In this talk, the presenter shares a personal frustration with manually faxing medical records for Veterans Affairs referrals and demonstrates how they leveraged an LLM (Codex) to design and build an automated, internet‑based fax solution costing less than a dollar. The workflow includes acquiring a fax‑capable number from Telnyx, using Telnyx’s outbound fax API, wrapping it in a FastAPI endpoint, handling status via webhooks/polling, storing PDFs temporarily, persisting status in a database, and exposing both a CLI and a web UI for uploading PDFs. The presenter validates the system by successfully sending a fax to a care facility, confirms receipt by phone, and discusses broader observations about the continued relevance of fax in healthcare and in countries like Japan. The source code and documentation are made publicly available for others to experiment with.
Chapters
When was the last time you had to fax something? Let me just ask you that. If you remember that, how that was that process for you? I'm sure you probably had to print it out, take it to somewhere like Staples or FedEx or somewhere, and then physically fax it from there to the recipient that you're looking for or that you're trying to send to. That applies to me too. I do that every year and mostly for medical reasons. So I get my care from the Veterans Affairs and sometimes they refer me to Community care providers. These are just specialists that the VA doesn't have access to. They send you there to go get your care done there. And so sometimes these doctors, most of the time at least, they request some scans to be done, some medical procedures to be done that are outside of what they can do. And so once that's done, the fax over the results back to them because the other facility can't directly send to them for PII and HIPAA reasons as well. But that process is always very manual for me. I get the scan a few weeks later. Once the results are ready, I go to the store, print it out, sign it. Fax it, similar. So this year I figured, well, there must be something better out there, right? Instead of me having to drive every day, not every day, but that one time to drive there and get that done. It shouldn't be an excuse for me to do that. There must be a better way to do this. So I figured, let me task Codex to help me with this because it's something that was urgent, but also let me see if it's going to do it. So I told Codex basically, hey, can you find solutions out there that could help me send fax over the internet without me having to walk physically to the store and do this? And I let it loose. It went and did some research for a few minutes and it created a plan and it recommended this service here for this company called Telnyx. Hopefully I'm pronouncing it correctly, but they do have fax services, programmatic services. It's not directly advertised here. It seems on the web they have other products that are much better, I guess, priority than what they're pushing here. But I found it very interesting. And so I just told it, okay, let's build around that. And Codex did the job really for me. I gave it the prompt what to do. It went ahead and built this entire workflow. And if I come here and show you what this looks like, so this is the entire workflow. So it created an app, a CLI app, and also just an actual app itself. And it created a FastAPI endpoint to wrap the Telnyx API in this case. And what it did there is exposed through the API there, there's a polling one for webhooks. So when you send the PDF in a sense as a fax, It'll also have it polling and saying, hey, is it sent or is it still sending? It's done. Then it says delivered. Then it pings back on the UI to say, hey, your fax has been delivered, right? You can simulate, you can hear the sounds of like that fax going, but basically that's what it is here. So you upload it, the PDF, and then it creates that data. It stores the PDF in a file storage for me locally, temporarily so that I can delete it afterwards. And it also persists just kind of the status in this database. So when it does the polling, it persists here. And then once he gets the final, it's been delivered, he just sends it up to me, to the client, and says, hey, here, it's been delivered, it's great. And I read it and it worked. But how would I verify that it worked, right? So what I did was I sent it on last Friday, and then today, this morning, because nobody was open on Monday, this morning I called the facility and asked them if they received my fax. And when I called them this morning, they were like, yeah, we received your fax. We're going to send the results over in the next 2, 3 days and call back to confirm. But I just wanted to confirm that it went right. They received it and they did. And the entire thing cost me less than a dollar. Majority of that was just mostly testing the first iteration and then the other one that actually sent it. So it was pretty easy to build. If you want to play around with this, I would come to this repo. Repo, I'll share it in the comments. Feel free to play around with it. Let me know if you like it. If you're watching, this is not sponsored, but y'all have a good product. If you want to sponsor me, of course I'm not going to say no. But this is it. So go play around with it. Look at the docs if you want to kind of understand how I implemented it. And there's a kind of like a run of flow. There's implementation details here. If you just get this and download it and give it to Codex or whatever Claude, it should understand what to do and just kind of guide you the next steps there. I did get a fax number first of all from Telnyx, which they do have a fax number. And here is within the services that I used here. You can come here and see. So I had to get a fax-capable number from Telnyx, which I had to buy from them. And then the programmable API that they provided there. And then outbound fax API that they have as well. And then the webhook. And that was really it. Most of this is like I added extra stuff to make it much cooler. But otherwise, it's very easy, simple steps to do here. And you can run it also on the command line and it should just curl and it should work as well. So play around with it, see how it works, and then let me know. I found some of these things interesting because you can just automate a bunch of random stuff that you don't like or stuff that you feel like, okay, I can automate this. Why not? But I've also found out that one of the countries that still does faxes huge in large scale is Japan, which is interesting. I know mostly right now is healthcare and other small fields like government agencies. It's just interesting to see that this is still, there's still a market for this. But yeah, that's all I wanted to share.
