Outside referral partners can send faxes exactly as they do today, or can take advantage of digital referral tools. Receiving organizations never handle, review, or manually enter fax data again while automatic workflow tools complete data capture and automate manual steps like eligibility verification.

Faxing remains the backbone of U.S. healthcare communication—and one of its greatest operational bottlenecks. Only 54% of faxed referrals result in a scheduled appointment, nearly 30% of diagnostic tests are reordered because results cannot be located, and one in four patients arrives for an appointment before their clinical records are available.

Industry estimates place the annual cost of manual healthcare administrative transactions at more than $250 billion.

“Every attempt to eliminate fax from healthcare has failed because it required everyone else to change,” said David Bongiovanni, CEO of ReferralMD. “SmartFax AI takes the opposite approach. Referral partners continue faxing exactly as they always have, while our AI agents autonomously transform every fax into structured clinical data, create referrals, update the EHR, and complete workflows which move patients through the continuum of care. We didn’t digitize the fax machine—we automated the labor around it.”

From Fax to Autonomous Workflow

SmartFax AI functions as an intelligent operational agent—not simply an OCR or document extraction solution.

For every inbound fax, SmartFax AI can autonomously:

• Port existing fax numbers to ReferralMD with no hardware, phone lines, or fax servers.
• Quickly deploy one number or a multi-location, multi-number, enterprise routing solution.
• Read, classify, and route every inbound fax automatically using AI.
• Match patients to existing records or create new patient records automatically.
• Identify and profile referring providers without staff intervention.
• Extract and validate referrals, demographics, insurance, diagnoses, authorizations, and clinical information.
• Create fully structured digital referrals automatically.
• Push referral data and documents directly into the EHR using APIs, HL7, FHIR, Direct
• Complete downstream automations including patient scheduling, patient intake, prior authorization, eligibility verification, provider notifications, referral routing, task creation, patient communications, document collection, and referral partner communications.
• Automatically request missing data and send referral status updates to referring providers, helping create a true automated, closed-loop referral process.

Rather than requiring staff to review documents, manually enter information, or complete manual processing, SmartFax AI performs these operational tasks autonomously, allowing staff to focus on patient care and exception management.

SmartFax AI supports centralized referral centers, decentralized clinics, specialty practices, health systems, ACOs, CINs, and FQHCs. It integrates with any EHR, practice management system, or radiology information system through APIs, HL7, FHIR and Direct, including Epic, MEDITECH, athenahealth, NextGen, eClinicalWorks, ModMed and many others.

Availability

SmartFax AI is available today. Start now with no startup cost, low pay-as-you-go pricing, and low-cost bi-directional EHR integrations. Enterprise healthcare organizations can deploy SmartFax AI along with the rest of ReferralMD‘s network orchestration platform. Learn more at referralmd.com.

About ReferralMD

ReferralMD is an AI-powered referral operating platform for modern healthcare organizations. The platform autonomously manages referrals, fax processing, patient intake, scheduling, prior authorizations, patient and provider communications, and care coordination by orchestrating intelligent workflows across healthcare systems. By transforming unstructured clinical documents into automated operational processes, ReferralMD helps providers reduce administrative burden, improve revenue capture, accelerate patient access, and achieve true closed-loop referral management.

ReferralMD®, SmartMatch®, SmartFax®, and SmartExchange® are registered trademarks of Electronic Referral Manager, Inc.