Passport supports TIFF, PDF, and Microsoft Office document formats for outbound fax transmission. In practice, that means the documents your team is already working with, reports generated by your EHR, PDFs from your document management system, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and standard image formats, can be sent directly through Passport without requiring manual conversion or reformatting before transmission.
Why Format Support Matters
Legacy fax infrastructure typically required documents to be in TIFF format, the traditional standard for fax transmission, before they could be sent. That meant any document not already in TIFF had to be converted first, which added steps to the workflow and created friction that slowed down time-sensitive transmissions.
Modern enterprise workflows generate documents in a wide range of formats. A laboratory report comes out of the LIS as a PDF. A clinical summary is exported from the EHR as a Word document. A prior authorization form is completed as a fillable PDF. A referral letter is created in Outlook. Requiring staff to convert each of those documents before faxing creates unnecessary overhead and introduces the possibility of conversion errors that affect how the document appears on the receiving end.
Passport handles format conversion internally. When a user sends a PDF, a Word document, or an Excel file through Passport, the platform converts the document to a fax-compatible format as part of the transmission process. The staff member initiating the fax does not need to take an additional step. The document transmits as it was created.
Sending From Email and Integrated Applications
Format support extends beyond the Personal Communications Center desktop interface. When users send faxes through Passport’s email integration with Outlook or Gmail, they can attach a PDF or Office document to the email and send it to a fax number in the same way they would send an email attachment. Passport handles the conversion and transmission on the back end, and the delivery confirmation returns to the sender’s email.
For organizations with LIS or EHR integrations, documents generated within those systems transmit through Passport in whatever format the system exports, without requiring a conversion step at the application level. A result report generated by Clinisys and routed to Passport for fax delivery transmits in the format the LIS produces. The integration handles the rest.
What the Receiving End Sees
Regardless of the format in which the document was originally created, it arrives at the receiving fax machine or platform as a standard fax transmission. A physician’s office receiving a referral summary that was originally a Word document receives it as a fax, with the same formatting and legibility as any other fax. The format conversion that happened within Passport is invisible to the recipient.
For organizations sending to recipients on older analog fax machines, Passport and Fax 2.0’s transmission through the etherFAX network ensures compatibility with traditional receiving equipment, so that a document created in a modern format and transmitted through a cloud fax platform arrives correctly on legacy hardware. The post on whether digital fax services can send to traditional fax machines covers that interoperability in more detail.
TIFF as the Baseline
For organizations that prefer to transmit in TIFF, which remains the native format for fax and offers the most direct transmission path, Passport supports TIFF natively without any conversion step required. Systems that generate TIFF output, including many imaging and document management platforms, can route those files directly through Passport for transmission.
For documents where image quality and rendering accuracy are particularly important, such as radiology reports with embedded images or pathology reports with photomicrographs, sending in TIFF or PDF ensures that the document arrives with the highest fidelity at the receiving end.
If you have questions about a specific document format or application integration and how it works with Passport’s outbound fax workflow, contact the Lane team or schedule a strategy call to walk through the specifics.
