Beth Israel Lahey Health recently modernized its fax infrastructure — a move the Massachusetts-based health system said has paid off big time.
The health system upgraded its faxing processes during a broader EHR consolidation effort, during which 14 hospitals migrated onto a single Epic EHR platform. Beth Israel Lahey adopted Retarus’ cloud-based faxing platform, which solved scaling problems that the organization’s legacy infrastructure couldn’t handle anymore, explained James Roeber, the health system’s director of infrastructure solutions.
He noted that Retarus’ system also gave Beth Israel Lahey visibility into fax delivery, which eliminated issues like busy signals, analog line failures and carrier issues linked to outdated telecom infrastructure.
And by integrating AI tools into its fax workflows, Beth Israel Lahey was able to automatically read and process incoming fax documents instead of relying on employees to manually sort and route them.
Roeber said the transition, which occurred in 2023, amounted to much more than just replacing fax machines. To him, it morphed into a larger digital transformation initiative that allowed for automation and remote work for administrative tasks like referrals and prescription refills.
“The refills or the referrals are ending up where they need to go in a more timely fashion. They’re not being babysat like they used to — there’s not a person who’s taking that piece of paper and scanning it back into the patient’s chart. It’s all a digital workflow, so we’re saving a ton of money on paper, printers and shredders,” Roeber remarked.
Beth Israel Lahey’s fax failure rate was 34% before adopting Retarus’ technology, but it has since improved to 4%, according to the health system.
The organization also said that it has saved $4 million as a result of using the platform. These savings stemmed from decreased paper and printing costs, the elimination of analog fax lines and fax cards, and reduced labor tied to manually processing failed faxes and routing documents.
Roeber added that clinicians have responded positively to Reyarus’ platform because it saves time and improves reliability.
Retarus CEO Martin Hager said the partnership is an example of how providers can improve care and reduce costs by fixing communication inefficiencies.
He reiterated that hospitals’ conventional fax infrastructure is typically quite unreliable because it relies on outdated hardware and poorly maintained systems. Hager believes that Retarus differentiates itself by having a platform that operates across the entire technology stack, including tools to manage cloud infrastructure, fax software and carrier relationships.
To him, this type of reliability and transparency is critical because delays tend to frustrate clinicians and create hidden operational costs like duplicate work and support tickets.
“If you can minimize that waiting period down to seconds, companies save a lot of money and the users save a lot of frustration. Our stuff turns around in seconds — like below 10 seconds after the job has been transmitted, the users get the status report back,” Hager declared.
The technology deployment shows how modernizing infrastructure can turn into measurable efficiency improvements — which often translates into material savings. For Beth Israel Lahey, the initiative marked a successful push to automate administrative work and improve the clinician experience.
Photo: Gary Yeowell, Getty Images
