Secure cloud fax is a service that sends and receives faxes over the internet, with no fax machine, and protects the documents with encryption. Hospitals and clinics in the United States use it to exchange patient records, because they trust fax more than email for this. It is used mainly in America.
A fax sends a scanned page over a telephone line, and the receiving fax machine prints it. Cloud fax does the same job without the machines. A clinic sends a document from its computer or from its record system. The service converts it into a fax and delivers it to the receiver's fax number. If the receiver also uses cloud fax, the page arrives as a digital file, not on paper.
Why does American healthcare still use fax? There are three reasons. First, almost every clinic, pharmacy and insurer in America has a fax number, but their record systems often cannot connect to one another. Second, HIPAA, the American health privacy law, accepts fax as a way for doctors and hospitals to share records for a patient's treatment. Email, by contrast, can go to the wrong address, can be read on the way if it is not protected, and is the main route for phishing, the fake messages that attackers send to steal data. Third, a fax comes with a confirmation: the sender receives a report that the page was delivered.
The cloud version adds protections that an old fax machine lacks. The document is encrypted while it travels and while it is stored, so only the intended receiver can read it. Every fax is logged: who sent it, to whom, when, and whether it was delivered. These logs help a hospital prove that it follows HIPAA, and they are often collected in HIPAA compliance software. And no printed page lies in a shared tray, where anyone could pick it up.
For instance, a cardiology clinic in Minnesota refers a patient to a heart surgeon at a hospital. An employee at the clinic selects 23 pages from the patient's record: the referral letter, two reports of heart ultrasound scans and a list of medicines. She sends them to the hospital's fax number from inside the record system. Forty seconds later, the clinic receives a delivery confirmation. At the hospital, the pages arrive in a digital inbox, not on a printer. Software reads them, recognises that they belong to a referral, and attaches them to the patient's new record. Turning a faxed page into data in this way is the job of intelligent document processing (IDP).
Fax is a slow answer to the problem of interoperability. The long-term aim is to send records as structured data through FHIR APIs. But until every clinic can do that, hospitals and medical record retrieval services will keep using fax. Fax plays a much smaller part in Indian healthcare. India's national approach links records to each patient's ABHA number instead.