Improving Fax Deliverability and Reliability with the Retarus Enterprise Fax Portal

An established U.S.-based vision care and optical distributor relies heavily on fax to transmit prescriptions for verification workflows. Fax remains the most widely accepted and regulator-approved communication channel across healthcare providers, making it mission-critical to the company’s daily operations.

The organization processed approximately one million fax transmissions per month using an on-premises fax server. Over time, this infrastructure became increasingly difficult to manage. Custom reporting tools had to be developed to extract usage data, and a great deal of  manual effort was necessary to troubleshoot failed transmissions and resend fax jobs. Developers had to actively monitor system capacity to avoid overwhelming the servers.It took more man-hours to maintain the servers than to use them.

Most importantly, the company lacked real-time transparency into fax delivery. Fax jobs were effectively sent “into a black hole,” with limited visibility into status or detailed audit trails. Given the risks involved with operating in a compliance-sensitive healthcare environment, the organization knew it needed to modernize.

The company set out to modernize its fax infrastructure by migrating from on-premises fax servers to a cloud-based solution capable of supporting its growing operational demands.

Their primary objectives were to:

• Strengthen fax infrastructure and improve reliability
• Maintain strict security and compliance standards
• Increase system capacity without performance constraints
• Gain real-time visibility into every fax job
• Improve delivery success rates
• Eliminate manual re-send processes

Uptime and deliverability were non-negotiable. The company’s verification workflows are “time-sensitive and cannot tolerate transmission delays.” Thankfully, Retarus enables their uptime with redundant data centers, providing industry-leading success rates, and the ability to scale instantly without throttling limitations. In addition, their development team wanted to integrate real-time fax status data directly into their own reporting systems via APIs.

When transitioning from a deeply embedded on-prem fax environment to a fully cloud-based solution, some key things had to be kept in mind: reporting, scale, and deliverability.

First, the organization had custom reporting workflows around their fax servers to compensate for gaps in visibility. Any new solution needed to deliver significantly better monitoring, not just transfer over the same functionality. Developers required unique fax IDs, detailed status reporting, and the ability to integrate reporting data via API into internal systems.

Second, capacity constraints had been a constant concern. The legacy fax environment required careful traffic management to avoid overload, pushing too many jobs at once risked performance degradation. Moving to a cloud-based model meant trusting a provider that could reliably handle thousands of API calls per minute without throttling or downtime.

Finally, success rates mattered. Internal reporting showed a  significant failure rate (excluding busy and no answer conditions) causing manual retries and secondary communication workflows. For a company transmitting one million faxes monthly, even small improvements in deliverability meant huge operational and financial impact. Any migration would need to improve transmission reliability while maintaining full compliance.

By implementing the Retarus Enterprise Fax Portal with their internal workflows, the organization achieved a fully modernized fax infrastructure capable of delivering measurable improvements in performance and visibility.

Outbound deliverability rates skyrocketed above 99%, minimizing the need for manual intervention due to failed transmissions. Automated retry mechanisms replaced labor-intensive re-send workflows, saving employees time and reducing operational friction.

Now, real-time monitoring, unique fax IDs, and detailed reporting provide full transparency into every transmission. Through the Retarus Reporting API, the company gained the ability to integrate fax status data directly into internal systems, eliminating blind spots and strengthening audit readiness.

Equally important, the customer cited the professionalism of the Retarus team, the strength of the SLA guarantees, and the flexibility of the API architecture as decisive factors in selecting Retarus as their exclusive cloud fax provider.

• ~1 million faxes processed monthly for prescription verification workflows
• 7% outbound deliverability achieved after migration
• Automated retry mechanisms reduced manual troubleshooting and re-sends
• Real-time monitoring and Reporting API integration delivered full visibility
• Highest-tier SLA selected to guarantee uptime for time-sensitive processes

For organizations where fax remains a highly regulated and mission-critical communication channel, modernization and automation are just as crucial. By replacing legacy fax servers with Retarus Cloud Fax, this optical distributor strengthened reliability, improved delivery success rates, and gained the scalability required for long-term growth.