Why Healthcare Organizations Are Replacing RightFax with WestFax

For decades, OpenText RightFax has been an important part of enterprise communications infrastructure. Hospitals, health systems, financial institutions, and large corporations have relied on it to move documents securely between organizations and business applications. RightFax helped establish electronic fax as an enterprise technology, and it deserves credit for that contribution.

But the economics of enterprise fax have changed dramatically. Healthcare organizations are under enormous pressure to reduce operating expenses, improve staff productivity, strengthen security, and automate administrative workflows. At the same time, many maintain fax infrastructure designed for an era when applications lived in corporate data centers and document processing required substantial human intervention.

The question is no longer whether fax remains relevant. In healthcare, fax still plays an essential role in referrals, medical record exchange, prior authorizations, laboratory communications, and provider coordination. The more important question is why healthcare organizations should continue paying to own and maintain the infrastructure required to deliver those faxes.

At WestFax, we believe organizations can preserve the interoperability and familiarity of fax while eliminating much of the cost and complexity associated with legacy fax servers. Moving from RightFax to WestFax also creates an opportunity to improve the entire document workflow, not simply replace one transmission method with another.

The financial case can be compelling, but replacing an established system is rarely purely economic. Healthcare organizations have invested years building reliable workflows around RightFax. Changing them requires careful planning. That makes it especially important to evaluate what the organization needs going forward, rather than simply what it invested in the past.

RightFax to WestFax

The financial case for cloud fax modernization

Legacy fax environment

$144,000

Illustrative annual cost

WestFax cloud environment

$84,000

Illustrative annual cost

41.7%

Modeled cost reduction

$60,000 in potential annual infrastructure savings

The Economics of Enterprise Fax Have Changed

The traditional enterprise fax environment was built on a straightforward concept: organizations bought software, deployed servers, established telecommunications connectivity, and maintained the infrastructure needed to send and receive documents. For many years, this was practical. Today, the same architecture can introduce unnecessary costs and operational complexity.

Modern cloud fax platforms can deliver enterprise capabilities without requiring customers to own and maintain much of the underlying communications infrastructure. Instead of managing dedicated fax servers, gateways, and telecommunications dependencies, organizations can consume fax transport as a managed service.

Traditional fax environments frequently involve software maintenance, database administration, operating system updates, telecommunications troubleshooting, backup infrastructure, disaster recovery planning, and specialized technical support. These costs are spread across departments, making the true expense difficult to identify. A traditional fax server may have been a sensible investment when you installed it. That does not necessarily make it the most economical solution today.

The True Cost of RightFax Is Larger Than the Licensing Invoice

When an organization evaluates RightFax expenses, the conversation often begins with annual software maintenance and support. That rarely captures the complete financial picture. A deployment may involve application servers, virtual machines, Windows Server licensing, databases, telecommunications gateways, SIP connectivity, fax boards, monitoring, backup systems, disaster recovery, and specialized technical personnel.

Not every deployment has all these components. Some use virtualized infrastructure, hosted services, or cloud-based transport. Nevertheless, every organization must account for the responsibilities it still owns.

A hospital processing hundreds of thousands of fax pages each month may have a reliable RightFax deployment while still paying to maintain software, manage upgrades, troubleshoot integrations, coordinate telecommunications vendors, and plan for interruptions. Software licensing, telecommunications, infrastructure, and manual fax handling often sit in separate departmental budgets.

A meaningful replacement analysis should include software and support, computing infrastructure, telecommunications, IT administration, and document-processing labor. In many healthcare organizations, the last category may represent the greatest opportunity.

A Financial Model: What Does a RightFax Deployment Actually Cost?

RightFax enterprise pricing varies by licensing, architecture, support, and contract. The following illustrative model assumes a mid-sized healthcare organization processing 250,000 fax pages monthly. These figures are planning assumptions, not verified customer expenditures or a WestFax quotation.

