The fax machine in the corner of your practice is costing you a phone line, paper, toner, and the time someone spends walking documents from the machine to the chart. It also fails HIPAA audits more often than most practice managers realize. Cloud fax fixes all of that for $25 to $49 per month.
We're VoIP International. Our vFAX service is built for the offices that still send and receive faxes every day — medical, dental, legal, and the title and lending side of real estate. Here's what changes when you move off the machine.
What vFAX actually does
You get a fax number. Faxes coming in arrive as PDFs in your email or a web inbox. Faxes going out get sent from email, the web portal, or from inside your EHR or practice management software with the right integration. No paper, no busy signals, no "sorry, the fax broke again."
- Email-to-fax and fax-to-email on every account.
- Web portal for sending, searching, and archiving.
- Delivery confirmation with retry logic when the receiving line is busy.
- Multi-user access so your front desk, billing, and clinical staff each have logins.
- Searchable archive instead of a filing cabinet full of thermal paper.
- API for integration into EHRs, practice management, and document workflows on the Pro plan.
- Cover sheet templates so every outbound fax meets your practice's standard.
HIPAA, in plain terms
Cloud fax for a medical or dental practice has to handle PHI inside a BAA, with encryption in transit and at rest, access controls, and an audit trail. Ours does. We sign the BAA, the traffic is encrypted, and the audit log shows who sent or opened each document.
What that means for an actual audit:
- You can produce a log of every fax sent, who sent it, and where it went.
- You can produce a log of who opened a received fax in the inbox.
- You can show that access was role-based — not every staff member could see every document.
- You can show that documents weren't stored in plaintext on a server in the back office.
A physical fax machine, by contrast, leaves paper in a tray that anyone walking past can read. We've seen audits flag exactly that.
If you're a covered entity, also look at our healthcare phone system and dental phone system — phone and fax under one HIPAA package is $49/mo on top of user seats. Wellness clinics: our wellness clinic phone system covers the same ground.
The audit trail details that matter
An auditor asking about fax-handled PHI typically wants to see four things: who sent which document, who received and viewed it, how long it was retained, and how access was controlled. Most physical fax setups can answer none of these. Cloud fax with proper logging answers all four. The first time a practice goes through a real audit and gets a clean pass on the fax line, the value of the change becomes obvious. Most practice managers don't think about audit until they're in one.
Encryption, in concrete terms
Faxes leaving your office travel over TLS-encrypted SIP signaling to our infrastructure. PDFs are stored at rest on AES-256 encrypted storage. Access requires authentication, with optional two-factor on accounts that turn it on. The email leg between your inbox and the vFAX service uses opportunistic TLS — modern Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace deployments handle this transparently. If your email is on an older system, talk to us about a portal-only setup so the email leg doesn't become the weak link.
What it costs
- vFAX Basic — $25/mo. One number, base page allowance, email and portal.
- vFAX Standard — $35/mo. Higher page bucket, multi-user, web portal access.
- vFAX Pro — $49/mo. Highest page allotment, API access for EHR/PMS integration.
- vFAX Custom for very high-volume or multi-location setups.
Compared to a copper fax line at $40 to $60 plus a machine, toner, and the staff time, the cost difference shows up in the first month. Full breakdown on pricing.
What the full cost-of-ownership looks like
A typical small practice with a single fax machine carries: one POTS line at $50/month ($600/year), toner at $300/year, paper at $150/year, machine maintenance or replacement at $200/year amortized, and roughly 4 to 6 staff hours per week scanning received faxes into the EHR (call that 250 hours/year at $20/hour = $5,000). Total: roughly $6,250/year. Move to vFAX Standard at $420/year, eliminate the scanning step because PDFs land directly in the EHR via API. Net savings: well over $5,000/year, and that's before you count the time savings on outbound (no walking to the machine, no waiting on a busy signal).
Use cases that actually pay back
Medical and dental
Referrals between specialists. Prescription confirmations to pharmacies. Insurance authorizations and claims. Patient records to other offices. A busy primary care practice with three providers easily sends and receives 200 to 400 fax pages a week. On the Standard plan, every one of those is searchable and traceable.
Legal firms
Court filings in jurisdictions that still require fax. Signed retainer agreements. Opposing counsel exchanges. Real estate closings. See our legal firm phone system. Legal customers often want the audit trail more than the convenience — if a fax to opposing counsel becomes a discovery issue later, the delivery confirmation matters.
Real estate, title, lending
Signed disclosures, lender packages, closing documents under tight deadlines. See our real estate phone system. Closings happen at 4:55 p.m. on a Friday more often than anyone would like to admit, and a fax machine jamming is an expensive problem at that hour.
Insurance and benefits
Claim documentation, authorization, and provider correspondence. Insurance still runs on fax for liability reasons — fax is a legal-grade transmission record in many states where email is contested. Same logic applies to workers' comp processing.
Switching without dropping faxes
Port your existing fax number ($15 one-time) and we run it in parallel until the cutover. No downtime, no "we're not getting referrals" panic, no notifying every referring office of a new number.
The mechanics:
- You sign an LOA with your current fax bill attached.
- We submit the port to your losing carrier. Typical timeline is 7 to 14 business days.
- While the port is pending, we provision a temporary fax number you can use for testing.
