HIPAA fax API for healthcare
HIPAA fax API for healthcare
Fax has not left healthcare. Where two EHRs cannot talk to each other, it is still the channel that closes the gap. The MGMA’s 2026 poll of medical practices found 73% had a digital fax solution fully wired into their EHR or PM workflow. The workflows with the highest volume are also where the paperwork burden concentrates: referrals, prior authorization, and lab-result exchange. The AMA’s late-2024 survey quantified prior authorization. A physician averages 39 prior authorization requests a week, and the practice spends 13 hours completing them.
mintfax is a developer-first fax service. The path to production is a REST API, a sandbox with realistic failure modes, and a BAA the customer signs in the dashboard.
What the healthcare integration actually needs
Three things a team wiring fax into a clinical or patient-facing product needs:
A BAA the day the evaluation starts. The mintfax BAA is a click in the dashboard, on every account, at every tier. The authorized signer reviews the prefilled template, clicks “I agree”, and the executed PDF is downloadable immediately. The same click writes a durable evidence record with the account, template version, signer name and title, accepted_at, IP, and user agent. No procurement gate, no sales call, no dependency on the plan the team is on. Pricing is public and per-page; /compliance/hipaa has the paperwork detail.
Named PHI handling, and a way to delete PHI on demand. The PHI boundary is stated: fax content, cover-page body, sender name, recipient name, and recipient company. Destination number and operational metadata (status, error codes, timestamps, attempt history) are operational data. PHI content retention defaults to 30 days from the moment a fax reaches a terminal state. It is customer-configurable per environment between 7 and 365 days. Per-fax content deletion runs at any time via DELETE /faxes/{id}/content, and the fax record stays queryable with PHI fields nulled. Zero-footprint mode is a per-environment toggle: PHI is scrubbed the instant a fax hits fax.delivered or fax.failed, and operational metadata is preserved. The developer walkthrough at /docs/patient-health-info shows the call shapes.
Predictable production semantics on the send path. Webhooks are signed with HMAC-SHA256 per the Standard Webhooks spec, so a receiving service can verify integrity before it acts on a delivered fax. POST /faxes honours Idempotency-Key for 24 hours, so a retry after a transient network failure does not send twice.
Compliance controls
mintfax operates under a signed BAA and implements the technical controls a covered entity relies on to meet the HIPAA Security Rule (45 CFR 164.312):
- Access and authentication. Read-event logging on PHI content access. Personnel access rows carry a pseudonymous staff identifier and a mandatory reason, and appear in the customer’s own audit feed.
- Encryption. AES-256 envelope encryption for fax content, mintfax-managed keys, one per environment, rotated automatically. TLS 1.2 minimum for inbound API and outbound webhook delivery. Endpoints registered with plain HTTP are rejected at registration.
- Audit controls. The audit stream is exportable over
GET /v1/account/auditand as a dashboard CSV, with a SHA-256 hash chain (prev_hash,row_hash) so integrity is verifiable offline. Retention is fixed at 6 years to match 45 CFR 164.530(j)(2). - Transmission integrity. Webhook payloads are signed and never carry file content or the cover-page body. The compliance boundary excludes upstream carriers; that boundary is stated on /compliance.
mintfax operates under a signed BAA and implements the controls above. Meeting HIPAA is the covered entity’s job; the controls above are what it depends on from mintfax. mintfax does not hold SOC 2, HITRUST, PCI DSS Level 1, or GDPR certification.