Illustrative Annual RightFax Cost

Cost category	Annual estimate
RightFax software maintenance and support	$30,000
Server, virtualization, and database allocation	$18,000
Telecommunications circuits, gateways, and services	$24,000
IT administration and troubleshooting	$45,000
Backup, disaster recovery, and monitoring	$12,000
Upgrade and infrastructure refresh reserve	$15,000
Total annual cost	$144,000

This hypothetical organization spends $12,000 per month before counting employees who receive, classify, index, and distribute documents. At three million pages per year, infrastructure alone costs approximately 4.8 cents per page. The relevant comparison is the full legacy cost against the fully loaded replacement cost, not just a telecommunications bill.

What Happens When the Organization Moves to WestFax?

Assume a hypothetical WestFax proposal of $6,000 monthly for fax transport, integration, and workflow capabilities, plus $12,000 annually in retained internal IT expenses. This is a modeling input, not published WestFax pricing.

Financial measure	Annual cost
Existing RightFax environment	$144,000
Illustrative WestFax service expense	$72,000
Retained internal IT expenses	$12,000
Total WestFax environment	$84,000
Potential annual savings	$60,000
Modeled cost reduction	41.7%

Some costs remain: connectivity, security oversight, integration support, vendor management, and potentially local Orchestrate components. Even so, a one-time migration expense of $25,000 would leave $35,000 in modeled first-year savings and $60,000 in recurring annual savings. Simple payback would be five months if the projected savings are realized.

The right question is not simply, “How much does WestFax charge per page?” It is, “How much are we spending to operate our entire fax environment, and what would that cost look like after modernization?”

The Largest Opportunity May Be the People Processing the Faxes

Infrastructure savings are important, but healthcare organizations should also examine the cost of processing incoming documents. A hospital may receive thousands of pages daily, including referrals, lab results, medical records, prior authorizations, and clinical correspondence.

Receiving a fax is only the beginning. Someone must identify the document, patient, department, and provider, then move the information into the EHR or document management system. Manual review, lookup, indexing, saving, and forwarding can accumulate into enormous workloads.

WestFax Orchestrate addresses this problem through intelligent document classification, data extraction, patient matching, routing, and indexing. It supports workflows involving Epic and OnBase, with human review where necessary.

How Much Can AI-Assisted Fax Processing Save?

Consider 100,000 documents monthly, with three minutes of manual handling per document. That equals 5,000 staff hours monthly. At a hypothetical fully loaded cost of $30 per hour, the annual labor value is $1.8 million. If automation reduces average human handling by 60%, the model changes as follows:

Metric	Before	After
Monthly documents	100,000	100,000
Manual minutes per document	3	1.2
Monthly staff hours	5,000	2,000
Monthly labor value	$150,000	$60,000
Annual labor value	$1,800,000	$720,000
Annual capacity recovered	$1,080,000

The 36,000 hours recovered annually do not automatically reduce payroll. Some time will shift to patient services, exception handling, or higher-value work. A controlled pilot should measure intervention rates, accuracy, exceptions, and actual handling time. The strongest return comes from reducing unnecessary work while preserving clinical accuracy.

Fax Completion Rates Are a Financial Metric

A failed fax is rarely just a failed network transaction. It may create a support ticket, delayed referral, another telephone call, or additional staff investigation. In healthcare, these consequences can interrupt clinical workflows.

Fax completion rate is one of the first operational metrics I look at because it shows whether our network is doing what customers depend on it to do. WestFax operates a diversified telecommunications network using both established TDM and SIP connectivity, selecting transport paths according to destination and delivery requirements.

Fax is a negotiated telecommunications session, not a simple file transfer. Interoperability varies across networks, equipment, and protocols. A lower price per attempted transmission is not necessarily a lower cost per successfully delivered document.

Consider 200,000 monthly transmissions. If initial completion improves from 96% to 99%, exceptions fall from 8,000 to 2,000. At four minutes of staff attention per exception, this represents 400 hours per month, or $144,000 in annual labor value at $30 per hour. This is a sensitivity model, not a claim about typical RightFax performance or a WestFax completion guarantee.

WestFax’s completed-fax billing model aligns our business incentives with successful delivery. We want customers’ transmissions to succeed, and we have a direct economic interest in that outcome.

The Cost of Maintaining Legacy Telecommunications Infrastructure

RightFax environments were often designed around PRIs, fax boards, gateways, and dedicated circuits. Some have transitioned to SIP; others still rely on a mixture of older and newer technology. As communications networks modernize, fax support can become its own infrastructure project.

