Moving scans between hospitals still often revolves around carrying CDs from one health system to another.
The fax machine dates back to the 1840s. The CD arrived in the early 1980s. Both remain strangely central to how healthcare information still moves today.
That reality sat quietly underneath nearly every conversation at the Axios Future of Health Summit in Washington, D.C. this week. Whether the topic was artificial intelligence, prior authorization, maternal health, transplant coordination or healthcare affordability, conversations that began around modernization eventually collided with the same hard limit: the underlying architecture of American healthcare still struggles to move information reliably between people, platforms and institutions.
This became especially visible during a discussion with CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz, M.D., who announced a new expansion of the CMS initiative colloquially called “Axe the Fax” alongside major health systems including Cleveland Clinic, Ochsner Health, Sanford Health, Providence and others, as well as EHR vendors including Epic Systems, Oracle and athenahealth. Dr. Oz described a system where nearly half of prior authorization communications still move through fax machines, creating delays, lost documentation and enormous administrative drag across care delivery.
