Fax Persists Amid Hospital Data-Use Gap

Hospitals often receive outside patient records but cannot readily use them: documents sent by fax may arrive as image files that staff must manually review and re-enter into electronic health records. The article says 71% of hospitals reported routine access to outside patient information at the point of care in 2023, but only 42% reported a further measure that is cut off in the provided text. Fax remains useful for connecting with smaller and rural facilities, while the underlying challenge is making incoming information readable and structured; digital fax tools that extract data are presented as one possible approach.