A PBX replacement may require new fax connectivity. Carrier service changes may force gateway redesign. Data center migrations may trigger reconfiguration and testing. These are not necessarily RightFax failures; they are consequences of owning a connected communications platform.

WestFax uses established TDM connectivity alongside increasing SIP traffic and intelligent routing to select an appropriate transport path. Diverse carrier relationships reduce dependence on any one provider. Customers can move much of the fax transport complexity from their own IT teams to a managed network designed for fax.

A Practical Approach to RightFax Migration

An enterprise migration doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Hospitals may have years of integrations involving RightFax, Epic, OnBase, multifunction printers, Active Directory, and departmental applications. Replacing every workflow at once introduces unnecessary risk. WestFax offers multiple modernization paths.

Approach	What changes	Financial opportunity
WestFax Transport Network	Replace transport; retain RightFax	Reduce gateway and telecom costs
WestFax Cloud Fax Toolkit	Replace routing and integrations	Retire legacy application infrastructure
WestFax Orchestrate	Replace workflows; add intelligent processing	Combine infrastructure and labor savings

Orchestrate supports routing rules, AutoPrint, folder-based workflows, Active Directory integration, Windows single sign-on, and audit history, while adding classification, extraction, patient matching, shared folders, and automation. Its self-hosted workflow architecture can retain local document-processing control while using WestFax cloud transport. Not every local component disappears, but you can reduce unnecessary legacy infrastructure.

Security, Compliance, and Operational Risk

Healthcare fax often contains protected health information. Security controls, access management, auditability, and compliance therefore matter as much as price. Misrouted documents, inappropriate access, and poor audit records can create substantial risk.

Cloud fax does not automatically eliminate those risks. Appropriate Business Associate Agreements, access policies, encryption, retention practices, and monitoring remain essential. WestFax supports healthcare customers with a HIPAA-focused service model, HITRUST r2 certification, and SOC 2 Type II auditing. Customers remain responsible for proper configuration and their own compliance processes.

Properly validated automated routing can reduce manual handoffs and opportunities for human error. Those improvements are difficult to value universally, but should be part of the total cost analysis.

Why Cloud Fax Modernization Is Accelerating

Organizations have adopted cloud-based email, collaboration, financial systems, and other applications to reduce infrastructure ownership and improve scalability. Fax is undergoing a similar transition.

Healthcare has a particularly strong need because fax connects organizations with widely different technical capabilities. A large academic center may operate Epic, while a rural clinic, independent practice, tribal health organization, or community provider may use entirely different systems. Fax remains a common communications method without requiring every participant to adopt the same platform.

The opportunity is not to eliminate fax. It is to make fax more efficient, reliable, and compatible with modern healthcare workflows, including intelligent document processing that transforms an incoming fax into useful clinical information.

Calculating Three-Year Return on a RightFax-to-WestFax Migration

A meaningful three-year total cost of ownership model should include software, servers, databases, telecommunications, disaster recovery, IT administration, migration, service fees, and retained infrastructure. Separately evaluate document-processing labor and transmission exception handling.

Using the earlier assumptions, a more conservative 15% recovery of manual document-processing labor would represent $270,000 annually in labor capacity. Combined with $60,000 in infrastructure savings, that is $330,000 in potential annual gross economic value before incremental automation costs.

Financial measure	Three-year amount
Infrastructure savings	$180,000
Recovered processing capacity value	$810,000
Total gross economic value	$990,000
One-time migration expense	($25,000)
Potential net economic value	$965,000

This hypothetical model assumes savings begin immediately, does not discount future cash flows, and excludes incremental AI licensing, validation, training, and ongoing workflow support. Recovered capacity is economic value, not necessarily cash savings. Nevertheless, even modest administrative improvements can be significant at healthcare scale.

Migrating Without Disrupting Patient Care

Cost reduction matters only if migration preserves critical communications. Every enterprise project should begin with an inventory of fax numbers, routing, application dependencies, departmental printing, transmission status, audit records, and rollback needs.

WestFax migration planning includes discovery, technical configuration, testing, cutover planning, and eventual retirement of unnecessary legacy components. Fax number porting can preserve established numbers when eligible. Many Orchestrate deployments can be completed in under four weeks, although porting, integrations, and organizational complexity can extend schedules.

