Ask anyone working in healthcare IT why fax still exists in 2025 and you will get a version of the same answer: because everything else failed to replace it. That is not nostalgia. It is a structural reality rooted in how clinical data actually moves between organizations. And nowhere is that reality more clearly visible than in the laboratory information system ecosystem.
The LIS sits at the center of clinical laboratory operations. It manages specimen tracking, result entry, QA workflows, and reporting. But the LIS is only as useful as the communication channels that carry its outputs to the people who need them. Ordering physicians, referring providers, hospitals, and long-term care facilities all need to receive lab results reliably, securely, and in a format they can act on. Fax is still the channel that makes that delivery possible across the broadest range of recipients.
Why Fax Persists in LIS Environments
The persistence of fax in laboratory settings is not a technology choice. It is a network effect. Clinical labs rely on fax because their recipients rely on fax. A busy primary care physician receiving results from three different labs, a specialist in a small practice without a sophisticated EHR portal, a long-term care facility that does not use the same health information exchange as the hospital lab sending them results, all of them have fax as a common denominator.
According to HIMSS 2025 data highlighted by etherFAX CEO Paul Banco, 75% of all medical communications in the United States are still transmitted by fax. Labs contribute a significant portion of that volume. Result faxes, critical value notifications, and patient report transmissions collectively represent one of the highest-volume fax use cases in all of healthcare.
How Fax Connects to the LIS
Modern fax infrastructure in a laboratory context is not a standalone fax machine sitting next to the LIS terminal. It is an integrated component of the LIS output workflow. When a result is finalized in the LIS, the system triggers a fax transmission to the ordering provider. That transmission is handled by a fax platform that connects to the LIS through an interface, processes the outbound job, and delivers the document through a secure fax network.
Lane’s fax solutions are built specifically for this integration model. Lane has maintained an authorized partnership with Clinisys (formerly Sunquest) for decades. Clinisys serves more than 1,200 hospitals with its diagnostic informatics suite, and Lane’s fax integration within the Clinisys environment means that labs using Clinisys can connect result fax delivery directly to their LIS workflow without custom development or third-party middleware.
Lane is also an Epic App Orchard partner, which extends the same integrated approach to hospital labs running Epic as their clinical system. When fax is connected directly to the LIS or EHR at the integration layer, result delivery becomes an automated, tracked, and auditable process rather than a manual task that depends on someone physically managing a fax machine.
Critical Values and the Stakes of Fax Reliability
Not all lab faxes carry the same urgency. Routine results for scheduled follow-up visits operate on a different time horizon than critical values. A potassium level indicating risk of cardiac arrest, a troponin result pointing to an active myocardial infarction, a platelet count indicating severe internal bleeding: these are values where the speed and reliability of fax delivery is a direct patient safety issue.
The Joint Commission’s requirements for critical value communication establish specific timeframes within which results must reach the ordering provider. Fax infrastructure that fails silently, that sends without confirming delivery, or that lacks tracking capabilities, creates compliance gaps in this area. Lane’s Passport platform provides complete transmission tracking for every fax, with delivery confirmation and status logging that satisfies both internal quality requirements and external regulatory review.
Inbound Result Management Within the LIS Workflow
The LIS fax integration story is not only about outbound result delivery. Reference labs, hospital labs receiving outside orders, and labs processing referred specimens all manage significant inbound fax volume. Requisitions, clinical notes, specimen collection information, and amended order requests arrive by fax and need to enter the LIS workflow accurately and promptly.
Managing inbound document intake without an integrated fax platform creates manual data entry, transcription risk, and audit gaps. Passport’s workgroup routing and the Personal Communications Center address this by routing inbound faxes to the correct queue, allowing lab staff to process documents directly in the Passport interface, and maintaining a tracked record of every incoming transmission.
Compliance and Data Governance in the LIS Fax Workflow
Laboratory data is subject to HIPAA protections, and the fax infrastructure that carries it must reflect that. This means transmission encryption, access controls on received documents, retention policies that meet applicable record-keeping requirements, and audit trails that can demonstrate who accessed what and when.
Lane holds ISO 27001 certification, which provides an independently verified framework for information security management beyond what HIPAA alone requires. For labs that participate in health information exchange or handle data from multiple partner organizations, this broader security posture matters. It is the difference between a vendor that asserts compliance and one that has been externally audited against international standards.
Building a Fax Infrastructure That Serves the LIS
For laboratory leaders and IT teams evaluating their fax infrastructure, the right question is not whether to keep fax. The right question is whether the fax infrastructure currently in place is genuinely integrated with the LIS, provides the tracking and reliability that critical value communication requires, and meets the compliance standards that external auditors and accreditation bodies will evaluate.
Contact Lane to discuss how fax integration within your specific LIS environment can be structured to meet those requirements. You can also review Lane’s case studies from laboratory and health system customers to understand how other organizations have addressed these challenges.
