Creating a HIPAA compliant email campaign is crucial for any business in the healthcare world, for a variety of reasons. First, you always want to focus on the privacy of your clients and their data. Additionally, you also need to ensure that it fits your branding, and that you can easily provide customers with excellent value and consistent results. That’s why you have to use the right tools, and thankfully, we are here to assist with the best options currently available.
How can you choose the best HIPAA email service providers?
There are multiple different things that you need to focus on, each with their pros and cons. As you can imagine, these include the following:
- The willingness to sign a business associate agreement is very important, few services will do that
- Scalability and pricing matter quite a lot, because as you grow, you want to have a service that fits your needs, and not be forced to switch.
- Onboarding costs and usability matter, because the last thing you want is to deal with a very long and challenging onboarding process.
- Logging, access control and auditing are also important, and stuff you want to keep in mind when running a HIPAA compliant email service.
- The encryption model they use matters, it can be client-side, end to end, gateway encryption, but also TLS only.
- Automatic policy enforcement is also something to think about: does the vendor detect PHI automatically and do they enforce encryption?
- Deliverability tooling should be important as well, along with integrations and workflows. It might not seem like much at first, but knowing how to implement everything and narrow down potential issues, that will help quite a bit.
Luxsci
LuxSci is the best option to consider if you want email marketing services that are HIPAA-focused. It’s one of the few that focus specifically on the healthcare niche, and it has excellent features specific to this niche. You have SecureLine encryption along with excellent encryption policies, so every message with PHI is encrypted automatically. Another benefit is that it’s made with high volume in mind, and it also has templates as well as deliverability optimization.
The main strength for LuxSci is the fact that it’s made specifically for the healthcare workflow and it has strong documentation, along with extremely powerful how-to guides, which makes it an exceptional solution to consider. It’s particularly good for organizations that need marketing automation, but also ePHI handling within a single, cohesive platform.
When it comes to downsides, it’s not going to be very suitable for a more general use case, since it does have a true HIPAA-compliant focus. It’s however the best option in this niche, and it can offer excellent marketing automation solutions, while also being very easy to adapt to requirements, while eliminating a lot of potential issues and challenges.
Paubox
Paubox is popular for the fact that it has invisible encryption systems that work very well with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace inboxes. You can send emails without the need for the person to click a portal link. Their transparent encryption can be quite helpful and you can apply it for the outbound messages without any hitch. That definitely makes it one of the better options that you need to take into consideration.
With that in mind, it also delivers low friction for patients and clinicians, mainly because the private messages are sent to the inbox without the need of an additional login. Because of that, it’s ideal for an organization who wants secure email, but who also doesn’t need to impact the user workflow. Plus, not everyone wants to deal with portals and challenges of that nature, so you always want to adapt and adjust things as you go along.
Naturally, Paubox is a good option if you want a low-friction and secure delivery system who also has email security as well. It’s definitely not hard to use, however it doesn’t have massive marketing automation systems in place outside of the healthcare world. But it’s definitely good in this niche, and that does matter quite a lot.
Virtru
Unlike the other tools mentioned above, Virtru is a little different. It focuses more on the client-side encryption and the persistent access controls for both files and email. The thing to note here is that it’s used rather commonly to add protection for an existing email platform. While it’s not meant to be used solely for healthcare, it does support this niche and thus it does have HIPAA context support.
Moreover, it comes with fine-grained access controls, as well as end to end encryption. We should also note that it allows persistent protection, and you can easily revoke access to attachments or messages even after sending them. So yes, if you accidentally sent those, then you have a way to revert, and that alone is going to help more than you might ever expect.
They also offer BAA support and guidance. With that in mind, being able to enforce access control at a data level is amazing, and it certainly enhances the experience in a way that’s very consistent and highly professional, which is something to keep in mind here. It’s by no means a marketing ESP, but it can be very good especially when you must retain marketing features and analytics.