A responsible cutover validates transmission completion, inbound routing, EHR integration, user permissions, audit history, exception handling, and rollback before decommissioning RightFax. The goal is not merely replacement, but a better clinical information workflow.

The Hardest Part of Leaving RightFax May Be Deciding to Leave

For many healthcare organizations, the biggest obstacle to replacing RightFax is not the technology or even the cost. It is the understandable reluctance to disrupt something that has been part of the organization for years.

IT teams have invested countless hours configuring servers, building integrations, troubleshooting telecom problems, and developing workflows. Administrators know the system, support teams know its quirks, and the organization has spent considerable money making it reliable. Walking away can feel wasteful. When fax supports referrals and medical records, the question “What happens if something goes wrong?” is entirely legitimate.

But an important distinction exists between protecting an investment and continuing to spend simply because the investment has already been made. Economists call this the sunk cost fallacy: letting unrecoverable past expenditures drive future decisions.

An organization may have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars implementing and maintaining RightFax. That investment served a purpose and delivered value. But those dollars are gone regardless of whether the organization keeps RightFax for another decade or replaces it tomorrow. The money already spent should not determine how much the organization is willing to spend in the future.

If a healthcare organization were building its fax environment from scratch today, would it choose to purchase and maintain servers, manage gateways, schedule upgrades, and dedicate internal IT resources to infrastructure? Or would it seriously consider a managed service with a path toward automation?

Recognizing the economics does not erase the work of migration. Numbers must be preserved, integrations tested, routing recreated, employees trained, and dependencies understood. That is why WestFax offers staged paths, including retaining RightFax while moving transport to our network. Organizations can validate performance and retire legacy components as the new environment proves itself.

There is also a human dimension. Every hour an IT professional spends maintaining aging fax infrastructure is an hour they can’t spend improving clinical systems. Every minute an administrative employee spends sorting a document could be redirected to help a patient or coordinate a referral. The status quo has opportunity costs that never appear on a maintenance invoice.

I understand why organizations hesitate to change a system that works. Reliability matters enormously. But familiarity is not the same as financial efficiency, and the absence of a crisis does not mean the absence of opportunity. The decision should compare future costs, migration risks, and measurable benefits. Money spent years ago does not belong in that forward-looking calculation.

The greatest risk is not necessarily switching from RightFax. It may be spending another five or ten years maintaining an expensive legacy environment simply because switching feels uncomfortable.

The Future of Fax Is Not Another Fax Server

I have spent much of my career in the fax industry, watching the technology evolve from dedicated hardware and circuits into sophisticated cloud communications platforms. What has remained remarkably consistent is fax’s importance to healthcare.

Despite decades of EHR investment and interoperability initiatives, healthcare organizations still depend on fax. I do not believe that dependence is inherently a problem. Fax is broadly accessible across organizations with different technical capabilities. The problem arises when organizations operate expensive, inflexible infrastructure to support it.

RightFax played an important role in enterprise fax history, and organizations that invested in it have legitimate reasons to be cautious. But maintaining an existing investment should not prevent evaluating a better economic model.

Cloud fax can reduce legacy infrastructure costs. Modern transport can reduce troubleshooting and delivery exceptions. Intelligent document processing can reduce the manual work needed to turn incoming documents into useful clinical information. Together, those benefits can free resources for patient care and higher-value technology initiatives.

At WestFax, our objective is not simply to replace RightFax with another fax service. It is to help healthcare organizations spend less on operating communications infrastructure, spend less time processing documents, and get more value from a technology they already depend on.

The goal is not change for the sake of change. Invest in technology because it represents the best path forward, not simply because it was purchased yesterday.

If you would not choose to build and operate your current fax infrastructure today, why would you choose to keep paying for it tomorrow?

Evaluate your organization’s potential savings and request a technical and financial assessment.

Frequently Asked Questions

Financial disclosure: All cost and ROI scenarios are illustrative, not verified customer results or guaranteed savings. RightFax and OpenText are trademarks of Open Text Corporation. WestFax is not affiliated with or endorsed by Open Text Corporation.