Insights from athenahealth: Enhancing Healthcare Communication with Integrated Cloud Fax Capabilities

Even as patient records have been digitized and communication systems have evolved, the healthcare industry still depends on fax to send and receive vital information. Recent data suggests 46% of healthcare facilities still rely on paper fax to exchange information with other providers in the absence of an EHR, according to a survey facilitated by CHIME and sponsored by Consensus Cloud Solutions. About 30% rely on digital cloud fax. 

From referral orders to prior authorizations to medical record requests and other information, Nagda and her team see all kinds of critical clinical data being faxed by the 160,000+ clinicians on the athenaOne® network. But traditional fax brings administrative challenges that can impede the flow of data, interrupting the exchange of information and the delivery of care. By integrating digital cloud fax directly within the athenaOne EHR, athenahealth helped customers streamline their communication workflows to strengthen continuity of care, revenue and referrals. Nagda explained the impact of eFax Corporate^® by Consensus Cloud Solutions during a recent fireside chat at HIMSS 2025 with Fred Goldstein, PopHealth Week Radio Podcast Host.

Facing fax challenges

Traditional fax communications can slow down small clinics and large health systems alike.

“The biggest challenge is that it’s a manual effort,” Nagda said. “A lot of these practices that we work with have to manage a lot of the faxes themselves, so medical staff are trying to upload the faxes, process the documentation, and manually enter a lot of the information. It leads to human error.” 

This cumbersome, time-consuming process takes clinical staff away from patients and increases inefficiencies that significantly impact care. To relieve providers of this administrative burden, athenahealth created a Document Services team to take over fax workflows, allowing clinicians to focus on managing care. Although customers loved the service, it suffered from some unanticipated technical limitations.

At first, athenahealth established toll-free numbers where customers could forward their existing fax lines. The Document Services team would receive the faxes and process the documents on behalf of the customer, then attach the data to the appropriate patient record. Although athenahealth was shouldering the burden, the process of forwarding faxes across telecommunication (telco) providers led to resolution loss, dropped calls, and other technical glitches. Customers and athenaheath staff were constantly having to troubleshoot and retry sending these faxes, while the customer’s partners and providers were frustrated their faxes weren’t getting through.

To streamline the workflow, athenahealth turned to eFax Corporate. “Any opportunity to automate the process and make sure that we eliminate human error and increase accuracy, especially in the medical industry, is [critical],” Nagda said.

Elevating fax efficiency

At that point, athenahealth was already leveraging eFax Corporate as its internal fax provider through “a tried and trusted partnership,” Nagda said. “We love the team at Consensus, so we said, ‘Why don’t we extend this to our customers? Why can’t our customers benefit from Consensus’ capabilities?’” 

Integrating eFax Corporate directly into athenahealth’s athenaOne^® software instantly solved the Doc Services team’s fax forwarding problems, enabling customers to streamline communications while improving documentation quality.

Through this integration, athenaOne users can port their local fax number directly to eFax Corporate. From there, Consensus automatically digitizes each document and attaches it to the matching patient record in the EHR. The difference is faxes are no longer being call-forwarded, it’s a direct digital path from eFax into athenaOne. “I call this the ‘email moment’ for faxing, because it allows faxes to be digital,” Nagda says. “It’s faster, it’s more reliable, it’s more accurate—and obviously, those all translate to significant outcomes.” 

Typically, eliminating legacy telco costs generates a return on investment of up to 80%, based on the average POTS (plain old telephone service) line cost between $60 to $80. Plus, eFax efficiencies reduce the labor expenses associated with manually processing traditional faxes, enhancing productivity by reallocating staff time to focus on patient care. 

“Anything we can do to improve the lives of our customers and providers—and make sure they have less costs and their time is more focused on the work that they’re supposed to be doing, which is seeing patients and delivering healthcare—is our end goal,” Nagda said.

Advancing the future of fax

For healthcare providers, payers, and other stakeholders exchanging critical patient information every day, fax is here to stay—and now, thanks to the cloud, it’s enjoying a sleek upgrade from the stodgy machines of decades past. 

As a HIPAA compliant and HITRUST certified solution, eFax Corporate adds an extra layer of security and reliability to athenahealth customers’ communications—providing a digitized, centralized document workflow that scales effortlessly from small clinics to large health systems, and any size operation in between. 

Considering these benefits, the healthcare industry can’t afford to abandon fax as a streamlined solution to exchange data between disparate systems.