fax portal outside of your EHR, allowing you to use their fax service for other purposes outside of your Direct EHR needs
Cons
  • Little or no feature flexibility – see above
  • Minimal innovation – see above

Integrating Cloud Fax Portals with EHRs

Some cloud fax services allow their fax portals to integrate directly with EHRs giving you a flexible, innovative fax platform that converts faxes into machine readable documents you can then save into patient records or trigger EHR workflows from your cloud fax platform’s interface.

Pros
  • Platform flexibility – you can use the fax platform for whatever you need, not just for EHR features
  • Rates and packaging – you will have a variety of packages available to you with more volume discounting
  • Complementary feature sets – most cloud fax platforms bundle their services together with related features like Intelligent document processing, electronic signatures, contact management, and advanced permissions
  • Constant Innovation – much like your EHR’s product team is constantly building new EHR functionality to
Cons
  • Two platforms – EHR and Fax users are working across two platforms, which may be a little challenging, but a good integration tries to remove as many usability barriers as possible

Documo and EHR Integration

At Documo, we recognize that every provider’s needs are different, so we’ve built an intelligent document management platform that works for every EHR integration scenario. EHR and Health Tech companies use our APIs for both native and choose-your-own direct integrations. Meanwhile, we’re constantly assessing EHRs and building integrations from our fax portal for healthcare providers whose technologies don’t support direct integration, or whose direct integration is not as cutting-edge as it could be.

And we have built the most modern fax network on the market. So no matter how we integrate with your EHR, you’ll have the most reliable service from a company that is constantly innovating.

Most importantly, we agree with all of the providers out there by saying that Cloud Fax doesn’t have to suck. We want to make faxing so transparent to your team that it feels like they’re simply moving documents around, as quickly and efficiently as they possibly can.

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