For more than thirty years, healthcare has repeatedly predicted the end of fax. Each new wave of interoperability initiatives, regulatory mandates, and secure messaging frameworks has promised to finally replace it. And yet, fax remains deeply embedded in healthcare operations—not because healthcare resists innovation, but because fax has consistently delivered what healthcare needs most: reliability in the real world. 

This blog explores how AI, when layered on top of cloud fax, turns inbound documents into actionable information that can be automatically classified, indexed, and routed. 

Why fax still powers healthcare interoperability 

Fax works across organizational boundaries that modern interoperability efforts still struggle to bridge. It reaches large health systems and solo practices alike, connects hospitals with post-acute providers, and enables communication between payers, labs, specialists, and community providers. 

It requires no directories, no endpoint negotiations, no vendor alignment, and no governance agreements. A fax is sent, and it arrives. 

What cloud fax changes in healthcare operations 

Cloud fax is not a reinvention of this model but an evolution of it. By moving fax into secure, scalable cloud environments, organizations eliminate physical machines, paper workflows, and on-premise maintenance while gaining auditability, redundancy, and enterprise-grade security. 

But cloud fax alone is not the end of the story. The real transformation begins when AI is layered on top. 

One of the most persistent criticisms of fax has never been about delivery. It has been about what happens after the document arrives. 

Historically, faxed documents required human intervention at every step. Staff had to open them, read them, identify the document type, match them to patients, and manually enter or attach them to the correct record. This manual burden created delays, introduced risk, and consumed valuable clinical and administrative resources. 

These inefficiencies were often blamed on fax itself, when in reality they were symptoms of a lack of automation. 

AI fax automation: Turning documents into actionable information 

AI changes that equation completely. In a modern cloud fax environment enhanced with AI, a fax can be transformed from a static image into actionable information. AI models extract text, recognize document layouts, and interpret clinical and administrative language. The system can determine whether the document is a referral, a lab result, a discharge summary, a prior authorization request, or a clinical note. It can identify patient identifiers, providers, dates of service, and contextual cues that define where the information belongs. 

This intelligence allows fax data to become actionable upon arrival. Documents are automatically indexed, classified, and routed to the appropriate workflows or systems of record. What once required manual sorting and data entry can now happen at machine speed. 

Critically, this approach does not require any change in behavior from the sending organization. The sender does not need to adopt new standards, upgrade systems, or participate in complex interoperability frameworks. Fax already spans the healthcare ecosystem. AI activates that existing network. 

OpenText™ Fax Aviator AI for healthcare fax automation 

This is exactly the challenge OpenText Fax Aviator AI was built to address. By combining enterprise-grade cloud fax with AI-driven document understanding, OpenText Fax Aviator AI automatically classifies, indexes, and routes inbound fax documents into systems of record and operational workflows. 

Learn more about modernizing healthcare fax workflows with secure cloud fax and automation here. 

Coming soon: Cloud fax, AI, and the end of interface dependency in healthcare. It explores how meaning-driven automation can reduce reliance on HL7 and FHIR interfaces for document-heavy workflows.

The post Artificial intelligence as a driver of cloud fax innovation and system interoperability appeared first on OpenText Blogs.