#20: Electronic Health Records and Fax
The patient chart may be electronic from beginning to end, but moving information to a clinic down the street can still involve fax technology. This does not necessarily mean a beige machine is sitting beside a telephone anymore. Modern healthcare increasingly uses digital fax services that send and receive documents electronically, but the underlying workflow remains tied to a communications method that became familiar in offices decades ago. The reason is compatibility. Hospitals, independent doctors, pharmacies, specialists, insurers, and laboratories often use different record systems that cannot exchange information cleanly, while virtually everyone knows how to receive a fax. A 2025 study estimated that 88 percent of Ontario physicians still used fax to share patient information.
