If you work in a clinical laboratory, you already know the challenge. Lab results arrive by fax around the clock, from multiple ordering physicians, across multiple departments, often with no clear system for who picks them up, when, or whether they were acted on. A result sitting in a fax queue is a patient safety risk. It is also an administrative burden that compounds across every shift.
Lane’s Passport platform was built specifically to solve this problem. At the center of the Passport experience is the Personal Communications Center, or PCC, a desktop client application that gives lab coordinators full visibility and control over every inbound fax. This guide walks through exactly how to use it.
What the PCC Is and Why It Matters for Labs
The Passport Personal Communications Center is not a simple fax viewer. It is a centralized messaging hub that consolidates inbound document receipt, status tracking, routing, and archive access into one interface. For lab environments specifically, this matters because labs receive high volumes of inbound faxes from referring providers, ordering physicians, and other facilities. Managing those transmissions through a shared physical machine or a generic email inbox creates gaps that PCC eliminates.
The PCC runs as a standalone desktop application, which means users are not dependent on a browser and do not face the session timeout and performance issues that come with web-only tools. Inbound faxes appear in real time, with status indicators that tell the coordinator exactly where each document stands.
Step 1: Configure Your Inbound Routing Rules
Before the PCC can surface the right documents to the right people, your Passport routing configuration needs to be set up correctly. Routing in Passport can be assigned to individual users, workgroups, or automated workflows.
For a clinical lab, the most effective setup typically routes by document type or sender. Stat results can be routed to a dedicated workgroup that monitors a priority queue. Routine results route to a standard coordinator queue. Results from specific partner institutions can be routed directly to the physician liaison or department coordinator responsible for that relationship.
Take the time at this step to map your actual document flow. Who needs to see critical values immediately? Who manages routine result batches? Who handles misdirected faxes? Building that map before configuring routing saves significant rework later and ensures that inbound documents reach the right hands without manual intervention.
Step 2: Open the PCC and Review Your Queue
Once routing is configured, the daily workflow in PCC is straightforward. Log into the PCC from your desktop. Your inbound queue will display all documents routed to you or your workgroup, sorted by arrival time by default. You can filter by sender, date range, document type, or status.
Each item in the queue shows the transmission status, sender information, page count, and arrival timestamp. Coordinators can open any document directly in the viewer without downloading to a local drive, which keeps protected health information within the controlled Passport environment rather than creating untracked local copies.
This is a critical HIPAA compliance advantage. HIPAA-compliant fax management requires that access to protected health information is controlled, logged, and auditable. PCC provides all three automatically.
Step 3: Triage and Act on Inbound Results
With your queue open, work through inbound documents using the triage workflow that fits your lab’s protocols. For most labs, this means reviewing each document, confirming the ordering provider, flagging any critical or stat results for immediate escalation, and marking routine results as received and processed.
PCC allows coordinators to annotate documents within the system, add notes visible to other workgroup members, and forward specific documents to individual users or other workgroups without leaving the interface. This is particularly valuable in labs where results need to pass through multiple hands, such as a coordinator who receives a result, confirms it is complete, then forwards it to the appropriate physician liaison for delivery notification.
The forward function creates a tracked chain of custody within Passport. Every action taken on a document, who opened it, who forwarded it, who marked it as processed, is logged with a timestamp. That audit trail satisfies both internal quality requirements and external compliance audits.
Step 4: Use Enterprise Status Manager for Real-Time Oversight
For lab supervisors or IT staff responsible for fax infrastructure, Passport’s Enterprise Status Manager complements the PCC by providing a system-wide view of all fax activity. Rather than waiting for a user to report a missing result, the Enterprise Status Manager surfaces transmission failures, queue backlogs, and delivery confirmations proactively.
In a lab setting, this means a supervisor can see at any moment whether inbound result faxes are arriving and processing normally, identify any transmission that has not been acknowledged, and intervene before a clinical gap develops. This shifts fax management from reactive to proactive, which is the difference between discovering a missing critical value before or after a physician calls asking where it is.
Step 5: Archive and Retrieve
One of the least appreciated features of PCC for lab environments is its archive and retrieval capability. Every fax received through Passport is stored with its full metadata, sender information, timestamp, routing path, and status history. Coordinators can search the archive by date, sender, or content attributes and retrieve any historical document in seconds.
This matters enormously at audit time, during disputes about result delivery, and in any situation where a lab needs to demonstrate that a document was received, reviewed, and acted on. Rather than searching through physical fax trays or asking a vendor to pull logs, the PCC archive surfaces that information directly.
For labs working within systems like Epic or Clinisys, Passport’s integrations mean that fax records can be connected directly to the relevant patient record, further reducing the manual reconciliation work that consumes coordinator time in less integrated environments.
Getting Started
If your lab is currently managing inbound results through a shared fax machine, a general inbox, or a system that lacks the routing and tracking capabilities described here, the operational and compliance gap is larger than it may appear day to day. Learn more about Passport and schedule a demo to see the PCC in action with your own workflows in mind.
