Short answer: in 2026, the fax has not disappeared from veterinary practices because animal medicine was left outside the scope of the major digitisation programmes that reshaped human healthcare: no MSSanté, no DMP, no Ségur du numérique funding. As a result, four workflows still travel by fax: laboratory results from veterinary analysis labs, referrals between colleagues (imaging, surgery, specialties), prescriptions sent to pharmacies, and health declarations filed with certain authorities. The right strategy is not to pull the plug overnight, but to keep an inbound number through a third-party provider while shifting outbound sending to an online service — and to reclassify, workflow by workflow, whatever can move to a portal, encrypted email, or practice management software.
About MondialFax. This article is an organisational guide, independent of any veterinary software vendor or analysis laboratory. MondialFax sends faxes free of charge and without registration to seven destinations (France, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Canada). It does not assign a number and does not handle reception: the inbound scenarios described here assume a third-party provider. See receiving a fax and our fax-to-email guide.
There is a blind spot in every conversation about the death of the fax. People talk about medical practices, notary offices, HR departments. They systematically forget veterinary clinics, which are nonetheless among the last healthcare settings in France where the fax machine still runs every day, sometimes several times a day.
The reason is structural. The frameworks that pushed the fax out of human healthcare — secure health messaging, the national health identifier, the funding under the Ségur programme — do not apply to veterinary medicine. A practising vet has no MSSanté address. There is no DMP equivalent for a cat. So exchanges happen with whatever tools are available: the phone, email, laboratories' proprietary portals… and the fax, whenever the other party has nothing else.
The four fax workflows that persist in veterinary practice
Before deciding anything, you need an inventory. In most of the practices described by vets, the volume breaks down roughly as follows.
1. Laboratory test results
This is the dominant workflow, and above all an inbound one. Haematology, biochemistry, serology, histopathology, PCR: the practice sends a sample, the laboratory sends back a report. Major veterinary laboratories now offer web portals and direct interfaces with practice management software. But departmental laboratories, university anatomical pathology units, and certain specialists keep sending their reports by fax, because it is the one channel that requires no account, no password, and no integration.
Practical consequence: if you cut off inbound faxing without warning, you will lose results. And a lost histology report means a diagnosis delayed by several days.
2. Referrals between colleagues
A general practitioner refers an animal to a referral centre for a CT scan, orthopaedic surgery, or a cardiology or oncology consultation. The referral file — history, current treatments, previous reports, sometimes printed radiographs — often goes by fax, because the centre supplies a referral form with a fax number printed on it.
Here the fax has a genuine advantage that vets mention spontaneously: it lands on a printer sitting in the corridor outside the theatre, and somebody sees it. An email in a generic inbox does not.
3. Prescriptions sent to pharmacies and purchasing groups
Veterinary prescribing is governed by the French Public Health Code and the Rural and Maritime Fishing Code, with specific rules on antibiotics — the national Écoantibio plan in particular imposed enhanced traceability for prescriptions of critical antibiotics. When an owner has a prescription filled at a retail pharmacy, or when a livestock operation orders from a purchasing group, the document is still very frequently transmitted by fax.
For this workflow, the sensitive point is not the channel: it is legibility. A poorly scanned dosage is a potential dispensing error. We covered the settings that matter in our guide on illegible faxes.
4. Health declarations and certificates
Notifications of regulated diseases, certificates for exporting pets, exchanges with the DDPP (departmental population protection directorates), autopsy requests. These channels have largely gone digital — the Expadon 2 platform for exports, the Ministry of Agriculture's online procedures — but there remain cases where an administration or a foreign official veterinarian asks for a fax.
Why the PSTN switch-off hits practices later — but harder
Veterinary practices often have an ageing telephone set-up: a switchboard, two or three analogue lines, a fax machine on a dedicated line. That is exactly the configuration the end of the Public Switched Telephone Network renders unusable.
Orange's timetable provides for the progressive shutdown of PSTN lines in geographic waves, with a general switch to IP telephony. For a practice, that means that one morning the engineer replaces the line with VoIP access, plugs the fax machine into the analogue port on the business router… and faxes stop going through reliably. This is the classic problem of the T.38 protocol and SIP gateways, which we picked apart in Fax over VoIP: why T.38 fails.
The shock is harsher in a veterinary practice than elsewhere, for two reasons:
- the practice generally has no IT department; the veterinary nurse or the associate vet discovers the outage in the middle of a rush of consultations;
- the inbound workflow is medically critical: a histopathology report that fails to arrive is not a mere administrative inconvenience.
Hence the value of dealing with the issue before migration, not after.
The switch in practice: separate sending from receiving
This is the guiding principle. Sending and receiving are two distinct problems, with two distinct solutions.
Sending: an online service is enough
For occasional outbound faxes — a referral, a prescription, a letter to a colleague abroad — an online sending service from the workstation solves the problem with no hardware. The workflow becomes: scanned document or PDF from the practice software → sending form → confirmation.
In practice, the piece most often missing is not the software but the scanning hardware. A fax machine also doubles as a scanner, and the day you unplug it, you have to replace it. A duplex scanner with an automatic document feeder radically changes life at a veterinary front desk: health booklets, reports handed over in person, and signed forms go through in seconds. For practices that scan very little, a monochrome laser multifunction printer does the job perfectly well and remains consistent with the bitonal nature of fax.
If you are sending to one of the seven covered countries, the sending form requires no registration; the full list is on supported countries.
