Fax to email

Who this page is for: the practice manager who knows exactly which pile the fax referrals sit in - the fax pile is the point.

Industry estimates put fax reliance at roughly 80 to 90 per cent of Australian healthcare organisations (PwC and industry estimates). Fax is optional, but at that prevalence a fax-to-email number can be useful coverage.

Status today: the fax-to-email capture pattern is built and exercised with patient-free files. Choosing Fax during signup records a preference only. A provider number being provisioned or ported does not activate Refera: the destination mailbox must be configured, a patient-free test fax arrival must be verified through that path, and every patient-data readiness check must pass first.

Recommended: port the existing number

The number on referral pads, letterheads and GP address books keeps working - referrers change nothing, and GP habits are preserved. A hosted provider (verified Australian options: GoFax and Notifyre) receives on your number and delivers each fax as a PDF email into the referrals mailbox - one pipeline, one queue.

Porting takes paperwork and a lead time, so the porting authority is signed on day one and the wait runs in parallel with everything else.

Alternative: a new number, same day

The provider can usually provision a new fax-to-email number the same day and deliver each fax as a PDF email into the referrals mailbox. That is provider readiness, not Refera activation. It suits a practice preparing the fax path while the connector is configured and proved; the old machine can keep running during the changeover.

What happens to a grainy fax

Faxes are the hardest documents at the door. During capture-off setup, the handling is honest: extracted fields are shown beside the available source excerpt and attachment metadata, and anything unparseable is held for review, never silently dropped or guessed at. The practice’s mailbox keeps the original PDF. Refera’s own source-document lifecycle is not deployed and must pass its patient-data readiness checks before it is claimed.

Related

• Microsoft 365 mailbox - where the fax PDFs land.
• Why the front door - why the fax pile matters.