Fax documents and the fax inbox

NeatPractice sends and receives faxes for you. Your clinic has its own fax number: faxes you send show it as the reply number, and faxes sent to it land in the fax inbox. You do not need a fax machine or a separate fax service.

Fax is an add-on#

Faxing is an add-on to your plan. An owner adds it from the subscription page in Setup. Without it, the fax pages do not appear in the Docs panel, Fax is not offered as a way to send a document or release records, and the Fax panel does not appear in Setup.

If your clinic removes the add-on, the fax inbox and sent fax log disappear with it. Nothing is deleted: every fax comes back when the add-on does. Faxes that were waiting to be retried stay waiting. Faxes that arrive on your number while the add-on is off are not added to the inbox, so ask senders to use another way, such as secure email, until it returns.

Get a fax number#

In Setup, open Communication. Under Sending identity, find Fax and click Request Fax Number. The panel then shows your number and how many pages your clinic sent and received this month.

Send a fax#

You can fax signed clinical documents and chart files that are PDFs or images.

1. Open the patient's chart.
2. To fax a note, evaluation, plan of care or other clinical document, go to Documentation, open the row menu of a signed document and click Fax. To fax a file, go to Documents, open its row menu and click Fax.
3. Check Sending at the top of the dialog: it names the patient, chart number and date of birth, and lists each document that goes out.
4. Search the Physician field by name, NPI or practice to fill in the name and fax number, or type them. If you change the name or number after picking a physician, NeatPractice keeps your change.
5. Leave Include a cover page on unless the recipient asks for none. Add a short note if you need one; keep clinical details off the cover page.
6. Choose where pages faxed back with this cover are filed, then click Send Fax.

Fax pages count toward your monthly fax allowance. If your plan stops faxing at its allowance and the month's pages are used up, Send Fax says so and nothing is sent; see plan usage and packs.

Faxing a plan of care to its physician also records the send on the plan's physician certification, and a plan that comes back on its cover is logged as returned by fax. Check the returned pages, then record the signature as described in Plan of care certification.

Follow delivery#

Open Sent under Faxes in the Docs panel of the main menu. If sending faxes is all you can do in Docs, clicking Docs opens Sent directly. Each fax shows who it went to, the number of pages, who sent it and its status:

A fax whose cover came back also shows Faxed back. Click the time it was sent (or View Pages in its menu) to open the fax in a side panel: its details sit above the pages exactly as they were sent. Click Download there to save a copy, or Send Again on a failed or retrying fax to try it now.

Work the fax inbox#

Open Inbox under Faxes in the Docs panel of the main menu. It lists the faxes your clinic received. It opens filtered to New faxes, oldest first; click Filter and change or remove the status filter to see filed and dismissed faxes, newest first. The Sent list filters by delivery status the same way. Pick patients in the patient panel to see the faxes sent from their charts and, in the inbox, the faxes filed to them; faxes not yet filed are hidden while patients are picked.

• Click the time it arrived (or View in its menu) to read the fax in a side panel beside the list. Download saves a copy, and a new fax has File to Chart and Dismiss right there, so you can read the pages while you pick the patient.
• Click File to Chart, pick the patient and the document category, and optionally add a description and the date on the paper. The fax is added to the patient's Documents.
• Click Dismiss for junk or a fax sent to the wrong number, and say why. Dismissed faxes are kept on record.

Filed shows where each fax went and who filed it; Barcode match marks the ones that filed themselves. Split into returned documents marks a fax whose pages carried return codes: its documents are listed, filed or waiting, under Returned documents. To file scanned paper the same way, pick Upload Returns from the page menu.