A practice that grows from one office to three usually grows its fax setup the same way: one machine, one line and one stack of paper per location. Each office develops its own habits. Nobody has a single view of what arrived across the practice, a fax for a patient seen at the north office sometimes lands at the south one, and covering for an absent colleague means driving across town or phoning someone to read a page aloud.
Online fax lets a multi-location or multi-specialty practice keep the numbers its partners know while running fax as one shared workflow. This article covers how to organize numbers, inboxes and staff so each document reaches the office that needs it, and how to keep access appropriate as the practice grows.
Decide between local and central intake
The first design choice is whether faxes are handled at each location or centrally. Both work. The right choice depends on how your practice is organized.
Local intake
Each location keeps its own number and its own team handles what arrives. This suits practices where locations run fairly independently, see different patients and have their own front desk and clinical staff. The improvement over paper is that each location's faxes arrive in an inbox rather than on a machine, and a colleague at another office can cover when needed.
Central intake
Faxes for all locations arrive in one place, where a central team triages and routes them. This suits practices with a central referral, authorization or records function, and practices whose patients move between locations. It concentrates expertise, but it needs clear rules for getting each document to the right location quickly.
A mix
Many practices combine the two: clinical faxes such as results and consult notes go to each location's clinical team, while referrals, authorizations and records requests go to central teams. The guide to routing incoming faxes to the right team explains how separate numbers make this straightforward.
Keep the numbers partners already use
Referring offices, labs, hospitals and payers have each location's fax number in their records. Changing them all is slow and creates a period in which faxes go astray. In most cases it is better to keep each location's existing number and change where it delivers, rather than replacing it. Where a practice wants to add central numbers, for example a single referral number for the whole practice, publish the new number deliberately and keep the old ones active as catch all destinations.
Design inboxes around teams, not buildings
With online fax, an inbox does not have to belong to a building. It can belong to the team that acts on its documents, wherever those people sit. A practice with three locations might have:
- one clinical inbox per location, for results, consult notes and pharmacy questions;
- one central referrals and authorizations inbox;
- one central records inbox for release of information; and
- one general inbox per location for correspondence.
Our article on shared fax inboxes for front desk, billing and clinical staff covers ownership, claiming and backup coverage for each one.
Cover across locations
One of the clearest benefits for a multi-location practice is coverage. When a location is short staffed, a colleague elsewhere can work its inbox without anyone moving paper. Make that deliberate:
- Name a backup for each inbox who works at a different location.
- Agree how coverage is requested and recorded, so the team knows who is watching each inbox today.
- Remove temporary access when the coverage ends.
Keep access appropriate as you grow
A larger practice has more staff, more roles and more turnover, which makes access decisions harder to keep current. HIPAA's minimum necessary implementation asks a practice to identify those persons or classes of persons in its workforce who need access to protected health information and what they need it for. For a multi-location practice, that usually means access by team and role, with cross-location access granted for a purpose such as coverage or a central function.
The Security Rule's technical safeguards make those decisions enforceable. Unique user identification means every person signs in as themselves, access control limits each account to the inboxes it needs, and audit controls record activity. Review access across all locations on a schedule, and whenever staff move between offices. Our article on minimum necessary access for shared fax inboxes covers the review process.
Specialty practices
Multi-specialty groups face the same design choices with an additional dimension: different specialties often receive different kinds of documents and may work with different referral partners. Two adjustments help.
- Specialty numbers. A dedicated number per specialty, published to the referring offices that send to it, keeps each specialty's referrals and results together without anyone reading every page first.
- Sensitive records. Some specialties handle records that are subject to additional federal or state confidentiality rules. Keep those documents in their own inbox with a deliberately small audience, and confirm the applicable rules with your compliance adviser before deciding who can see them.
Standardize the process, not just the technology
Moving every location to the same fax service is the easy part. The value comes from every location following the same process: the same document categories, the same naming convention, the same tracking log for referrals and records requests, and the same rules for misdirected faxes. Write the process once, train every location on it and review it together. Our comparison of cloud fax and on-premise fax covers the infrastructure side if your practice is also consolidating servers.
Where LABUSA eFaaS fits
Because LABUSA eFaaS is hosted and works through email, staff at different locations can send and receive faxes, and each number can be routed to the location or team that handles it. Existing numbers can often be ported, subject to eligibility, and new dedicated and toll free numbers are available for central or specialty lines. Named accounts, access control and a queryable record of every transmission support the access decisions your practice makes; where your documents fall under HIPAA, the obligation to meet it stays with your practice.
See how this fits a medical office on our medical practices page, compare plans on our pricing page, try LABUSA eFaaS free for 30 days, or request a workflow consultation to plan a multi-location setup with us. You can also contact our team.