Fax Medical Records from Home Without A Fax Machine
If you need to send medical records to a doctor’s office or a hospital, you might come up against policies that require you to mail, hand deliver, or fax those documents. While most people no longer have a fax machine, there are a few options for sending faxes through an online provider for free or at a very low cost.
There are online fax providers that will let you send a certain number of pages for free, such as HelloFax, although anything beyond those free pages will add up. In the case of HelloFax, faxes cost 99 cents per page after the first five pages without a subscription.
If you need to send a lengthier fax – a complete medical history, for instance – it may instead make sense to pay for one month of an online fax service.
Picking a Provider
There are several good choices when it comes to finding low-priced online fax providers to help you send a secure fax such as medical records.
SRFax offers a plan (Lite 200) that includes 200 total inbound and outbound fax pages per month, for $6.95 per month. It also offers one of the longest free trials of any provider, 60 days, although it doesn’t have some of the features that other providers include – eSigning and a mobile device app are the most notable features missing.
MetroFax’s Essential plan runs for $7.95 per month, and includes up to 500 total pages and a 30 day free trial. MetroFax doesn’t offer eSigning, but it does have a smartphone app for iOS and Android that allows you to send faxes directly from a smartphone using your camera, or send documents saved in cloud storage.
Nextiva is a good option for people with a lengthy medical history and / or the need to send that history to multiple medical professionals. The Single User plan includes 1,000* pages for $8.95/ month and offers a 30 day free trial.
FaxAge also offers a reasonably-priced package at $7.95 per month that includes 300 inbound pages and 300 outbound pages. FaxAge does not offer a free trial.
RingCentral’s Fax 500 plan costs $9.99 per month, and includes up to 500 total pages, along with a 30-day free trial. RingCentral also offers smartphone apps for iOS and Android.
If you choose a provider that offers a free trial, you can opt to try it out for that time period and then cancel if the service is not right for you.
* Nextiva typically only includes 500 pages with this plan, but people signing up using one of FaxCompare’s links get 1,000.
Sign Up
Once you have the medical records you’ll need to send and have selected a provider, it’s time to sign up. As an example, we’ll walk through the process here with SRFax.
First, select the plan you want to try:
And then decide whether you’d like a toll free or local fax number.
Once you’ve created an account and password, you will be able to go directly into your account and under “Faxes” choose to send a fax.
Note the button that lets you select files to attach. SRFax supports a number of compressed, document, and image file formats. If you choose to include a cover page, it will look like this:
Once you’ve finished attaching files and filled out your cover sheet, just click the “Send” button on the bottom of the screen.