Spruce fax is a HIPAA-compliant eFax service that lets you both send and receive faxes. You do not need a physical fax machine to use Spruce fax, but you can send faxes to and receive faxes from physical fax machines, just as if you were using one. You can also use Spruce fax to send faxes to and receive faxes from other eFax services.
You can get a new fax number or transfer your existing fax number over to Spruce.
IN THIS ARTICLE
Acquiring a Spruce fax number
There are two ways to get a Spruce fax number:
- Transfer an existing fax number into Spruce
- Get a new fax number via Spruce
Please note: only Spruce admins can add new or transfer in existing fax numbers. Learn more about creating and transferring fax numbers.
Receiving a fax
Faxes sent to your Spruce fax number will arrive as PDF attachments in your Spruce inbox. Every new fax will appear as a new conversation in your inbox, even if the fax is from a number that has sent you a fax previously. This is done intentionally, as most healthcare providers receive faxes from the same fax number but regarding different patients. Having every fax appear as a new conversation will make it easy for you to attach/file the appropriate documents to the correct patient.
File a specific inbound fax to a contact by using the "regarding" feature:
- Click into the fax conversation when it appears in your inbox.
- Select the "i" icon in the upper right-hand corner.
- Scroll down until you see a field for "Regarding."
- Click into the "add contact" field.
- Select the relevant patient or other contact from your contact book.
To revisit this fax conversation, find the patient in your contact book at any time, click into their contact, and toggle over to "Conversations" listed right next to "Details." You'll be able to see any notes, calls, messages, and faxes associated with this patient.
Watch a video on sending and receiving faxes in Spruce.
Sending a fax
Every outbound fax will create a new conversation, allowing you to associate each fax with the most relevant contact. Spruce fax works much like adding an attachment to a message; in fact, you can fax image files and even video links in addition to standard PDF documents. Spruce fax automatically generates a cover page for your fax using any text you write in the message field before you send your fax. You will get a system event confirming the fax was successfully sent.
Sending a fax from your Inbox
From the Inbox, select the "New" button on web (mobile select the + button), select Fax and enter the "to: phone number or contact" and confirm the "from:" fax number (if you have multiple fax numbers). You also have the option to indicate which Contact this fax is regarding, if you want this fax to show up under a contact's conversations. Additionally, after sending a fax you can provide a subject for the fax to identify what it is about, which can help to prevent confusion when you have multiple faxes associated with a contact. To do this, after sending your fax, select the [i] and add a subject in the subject field.
If on your Web browser version of Spruce, open up conversation details ("i" in the upper left corner), go to the contact (name or fax number) under Conversations Between and click on the fax icon to the right of the fax number. See this demo video.
If on your mobile (android or iOS), click on the "Send Another Fax" button from within the conversation.
Sending a fax from the Contacts tab
In your Contacts, find and open the Contact that you wish to fax. If they have a fax number stored, and they are listed as a "professional" contact (i.e., not a "patient"), you will see a blue fax icon on their Contact card. Click this icon, and a new fax message will open, after which you can follow the same instructions as above to finish sending your fax.
Fax cover sheet information
The Spruce fax cover sheet will automatically display a from section that will contain your Practice Name, as listed in your Spruce account, the name of the user who sent the message, the user's default phone number and the fax number the fax was sent from. If you want to customize the 'Practice Name', please reach out to our Support team with the updated practice name you want displayed.
Organizing Faxes in Your Inbox
Many customers prefer to have all fax communication appear in a separate filter within their Inbox so that it does not cause direct patient communication to be missed. If this would be helpful for your organization please follow these steps:
- Navigate to Settings/Teams and create a team called Fax (the name of the team can be whatever you choose). Add any teammates who should monitor incoming faxes. All members of the Fax Team will automatically see a new filter titled “Assigned to Team Fax” in their Inbox. They can hover over this, select the three vertical dots, and edit the filter to rename it if desired (for example shortening the name to just Fax).
