Faxes

Healthcare still runs on fax — referrals, records requests, lab paperwork. Ona gives you a digital fax so none of it needs a machine: incoming faxes arrive as documents, outgoing ones send from the app, and referral faxes route straight into your referral inbox.

Fax settings

Go to Settings → Fax & Referrals — "provision a dedicated toll-free fax number to send and receive faxes, or forward incoming documents to a digital inbox to process referrals without changing your existing number."

• Fax — "allow your clinic to send faxes from this number." When on, sending is enabled.
• Fax number — your dedicated toll-free number, e.g. +1 (866) 698-1028, marked "Fax is on — sending is allowed."
• Digital inbox — "forward faxes to a digital inbox to receive documents without changing your fax number." This is the key option for a practice that already has a fax number: you keep it and forward to Ona.
• Forwarding address — the address to forward from your existing fax service, e.g. ona+xxxx@ona.health. "Set up forwarding from your existing fax service to this address."

The digital-inbox route is what lets you adopt Ona's fax without disrupting anyone. Your published fax number stays the same; you just forward it to Ona, and faxes start arriving digitally. No stationery to reprint, no number to announce.

The Faxes inbox

Open Faxes on the settings page (or Faxes in the left sidebar) opens the fax history.

The inbox has Received and Sent tabs, each with a count, plus a Contacts list and a Send fax action. Each fax shows the sender, a PDF of the document, and tags — incoming faxes are often tagged Referral, with a Link action to attach them to a patient.

Faxes and referrals

Fax and referrals are two sides of one feature — hence the combined settings page. An incoming fax tagged as a referral flows into the Referrals inbox (see Managing incoming referrals), where Ona reads it, matches it to a patient, and lets you convert it into a patient record. So a faxed referral doesn't sit as an image to retype; it becomes a structured referral automatically.

Watch which faxes are referrals versus general documents. A referral is a patient trying to reach your practice, so a missed one in the fax pile is a missed patient. The referral routing exists to stop exactly that — but it only helps if the fax forwarding is set up in the first place.

Sending a fax

Send fax composes an outgoing fax — pick a contact or number, attach the document, and send. Because it goes through your dedicated number, the recipient sees your practice's fax line, the same as any traditional fax.