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Architecture

Faxart separates media from intelligence. FreeSWITCH moves audio and pages; everything else (routing, directory access, email, filing) lives in the broker. The fax system dispatches. It does not make clinical decisions.

The whole picture

flowchart TD
  subgraph Inbound
    T[SIP trunk] -->|T.38 / G.711| FS[FreeSWITCH<br/>rxfax to TIFF]
    FS --> BK[Broker API]
    BK --> AD[(Active Directory<br/>read-only)]
    BK --> READ[On-prem OCR + LLM]
    READ --> RQ[Review queue]
    RQ -->|human approves| HL7[HL7 ORU / MDM]
    HL7 -->|SFTP| MT[(MEDITECH)]
    BK --> INBOX[Web inbox]
    BK --> MAIL[Mailbox delivery]
    BK --> PRINT[Printer]
  end

  subgraph Outbound
    SMTP[Email-to-fax intake] --> BK2[Broker]
    BK2 --> AD
    BK2 -->|PDF to TIFF, originate| FS2[FreeSWITCH<br/>txfax]
    FS2 -->|T.38 / G.711| T
  end

  WEB[Astro + React web app] --> BK
  BK --> PG[(PostgreSQL<br/>+ PHI-read audit floor)]

Layering principle

The media layer is pure. All routing intelligence, directory access, email, and filing logic live in the broker. This keeps the failure domains separate: a media issue cannot corrupt routing logic, and a broker outage cannot drop a call mid-page.

Inbound resilience

Rather than query the directory per call, a scheduled job batches one directory query, builds the inbound dialplan, and reinstalls it only if it changed. So:

Inbound keeps routing from the last good dialplan even if the directory or broker is down.
Only numbers in the directory are answered. An unknown number is rejected at the trunk, never answered and dropped.

Transport

Faxart offers T.38 and falls back to G.711 pass-through automatically. It is one configuration, not a fork: a fax starts as a voice call and tries to upgrade to T.38; if the far end declines, it rides the audio path. New T.38-capable carriers light up with no redeploy.

Background work

Slow or failure-prone jobs run on isolated queues so they never starve each other: outbound send, classification, MEDITECH filing, printing, mail delivery. A burst of inbound classification cannot block outbound transmission.

See also