Healthcare organizations face a persistent tension in fax management: sensitive patient info must be sent quickly, but without compromising strict HIPAA controls. Legacy fax systems handle one side of that equation adequately. Cloud fax is supposed to handle both—but not every cloud fax option delivers.
Private Fax Cloud®, our managed deployment of RightFax on private cloud infrastructure, is built specifically for this environment.
Traditional fax transmits data over analog lines and, yes, those transmissions are encrypted in transit by the nature of the medium. But that’s where the HIPAA story largely ends.
There are no automated audit trails. Access controls depend on physical proximity to the machine. Retention policies are enforced—if at all—by whoever collects the output tray. And when a transmission fails, there’s typically no alert and no log entry, just a document that never arrived.
HIPAA requires audit controls, access management, integrity controls, and transmission security. Traditional faxing satisfies the last of those, technically, while leaving the others almost entirely to human behavior.
Not all cloud fax is created equal, and the distinctions matter for compliance-heavy healthcare environments.
TLS during transmission is standard across most cloud fax products. AES-256 encryption for stored fax images is less common and more important for organizations with at-rest encryption requirements—which, under HIPAA, is an addressable specification that most covered entities treat as required.
Role-based access with group policy management, integrated with Active Directory or a similar directory service, allows organizations to control precisely who can send, receive, and retrieve faxes. This is a meaningful compliance difference from products that offer basic user-level access only.
A compliant audit trail captures sender, recipient, timestamp, delivery status, and access history for each transmission. Many public cloud fax services offer basic reporting; very few offer the granular, exportable audit logs that HIPAA audits actually require.
Where does the fax data live, and who controls it? Under general-terms public cloud fax services, that’s largely determined by the vendor. Under a private cloud deployment, the organization specifies the data center and retains full control over data location and handling.
Private Fax Cloud® is built on RightFax, OpenText’s enterprise fax platform, deployed on private cloud infrastructure the organization controls.
On compliance specifically:
On operations:
| Traditional fax | Public cloud fax | Private Fax Cloud® | |
|---|---|---|---|
| HIPAA compliance | Partial (transmission only) | Variable; often limited admin controls | Full: audit trails, RBAC, encryption at rest and in transit |
| Audit trails | Manual logs, minimal detail | Basic or delayed reporting | Granular, exportable, real-time |
| Access controls | Physical only | Basic user management | Role-based, AD-integrated, group-configurable |
| Data sovereignty | Full (on-premises) | Limited; vendor-determined | Full; organization-specified data center |
| Reliability | Busy signals, failed transmissions, no alerting | Variable; limited failure notification | Real-time delivery confirmation, automatic retry |
| Cost structure | Fixed line fees + re-send labor | Per-page; can spike unpredictably | Usage-based, 6-second increments; intra-cloud faxing reduced or free |
| EHR integration | MFP scan-to-fax only | Generally API/SMTP | Native Epic, Cerner, MEDITECH + multiple APIs |
| Implementation time | Weeks to months | Days | One week or less |
The migration from legacy fax to Private Fax Cloud® is less disruptive than most IT teams expect. Because Private Fax Cloud® runs on whatever virtualization environment the organization already uses, there’s no new infrastructure to procure. Existing fax numbers port over. EHR integrations are configured during implementation by our team, not handed off to the organization to figure out.
For organizations currently on a public cloud fax service, the migration path is similarly direct. We handle the telephony transition and the configuration; the organization’s staff sees a more capable, more configurable fax environment with the same familiar workflows.
To learn how Private Fax Cloud® would work in your specific environment, contact us for a consultation. We’ll walk through your current setup, your compliance requirements, and what a deployment would look like in practice.