As a patient, may I send my own records to a clinic by fax?

Yes. It is your own information, so fax is your call if the office accepts it. It is worth confirming the number with the department and adding a cover sheet with a phone number, so the office can call back if a page is missing.

Is faxing health information illegal in Canada?

No federal or provincial statute bans it outright. The laws do require reasonable safeguards, which makes routine fax use harder to justify. Your provincial privacy commissioner publishes up-to-date guidance on its official website.

What if a medical fax reaches the wrong number?

Contact the recipient right away to ask them to destroy the pages, record the incident and assess whether it must be reported to the privacy commissioner and the patient. Our page on misdirected faxes walks through the steps.

Fax and health information

What to check before you fax a medical document in Canada, and when a secure clinical channel is the better choice.

Faxing health information is still common in Canada, but it falls under strict privacy laws such as Ontario’s PHIPA, Alberta’s HIA or British Columbia’s PIPA. Where a provincial health record or secure messaging is available, use it. If fax is all you have, confirm the number, send only what is needed and warn the person receiving it.

Four things to know

Each province sets its own rules for personal health information, and federal PIPEDA covers private-sector activity where no similar provincial law applies.
Provincial health records, eReferral and eConsult services and clinical secure messaging are designed for what fax still does in many clinics.
A misdialled fax prints in plain view at a stranger’s machine: checking the number is the safeguard that matters most.
FaxTelecom encrypts your PDF in transit to its servers and deletes it after sending, but the final phone line is not encrypted.

Why fax is still part of Canadian health care

Canada is one of the countries where clinical fax has lasted longest. Referrals from a family physician to a specialist, requisitions sent to a lab, prescriptions faxed to a pharmacy and forms returned to a provincial plan still travel this way in many places. Canada Health Infoway and several provinces have programs aimed at reducing that reliance.

Patients send faxes too. A clinic may ask for an insurance form, a consent or an earlier test result, and the patient has no access to the systems clinicians use. In that case the patient is choosing to share their own information; the real risk is a wrong digit in the number.

For professionals, fax tends to fill the gaps: a correspondent outside the provincial network, an office whose system is down, or a one-off exchange with an organization in another province.

What the legislation expects

There is no single Canadian health privacy law. Ontario’s Personal Health Information Protection Act (PHIPA) governs health information custodians such as physicians, hospitals and pharmacies. Alberta has its Health Information Act (HIA) for custodians and the Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA) for private organizations. In British Columbia, private practices fall under PIPA and public bodies under FIPPA. Manitoba, Saskatchewan and the Atlantic provinces have their own health statutes.

None of these laws bans fax outright. They require reasonable safeguards scaled to how sensitive the information is. A diagnosis, a medication list or mental health notes are among the most sensitive records there are, so an unencrypted channel whose recipient you cannot see needs extra care and is hard to justify for routine use.

Provincial commissioners, such as the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario or the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta, publish guidance on their official websites, including material on faxing. Your regulatory college may add its own expectations.

Fax or secure channel: what each route protects

This table describes how each channel works. It does not rank them legally: the right choice depends on the content, the recipient and the rules of your province and college.

Comparison of channels for sending health information in Canada
Channel	What is protected	Weak point	Sensible use
Provincial health record viewers (for example ConnectingOntario, Alberta Netcare)	Access limited to authorized providers, with audit logs	For consulting a record, not for sending a document to anyone	Reviewing results and reports for your own patients
eReferral, eConsult and clinical secure messaging	Encrypted exchange between identified clinicians	Both sides must be enrolled in the same service	Routine referrals and consults between providers
Office fax machine	Nothing on the line: only the choice of number protects	Pages print on arrival, visible to anyone nearby	Fallback, recipient warned, content kept to a minimum
Online fax (FaxTelecom)	HTTPS transfer to the servers, file deleted after sending	Same unencrypted phone leg as any fax	Occasional sending without a fax machine, by a patient or a clinic

Five safeguards before faxing a medical document

Confirm the number. Take it from a recent document issued by the recipient, or call the office to confirm it. A number copied from a fax received years ago may now belong to someone else, and one transposed digit is enough to deliver a consult note to a stranger.

Ask where the machine sits. A fax at a busy front desk is not the same as one in a nurse’s office. If it is in a shared space, agree on a time so that someone collects the pages as they arrive.

Mark the cover sheet as confidential. Include the recipient’s name, the page count, a callback number and a request to notify the sender and destroy any pages received in error. Keep clinical details off the cover sheet itself.

Send only what is needed. The relevant page of a report rather than the whole chart; no full health card number unless the form requires it, no unrelated history, nothing about other family members.

Confirm receipt. A quick call or message after sending tells you the pages reached the right hands, and alerts you early if they did not.

What FaxTelecom does, and where it stops

FaxTelecom sends a PDF from a web browser to a landline in Canada or six European countries, with no account. The file is encrypted (HTTPS) on its way to our servers, used for the transmission alone, then deleted automatically. No advertising is added to your pages.

Past our servers, the document crosses the telephone network like any other fax. That last leg is not encrypted: it is a limit of the fax protocol, not a setting we could change. FaxTelecom does not receive faxes, so it cannot be used to collect results or prescriptions.

Before transmission there are two checkpoints: a confirmation link sent by email, then a countdown of about 55 seconds during which you can cancel. Use it to reread the number. For regular exchanges between clinicians, a provincial secure channel remains the right answer.

Frequently asked questions

As a patient, may I send my own records to a clinic by fax?: Yes. It is your own information, so fax is your call if the office accepts it. It is worth confirming the number with the department and adding a cover sheet with a phone number, so the office can call back if a page is missing.
Is faxing health information illegal in Canada?: No federal or provincial statute bans it outright. The laws do require reasonable safeguards, which makes routine fax use harder to justify. Your provincial privacy commissioner publishes up-to-date guidance on its official website.
What if a medical fax reaches the wrong number?: Contact the recipient right away to ask them to destroy the pages, record the incident and assess whether it must be reported to the privacy commissioner and the patient. Our page on misdirected faxes walks through the steps.

Security and data

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