Before I did these interviews, I thought the story was about fax. Everyone in tech has the fax take: it’s archaic, it’s slow, healthcare needs to modernize. I went into these conversations expecting people to tell me they hated fax.
They didn’t. Or at least, that wasn’t the thing.
The thing was what happens after the fax arrives.
The document comes in. It lands in the EHR. Someone — a medical assistant, a front desk person, a clinical staff member — opens it, reads it, and types the information into the patient record by hand. The data is right there, in the document, and they are re-keying it character by character into a system that is six inches away from the document on their screen.
Fifty conversations, different specialties, different practice sizes, different EHRs. Same story.
Nobody was asking us to fix fax. They were asking us to fix the step where a human becomes the bridge between a document and a database. That’s a workflow problem. It’s also, it turns out, a solvable one.
That’s the product we built. Not “fax is dead, here’s the future.” Just: the document already has the information. Let’s stop asking people to re-type it.
The interviews taught me something I try to remember on every discovery project: the problem people describe in the first five minutes is usually a symptom. The thing worth solving is usually quieter, and you have to sit with it for a while before it shows up.
Omnium Growth Partners 
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