12 steps to finally kill the fax machine in your practice

The fax machine is the last piece of 1980s office equipment still doing load-bearing work in American medicine, and most practices have made peace with it. A March 17, 2026, MGMA Stat poll found that 73 percent of practices have a digital fax solution fully integrated with their EHR and practice management systems, while nearly one in four does not. The poll drew 292 applicable responses.

Going digital is not the same as getting rid of fax. Swapping the machine for an inbox leaves the same work in place: monitoring the queue, matching documents to patients, splitting multipage packets, chasing missing pages and routing everything to the right worklist. That translation layer between fax traffic and your systems is where staff hours quietly go, and it is where protected health information most often ends up in the wrong place.

The alternatives finally exist. More than 71,000 sites now exchange data through TEFCA and its 11 designated QHINs, and payers face a Jan. 1, 2027, deadline for prior authorization APIs. Here are 12 places to start.