Voicemail as an inbound channel
Faxart treats a voicemail as an inbound item whose text happens to come from speech instead of OCR. Once you have the text, everything a fax can do, a voicemail can do: match a rule, wait in the review queue, earn auto-mode, file to a chart. This page explains the design.
One pipeline, two sources
Section titled “One pipeline, two sources”The insight is that classification, routing, review, auto-mode, and audit do not care whether the text came from a scanned page or a spoken message. So the inbound logic is generalized to span both rather than forked. A fax is OCR then classify; a voicemail is transcribe then classify. From the classify step on, the path is the same.
flowchart LR FAX[Fax] --> OCR[OCR] --> CL[Classify] VM[Voicemail] --> STT[Transcribe] --> CL CL --> RULES[Rules] --> RQ[Review queue] RQ --> AUTO[Auto-mode eligible?] RQ --> FILE[Human-confirmed filing]
Why a separate table, paid down
Section titled “Why a separate table, paid down”Voicemails live in their own table rather than being crammed into the fax table. That keeps each record honest (a voicemail has a duration and a transcript, not pages and a PDF). The cost of a separate table is that shared logic has to span both, and the load-bearing example is auto-mode trust: a rule’s eligibility is scored over a union of its fax, voicemail, and dictation decisions, so a shared rule keeps one trust score across every channel instead of fragmenting per channel.
That union is the whole point. If each channel’s trust were tracked separately, a rule that is clearly trustworthy from its combined history might never graduate on any one channel alone.
On-prem, like everything else
Section titled “On-prem, like everything else”Transcription runs on your own hardware. Audio never leaves the building, the same rule that governs page images. Reading or streaming a stored recording is a PHI access and is audited like viewing a fax.
The line that does not move
Section titled “The line that does not move”Auto-mode can route a voicemail without a person. It can never file one to a chart without a person confirming the patient, because filing needs an independent identity cross-check that a routing decision does not provide. A voicemail files to MEDITECH the same human-confirmed way a fax does: the transcript is rendered to a one-page “Telephone Message” document and rides the identical HL7 path.