Switching fax vendors is not like switching a SaaS productivity tool. Fax infrastructure is embedded in clinical workflows, compliance programs, and operational processes in ways that make a poorly managed vendor transition expensive and disruptive. A vendor that looked good in a demo but cannot deliver on BAA requirements, does not support the routing complexity your environment needs, or has an implementation process that leaves critical integrations unaddressed will create problems that outlast the sales process by months or years.
The questions below are the ones that surface those gaps before you are committed to a contract rather than after.
On Compliance and Security
The first question is whether the vendor will sign a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement. This is a threshold question, not an evaluation criterion. A vendor that will not sign a BAA is not a viable option for any healthcare organization transmitting PHI, regardless of how their features compare. Ask for the BAA early in the evaluation process, read it carefully, and pay attention to how the vendor handles PHI after transmission. Vendors whose BAA language permits ongoing storage of fax content after delivery create a PHI retention risk that strong transmission security cannot offset.
Ask specifically how the vendor encrypts fax content in transit. TLS encryption over a purpose-built fax network like the etherFAX network is a different proposition from transmission over standard VoIP infrastructure. Ask whether the vendor has been audited against recognized security standards: ISO 27001, HITRUST, SOC 2. Ask whether their data centers are PCI Level 1 certified. These certifications are not the complete picture of a vendor’s compliance posture, but they represent independent validation that the vendor takes security seriously enough to submit to external assessment.
The post on what HIPAA actually requires for secure document transmission provides context for evaluating vendor answers to these questions.
On Reliability and Network Infrastructure
Ask what network infrastructure underlies the vendor’s fax transmission. The answer matters because fax reliability depends significantly on whether the underlying network was designed for fax or adapted from voice infrastructure. Standard VoIP is sensitive to packet loss and jitter in ways that cause fax failures, and vendors built on VoIP infrastructure carry that reliability limitation regardless of how their user interface or feature set compares.
Ask about retry logic: how many times does the platform retry a failed transmission, at what intervals, and what notification is generated when retries are exhausted. Ask about disaster recovery: what happens to inbound faxes during a platform outage and how long is the recovery time objective for restoring service.
Ask for references from customers with similar volume and complexity to your organization. A vendor that performs well for low-volume environments may not have the architecture to handle peak-hour transmission loads in a high-volume clinical or enterprise environment.
On Routing and Workflow Capability
Ask how routing is configured and who can update it. In a modern enterprise fax platform, routing rules should be configurable by administrators through a centralized interface without requiring a vendor support call or a ticket to IT. A vendor whose routing configuration requires vendor involvement to update is creating an operational dependency that will slow down your ability to respond to workflow changes.
Ask whether the platform supports workgroup-based routing, dedicated fax numbers for specific departments or use cases, and routing rules based on configurable criteria including sending number, receiving number, and time of day. Ask how the platform handles high-volume inbound fax traffic and whether there are queue management capabilities that prevent backlogs during peak periods.
Ask specifically about the Personal Communications Center or equivalent user interface: what does the individual user experience look like, and how does it differ from the administrator experience?
On Integration
Ask which EHR and LIS platforms the vendor has certified integrations with and how those integrations are maintained as EHR vendors release updates. A certified integration that breaks after an EHR upgrade and requires weeks to restore is worse operationally than no integration at all, because your workflows were built around it.
Ask about email integration with Outlook and Gmail, API availability for custom integrations, and whether the vendor supports fax within Microsoft Teams or other collaboration platforms. Ask specifically about any applications in your environment that currently send outbound faxes through your existing infrastructure, because those integration points need to be rebuilt in the new platform before the old one is decommissioned.
On Implementation and Migration
Ask how the vendor handles number porting. Your established fax numbers appear on letterhead, in referral directories, and in partner systems, and losing them in a migration creates downstream work and missed faxes during the transition window. A vendor that cannot manage number porting or that transfers that responsibility entirely to you is presenting a significant operational risk.
Ask what the typical implementation timeline looks like for an organization of your size and complexity. Ask who owns the routing configuration work during implementation: whether that is done by the vendor, by the customer, or collaboratively. Ask what testing is performed before go-live and who is responsible for validating that every integration and routing rule is functioning correctly before the old system is decommissioned.
The post on migrating from a legacy fax server to Passport provides a useful framework for evaluating how well a vendor’s migration process covers each of those areas.
On Support
Ask what the support hours are and what the escalation path is for critical failures during off-hours. For healthcare organizations, a fax platform failure at 2am is not something that can wait for business hours. Ask whether the vendor provides regional support for organizations with international deployments. Ask about the vendor’s average response time for critical support tickets and whether that commitment is contractual.
A vendor that has been operating in enterprise fax for decades has a support track record that a newer entrant cannot replicate. Lane’s fifty-year history in enterprise fax is relevant context when evaluating that dimension.
Schedule a strategy call with the Lane team to discuss how Passport answers each of these questions for your specific environment.