Receiving: keep a number, have it delivered by email
This is the non-negotiable part. A practice cannot afford to lose an inbound fax. The solution is to keep the fax number — the one printed on prescription pads, door plates, and labs' referral forms — and have it hosted by a fax-to-email provider that delivers it as a PDF to a dedicated inbox. Our guide Keeping your fax number after the PSTN shutdown explains number portability.
Two recommendations specific to the veterinary context:
- A shared inbox, not a personal one.
labo@orfax@rather than the associate vet's own address. A result must not sit unread in an inaccessible mailbox over the holidays. - An automatic sorting rule that pushes reports into a monitored folder and, ideally, a visible notification at the front desk. Many practices install a monitoring tablet at reception, permanently displaying the fax inbox and the appointment diary: the visual reflex of paper coming out is replaced by a screen reflex.
Confidentiality: an animal's record is not health data, but the owner's details are
This is a poorly understood nuance. An animal's medical data is not "data concerning health" within the meaning of Article 9 of the GDPR, which only protects natural persons. The record, however, almost always contains the owner's name, address, phone number, email and sometimes payment details: these are ordinary personal data, fully subject to the GDPR, and the CNIL regularly makes this point about the client files held by self-employed professionals.
In addition, vets are bound by professional secrecy under Article R.242-33 of the Rural Code, restated in the veterinary code of ethics enforced by the Ordre national des vétérinaires. A misaddressed fax that ends up at the laboratory's next-door neighbour is a breach of that secrecy and, where applicable, a security incident to be documented.
The measures that cost the least and protect the most:
| Risk | Concrete measure |
|---|---|
| Inbound fax read by an owner in the waiting room | Remove the fax printer from reception, receive as PDF |
| Wrong number | Fax address book locked in the software, handwritten numbers removed |
| Result PDFs stored haphazardly | Encrypted folder, naming convention YYYY-MM-DD_animal-name_lab |
| Paper documents left pending | Cross-cut shredder behind the counter |
For the general framework, see our article on fax confidentiality and the GDPR.
The four-week migration plan
Nothing here warrants a big project. Four weeks are enough in a practice with two to six vets.
Week 1 — count. For seven working days, log every inbound and outbound fax: sender, recipient, type of document, number of pages. Most practices discover that 80% of their faxes come from just three or four senders. That is excellent news: the problem can be solved with four phone calls.
Week 2 — reclassify. For each of those senders, ask explicitly whether there is a portal, an interface with your practice management software, or a dedicated email address for reports. Nearly all major veterinary analysis laboratories offer an integration; it simply is never enabled by default. Every sender you switch over is fax volume gone for good.
Week 3 — equip. Set up online sending and fax-to-email reception, in parallel with the existing system. Nothing gets unplugged. Both channels run together for a fortnight or so: that is the only way to catch a forgotten sender. If the front desk has to handle PDFs all day long, a second desktop monitor pays for itself within a week in sheer comfort.
Week 4 — cut over and communicate. Unplug the fax machine, and only then. Then notify everyone: laboratories, referral centres, partner pharmacies, the DDPP. Update the number on prescription pads, the website, the Google listing, referral forms. This is the step everyone neglects, and the one that causes documents to go missing three months later.
For team organisation, our guide Training your team on online fax offers a plan you can reuse as is.
And the hardware you don't replace
One recurring detail: by unplugging the fax machine, practices also lose the paper backup function for sensitive documents. Many vets rightly insist on keeping a physical record of surgical consent forms and signed certificates. A desktop label printer and a sturdy archive binder are enough to rebuild a clean workflow: the signed document is scanned, filed in the record, then stored physically under a legible reference. Nothing high-tech, but it is what makes an archiving routine last — a subject we cover in Archiving your faxes in 2026.
Frequently asked questions
Can a laboratory refuse to send its results by any means other than fax?
In practice, no: every veterinary laboratory of any size has a portal or electronic transmission. Fax is an inherited default setting, rarely a deliberate choice. It is usually enough to ask the laboratory's support team to switch you over, supplying a dedicated email address.
Does a fax carry the same weight as an original for a veterinary certificate?
No, not for certificates requiring an original with a signature and, where applicable, a stamp — notably export health certificates, for which the destination country's authorities impose their own formal requirements. A fax remains a means of transmitting information, not an equivalent of the original. See our article on the legal value of fax.
Do you need to keep an analogue line for the card payment terminal?
Less and less: recent payment terminals work over IP or 4G. It is nonetheless worth checking before the PSTN migration, as it is the second most frequent failure after the fax when moving to VoIP.
How do you send a fax to a colleague abroad?
An online sending service avoids billing surprises and dialling-code mistakes. The rules for international dialling are set out in Sending a fax abroad, and the covered countries on supported countries.
Can you send radiographs by fax?
Technically yes, usefully no. Fax transmits a bitonal image with no greyscale: a radiograph becomes illegible. For imaging, use the DICOM format and the referral centre's portal, or failing that a PDF sent over an encrypted channel.
Key takeaways
- Veterinary medicine was left outside the digitisation frameworks of human healthcare: that is why the fax survives there in 2026.
- Four workflows account for the volume: laboratory results, referrals, prescriptions, health declarations.
- The PSTN shutdown hits practices hard: deal with it before the VoIP migration, not after the outage.
- Separate sending (online service, no hardware) from receiving (number retained with a fax-to-email provider, delivered as PDF to a shared inbox).
- 80% of inbound faxes come from three or four senders: calling them one by one solves most of the problem.
- An animal's record is not health data under the GDPR, but the owner's data is, and veterinary professional secrecy applies in full.
- Only unplug the fax machine after two weeks of parallel operation, then publish the new number everywhere the old one is printed.
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