7:42 a.m., Monday. The fax queue is already at 312 and climbing. A refill request hides behind a prior auth; a referral sits in limbo because no one’s triaged page 47 yet. Somewhere, a patient waits. This isn’t negligence. It’s volume.
Fax is the one channel that never says “no.” That’s exactly the problem.
About 70% of healthcare organizations still exchange documents by fax because it just works—this equates to 9+ billion fax pages exchanged every year. No compatibility issues, no interoperability headaches. But what’s convenient for the system is punishing for the workflow: people reviewing, classifying, and routing every single page. This means refills arrive late, referrals bog down scheduling, and prior auths stall procedures—costing time and dollars you can’t afford to lose.
Here’s how one large health system flipped that script, teaching its tech to do the reading and routing so pharmacists get refills faster, schedulers get clean referrals, and clinicians get back time. And yes, the queue finally dropped.
Embedding Intelligence Where The Work Happens
One Redox customer—a U.S. health system operating hundreds of facilities—was drowning under ~17 million inbound fax pages a year (literally). Referrals. Refills. Prior auths. To keep pace, they projected 17 full-time staff dedicated just to routing. Not reviewing care. Not helping patients. Routing.
Then came the EHR transition. Leadership braced for a 350% spike in fax volume. The math was ruthless: quadruple the HIM team or watch turnaround times slip and patient callbacks surge. Neither was acceptable.
So we aimed at the real bottleneck: human triage. The mandate was simple:
- Classify every incoming page (referral, refill, prior auth, RFI).
- Auto-route to the right downstream system or queue.
- Escalate only the exceptions for human review.
The key wasn’t adding another tool or screen. Because of Redox Engine’s modular platform architecture, we turned generative AI into a plug-in inside the orchestration layer to automatically identify and route documents to the right destination.
Result: kickoff to full production in just under four weeks. A live, scaled service that started reading and routing on day one so pharmacists saw refills sooner, schedulers got clean referrals, and clinicians got back minutes that add up to hours.
Bottom line: the fax firehose didn’t slow down. The work did.
Automation Reduced FTEs and Turnaround Time
Seconds, not hours. The new workflow ingests, classifies, parses, and routes each fax the moment it lands—LLM-powered, wired straight into downstream queues. HIM only touches the edge cases. Operational strain drops and throughput jumps.
59% reduction in FTEs. With automation in place, the large routing squad originally projected was no longer necessary. Required headcount dropped significantly, unlocking real cost savings and letting staff focus on higher-value work. It also removed the need to scale the team linearly as volume increased.
Accuracy with guardrails. Each decision carries a confidence score. Low-confidence items route to a human in one click; high-confidence items move automatically with a full audit trail—traceable, reviewable, compliant.
When Data Moves Faster, Care Does Too
When faxes don’t sit in queues, care doesn’t sit on hold.
- Refills reach pharmacy teams almost immediately, shrinking time-to-medication.
- Referrals hit the right scheduler in moments, so appointments land sooner.
- Prior auths start earlier, reducing day-of delays that frustrate clinicians and patients.
Speed isn’t a vanity metric here; it’s fewer callbacks, fewer resubmits, and fewer “we’re still waiting on paperwork” conversations. Fax may still be the most universal way to exchange patient information, but with Redox, it doesn’t have to be the most labor-intensive.
If you’re looking to reduce operational burden, return hours to clinical teams, and speed access to care—without new headcount or new systems—this is how you start. Fax routing was one of the hardest bottlenecks. Now it’s automated.
Let’s put intelligence where your work already lives. Reach out to our team and see how quickly you can go from kickoff to production.