This week's poll is sponsored by Insight Health AI, whose mission is to build AI-powered clinical agents that offload routine and complex tasks, enabling clinicians to practice at the top of their license and deliver meaningful, personalized care. 

To most businesses, fax isn’t a core communication channel in 2026. In almost any other industry, it would be a museum piece or a punchline. But healthcare has kept fax relevant long past its expiration date because it moves information between organizations that still don’t share data smoothly, especially across referral networks and payer workflows. 

This anachronism is an annoyance for practice managers and administrators as it quietly consumes staff hours: monitoring inbound queues, matching faxes to patients, splitting multi-page packets, routing documents to the right worklist, tracking missing pages, and then turning around and faxing EHR outputs back to whoever requested them.  

“Digital fax” has helped in many practices, but often it only swaps a physical machine for a digital inbox — leaving the same manual sorting, indexing, and follow-up work in place. 

Our March 17, 2026, MGMA Stat poll finds that nearly 1 medical practice in 4 (24%) report not having a digital fax solution fully integrated with their EHR/PM and workflows, while 73% do, and 3% were unsure. The poll had 292 applicable responses. 

Our polling has been flagging this for years. In 2019, 89% of healthcare leaders said their organization uses a fax machine. If this 20th-century artifact exists inside your 21st-century practice, the next step is moving from manual, human-handled fax to AI-assisted workflows that can classify, extract, route, and document fax traffic with far fewer touches by your team. 

Where fax steals staff time 

Even when you’ve gone “paperless,” staff often spend real time doing the translation layer between fax traffic and your systems. The work hides in small steps that add up: 

• Triage: What is this fax, and who owns it? 
• Patient match: Which chart does it belong to — and what if the fax has a nickname, a missing DOB, or the wrong MRN? 
• Routing: Which provider, pool, or work queue should get it — and by when? 
• Rework: Missing pages, illegible details, duplicate faxes, multi-patient packets that have to be split, or faxes sent to the wrong number (a compliance risk that requires “reasonable safeguards”). 
• Outbound churn: “Fax us your last note,” “send the op report,” “send the denial appeal packet,” “send the records by Friday,” “send proof of eligibility.” Your team ends up pulling EHR/PM outputs, converting them, attaching the right documents, and tracking whether the request was satisfied. 

MGMA has pointed out how healthcare operations often “jerry-rig” technology to replicate manual workflows — printing, scanning, and faxing to bridge gaps that systems never fully solved. Fax is a prime example: it turns structured data needs into image-based paperwork, which then must be manually transformed back into structured workflow. 

What you told us and what it reveals 

• Among those who answered "yes," the “wins” described by respondents suggest that the real value is not simply making fax digital, but making it operational. When faxed information flows directly into routing, indexing, and follow-up workflows, practices report fewer manual touches, less rework, faster turnaround on referrals and prior authorization packets, and fewer documents effectively disappearing between receipt and action. That points to a broader benefit: tighter workflow integration converts fax from a persistent point of friction into a more manageable administrative channel.
• The “no” responses show that fax burden clusters around a few especially time-intensive workflows, led by prior authorizations, denials and appeals, and referrals. Orders and results, records requests, and signature-related communications also show up, but the dominant pattern is staff time getting absorbed by high-friction administrative exchanges that require repeated follow-up, documentation, and handoffs across teams. This aligns with other MGMA member concerns on growing burdens. For example, MGMA’s Annual Regulatory Burden Report found that 92% of surveyed medical group practices hired or reassigned staff solely to handle growing prior authorization volume — a signal that PA documentation handling (often fax-driven) remains a major drag. 
• Other comments from administrators in this week's polling suggest that many practices are operating in a middle ground: faxes may arrive digitally, but staff still do substantial manual work to sort, flag, upload, index, and route them into the right chart or workflow. A few respondents described stronger automation, including EHR-based routing or AI-assisted labeling, but the dominant picture is that inbound fax management still depends heavily on human review — especially for referrals, records, pharmacy messages, and prior authorizations.

Why referrals are usually the “tell” 

Referrals are the fax workflow that most quickly exposes whether your “digital fax” is truly integrated. MGMA polling has found most practices now use their EHR or referral management tools — but leaders still cite faxed paper referrals and EHR limitations as reasons some workflows remain manual. Referrals aren’t just documents; they’re work objects that need to be matched to a patient, checked for completeness, routed to the right service line, and tracked to appointment and close-the-loop. Fax makes that harder unless the workflow does more than store PDFs. 

The next shift: from “digital fax inbox” to “AI-managed fax workflow” 

Practices are already moving AI beyond experimentation and into production. MGMA Stat polling showed 68% of medical practices added or expanded AI use in 2025, with adoption clustering around high-friction workflows and inbound communications. 

Fax is increasingly in that same category, and the “AI fax agent” concept is straightforward: treat inbound faxes like structured workflow inputs, not static images. In practical terms, that can mean: 

• Intercepting inbound faxes from your existing fax service or email feed 
• Classifying document type and splitting multi-patient packets 
• Extracting key fields (patient identifiers, orders, dates, payer details) and matching to the right chart 
• Routing to the right provider/team/work queue with flags for urgency or missing information 
• Auto-requesting missing items when a referral or PA packet is incomplete (with staff overseeing exceptions) 
• Creating searchable text so staff aren’t stuck reading blurry images and retyping details 

You may not automate everything, but reducing the number of human touches per fax enables you to reserve staff effort for the exceptions that truly require judgment. 

Two action steps to take 

1. Run a one-week fax workflow audit. Count inbound faxes, categorize the top five types, and estimate touches per item (triage → match → file → route → follow-up). You’ll immediately see whether your biggest problem is volume, rework, or routing ambiguity. 
2. Define what “fully integrated” means for your practice. A practical definition isn’t “we receive faxes digitally.” It’s: “the right document lands in the right chart, with the right owner, in the right queue, with visibility into status and turnaround.” 

Fax won’t disappear because you wish it would. It disappears when your workflows stop treating it like paper and start treating it like data. Quantify where the burden concentrates — your most realistic AI automation wins are hiding in plain sight.