- Navigate to Settings/Fax and choose your fax number, then edit “Conversation Membership.”
- Change the “owner” of the number to the team you created.
- In the “additional internal members” field you can leave the organization listed if everyone should have access to faxes, if this should be limited to the team only you can remove the organization from this field.
This video demonstrates the above steps.
Media attachment options
- Text: Any text typed into the message-compose bar while creating a fax will be included in a fax cover sheet.
- PDF: Any attached PDF file will be converted to black and white and included as typical fax pages after the cover sheet. For best results, choose PDFs that are already black and white and that don’t contain any large images.
- Images: Attached images will be converted to black and white and included in the fax. This can be used to send photos of single-page documents, such as a signature page, as part of your fax. When you include image files, the fax will also include a QR code to download the full-resolution, color image.
- Video: You can include a video in your fax! The recipient will get a single fax page that contains a QR code to download and view the video. Don't worry: we will not send every image frame of the video as a separate fax page. ;)
PDF guidelines
For best results when faxing PDF documents:
- Keep PDFs black and white. Any color will be converted to black or white (not gray), so recipients may not see what you expect them to if you include any color images.
- Use standard U.S. Letter sized pages (8.5" x 11"). Any non-standard page size might be rejected by the recipient’s fax machine.
- Keep it brief. Some fax machines are configured to reject faxes that exceed a certain number of pages. You're usually safe under 30 pages, but if you plan to send a large fax, check with the recipient to see if they have a page limit. *Note there is a max limit of 200 pages per fax*
The best way to turn a document you have into a PDF is to use the 'Scan Document' icon on your Spruce mobile app, which is available on iOS and Android. You can access this by selecting the '+' sign, then choosing 'Scan Document'. See the below screenshot:
Blocking Fax Numbers
To block a fax number, click on the fax number or contact to open their contact card. Then, click on the 3 vertical dots next to the fax number that you want to block and select “Block Fax Number”. Once it’s blocked, it will say “Blocked” in red text next to the number.
You can also manage your list of blocked fax numbers from your Spruce settings, under “Fax”, then “Blocked Fax Numbers”.
Deleting fax Conversations
In Spruce, an admin or user who owns the fax number can delete fax conversations. To delete a fax conversation, open the conversation, select the info "i" in the upper right corner to open conversation details, scroll to the bottom, and select "Delete Conversation." Deleting a conversation permanently removes it from the inbox of everyone on your team.
Trouble sending or receiving faxes
Please contact the Spruce Support team in your Spruce app if you are experiencing an error while trying to send a fax. If another person is reporting that they have sent you a fax but you never received it, please share their fax number and the date and time of the attempted fax. With this information, we will report the failure to our fax carrier. Please do the same for any faxes you have sent that were not received by your intended recipients.
Maintaining HIPAA compliance
All users of Spruce agree to our Terms of Service, which include our HIPAA Business Associate Agreement (BAA), as applicable. Importantly, Spruce stores your fax contacts and transmission logs, as well as digital copies of all of your incoming and outgoing faxes, identically to how we store all other medical data. This means that your fax information is protected by the same technical, administrative, and physical safeguards that HIPAA demands and that we use regularly throughout our entire system.
For more detail on using Spruce fax while maintaining regulatory compliance, please see our white paper on Using Spruce in a HIPAA-Compliant Way.
To maximize security and privacy, Spruce's underlying efax infrastructure partner specifically attempts to process all faxes via T.38 protocol. However, if an external fax system does not support T.38, transmission to or from Spruce may occur via another protocol, like T.30, so that fax delivery is not compromised.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does eFax work in Spruce?
Spruce eFax converts faxes to digital format, delivering incoming faxes to your shared inbox and letting you send faxes directly from the app to any fax number, with no physical fax machine needed.
Is faxing through Spruce HIPAA compliant?
Spruce provides eFax that can be used in a HIPAA-compliant way, with all fax data encrypted and stored securely within the Spruce platform.