- On the port date, the existing number swings over and starts delivering to the vFAX inbox.
- You cancel the copper line and pull the old machine out, or hand it to whoever wants a paperweight.
Running parallel during the transition
Customers often ask whether they can run both systems in parallel for a week. The answer is yes, with a caveat: you can have the temp vFAX number live before the port, and you can keep the old machine running until the port date, but you can't have inbound faxes hit both numbers on the same DID at the same time. The port itself is instantaneous from a routing standpoint — one moment the legacy carrier owns it, the next moment we do. Train staff on the new workflow during the parallel period using the temp number so day-one isn't day-zero of learning.
Common mistakes when switching
- Not testing before cutover. Send and receive on the temp number first. Make sure your EHR or PMS can attach inbound PDFs to the right chart.
- Underestimating page volume. Pull a month of fax records from the old service. Buy the plan that fits, not the cheapest one.
- Skipping user training. Front desk staff used to grabbing paper need a 10-minute walkthrough of the email and portal workflow.
- Forgetting the old machine's line. Cancel the copper line after the port confirms, not before.
- Assuming fax-by-email is fax-by-encryption. The fax leg is encrypted. The email leg is only as encrypted as your email provider. If your team is on Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace with TLS enforced, you're fine.
- Forgetting to update fax cover sheets. Every outbound should still identify the practice.
- Letting one person own the inbox. Use shared access with role-based controls.
- Not setting a retention policy. Decide how long to keep faxes, document it, and configure it in the system.
What to ask a fax provider
- Do you sign a BAA?
- Is the inbound and outbound traffic encrypted, and is the storage encrypted at rest?
- Who has access to the inbox by default, and how do I add role-based controls?
- What's your delivery confirmation and retry behavior?
- Can I port my existing fax number, and what's the timeline?
- Do you have an API for EHR integration if I need it?
- What's the page allowance, and what's the per-page rate over it?
- What's your retention policy default, and can I customize it?
- Who answers when something breaks?
What we don't do
We don't sell the bargain-bin fax-to-email services where every page over the allotment costs more than a postage stamp. We don't double-bill for inbound and outbound — your monthly page bucket covers both. We don't make you call to cancel. We don't auto-renew long-term contracts. We don't sell fax broadcasting for marketing campaigns (that's a different product and a different regulatory framework).
EHR and PMS integrations we set up most
The Pro tier and Custom tier expose an API for routing inbound faxes directly into the patient chart or matter file. The integrations vary by software, but the patterns are consistent:
athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, NextGen, Practice Fusion
Most major EHRs either have a native cloud fax integration we plug into, or accept webhook-based inbound routing. Setup involves pointing the EHR at our API endpoint, configuring the metadata mapping (caller ID, page count, timestamp), and validating with a test fax. Typical setup: a half-day of coordination with the EHR vendor.
Dentrix, Eaglesoft, Open Dental
Dental PMS platforms have varying levels of fax integration. Open Dental and recent Dentrix versions handle it cleanly. Eaglesoft installations sometimes require a middleware layer. We've helped customers with all three.
Clio, MyCase, PracticePanther (legal)
Legal practice management platforms expect document attachments tagged to matters. Our API supports the metadata fields these systems use. Inbound faxes can be routed to the right matter based on sender number, OCR extraction, or manual tagging by staff.
Custom and legacy systems
If your EHR or PMS doesn't support cloud fax natively, we can typically route inbound faxes to a shared folder, an email distribution list, or an FTP destination. Less elegant than direct API but covers most legacy cases.
When the analog adapter option is worth it
Some offices want to keep using a physical fax machine even after moving to cloud — maybe the receptionist is comfortable with it, maybe the multi-function copier is also the printer and scanner. Our analog telephone adapter lets that machine plug into our service. The fax machine sees a normal phone line, dials normally, prints normally. Behind the scenes, the call routes through our infrastructure over the internet. You get the cost savings and audit trail of cloud without changing staff workflow.
The catch with the adapter option: if internet is down, the fax machine is down. Most offices solve this with cellular failover on the router. If you have any uptime concerns, ask about it during the quote.
What we won't do
- We won't sell you a plan with a low page bucket if your actual volume is going to push you into overages every month. We'd rather price you correctly.
- We won't sign a BAA for an account that isn't a covered entity, just to make a sale. BAAs are real legal documents with real obligations.
- We won't auto-renew a multi-year contract without your explicit consent.
- We won't promise integration with software we haven't actually integrated with.
- We won't help with junk fax campaigns. Don't ask.
A real example
A 4-provider medical practice in central Florida. Before us: one fax machine, one POTS line at $58/month, one staff member spending about 6 hours a week scanning inbound faxes into the EHR and walking them to providers. After: vFAX Standard at $35/month, API integration with the EHR so inbound PDFs route directly to the patient chart based on metadata or staff tagging. Annual savings on the line and machine: about $750. Annual savings on the scanning labor: about $6,200. Total payback: under a month. The harder-to-quantify win: providers see referral docs the same hour, not the same day.
Where to start
Tell us how many users, what software needs to send faxes, and whether you need HIPAA. We'll quote it the same day. If you're combining phone and fax, look at phone service as well — one bill, one support team. Get started, look at pricing, or contact us. Background on us: about.