How to Choose the Right HIPAA-Compliant Email Provider
In the healthcare sector, securing protected health information (PHI) has huge implications for healthcare providers, payers and suppliers, including protecting their organizations from malicious actors and cyber security threats, as well as damage to reputation. At the same time, the secure handling of PHI enables you to take advantage of today’s digital engagement and data-driven solutions to improve patient health outcomes – and achieve your growth objectives.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) details strict rules for safeguarding sensitive health information, especially when it comes to electronic communication. Organizations looking to ensure compliance while maintaining effective and efficient email communication with patients and customers are often faced with the choice of balancing the right level of security with the growth of their business. Fortunately, today’s solutions have the ability to ensure the secure exchange of sensitive information over email, but can also empower healthcare companies to scale their communication strategies and grow their business—while staying within regulatory guidelines.
In this post, we examine today’s most popular email providers on the market, including HIPAA-compliant, marketing and general purpose email service providers (ESPs), such as their position on a variety of criteria including security, infrastructure, compliance, volume, and ease of use.
Comparing HIPAA-compliant Email Providers and Marketing Providers
Before we dive in, it’s important to explain how we categorize email providers and email marketing providers.
A general purpose business email provider is more focused on transactional and informational communications, including high volume sending, or bulk email sending. A marketing provider, meanwhile, may be more focused on the finer points of email marketing campaigns, such as segmentation, automation, and generating lead conversions, both in low volume and high volume sending.
With these distinctions in mind, this post focuses on comparing HIPAA-complaint email providers and general purpose business email providers, including:
- LuxSci
- Paubox
- Virtru
- Zix Webroot
- Google Workspace
- Microsoft 365
We’ll cover how to choose an email marketing provider for healthcare in an accompanying post.
Key Considerations: Email Providers for Healthcare Communications
Here’s a quick overview on how we compare ESPs across a number of criteria, including:
Data Security and Compliance
This refers to whether the email provider has the required security processes and controls to achieve full HIPAA compliance and, consequently, if it allows you to securely include PHI in your email communications. This includes end-to-end encryption, which ensures emails are encrypted both at rest and in transit, to mitigate the risk of the exposure of sensitive patient data in the event of a data breach. Additionally, if an email provider has attained a HITRUST (Health Information Trust Alliance) Certification, this displays further commitment to aligning with data privacy best practices and should be a key consideration.
Performance and Scalability
This refers to an email service provider’s ability to support high-volume email sending, i.e., hundreds of thousands or even millions of emails per month across multiple patient segments and engagement campaigns. In service of this, an email platform must be capable of the required high throughput to ensure 1000s of emails are delivered per hour. Also, it’s key to keeping your organization’s growth objectives in mind and opt for a solution that offers scalability to support your long-term growth. What’s more, it’s ideal for your provider of choice to offer comprehensive reporting tools to measure the efficacy of your engagement efforts.
Marketing Capabilities
Though more important when choosing a HIPAA-compliant email marketing platform, an email provider with marketing functionality, including automated message transmission based on particular triggers, streamlines workflows and simplifies engagement campaigns. Additionally, a provider that allows you to customize and brand your emails facilitates a better connection with patients and boosts the efficacy of your outreach efforts.
Ease of Use
To get your HIPAA-compliant marketing campaigns up and running as soon as possible, your email provider should be as intuitive and easy to get to grips with as possible. Similarly, it needs to be easy to deploy with your provider offering quick and comprehensive support should you need it.
Infrastructure
Choosing an email provider with HIPAA-compliant infrastructure in place reduces your operational and compliance overhead by ensuring all your healthcare communications occur within a secure ecosystem. This includes a dedicated infrastructure email solution that insulates your organization from the shaky cybersecurity postures of other companies that use shared cloud services. It’s also crucial that your HIPAA-compliant email provider offers ultra-high availability and disaster recovery capabilities to ensure PHI can still be accessed, and you can resume normal operations rapidly in the event of a breach or cyberattack.
Other Products
As well as email delivery services, does your prospective platform offer auxiliary tools that aid your patient and customer engagement objectives? This includes forms for sensitive patient data collection, secure texting (SMS) functionality, and HIPAA-compliant file sharing.
How Today’s Email Providers Compare
Here’s an overview of how some of the leading email service providers compare across the criteria outlined in the previous section.
Data Security and Compliance
The top email providers possess a variety of data security and compliance postures, with LuxSci and Paubox being the most robust when it comes to data security and HIPAA compliance.
Performance and Scalability
If you aim to conduct patient or customer engagement campaigns consisting of sending hundreds of thousands or millions of emails per month, then LuxSci is a proven solution. If comprehensive email reporting is required, consider Virtru and Zix Webroot.
Marketing Capabilities
As alluded to earlier, these capabilities are more of a consideration when selecting an email marketing platform. That said, it’s advantageous to know that both LuxSci and Paubox provide HIPAA-compliant marketing functionality such as automation and personalization.
Ease of Use
Fortunately, like Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, today’s leading HIPAA-compliant email providers have a shallow learning curve and are easy to get up and running both for IT and your employees.
Infrastructure
Similarly, the featured email providers perform well across the board regarding infrastructure, with LuxSci, Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 being particular standouts.
Other products
In offering secure forms, file sharing and texting features, LuxSci leads the way in providing a comprehensive secure healthcare communication solutions suite.
We hope you found this article useful and informative.
As the most experienced HIPAA-compliant healthcare communications provider, LuxSci specializes in providing trusted and scalable services for companies aiming to send secure emails and communications to their patients and customers.
For a more in-depth look at how to choose the right HIPAA-compliant email provider across the full range of features, and how to best match a provider to the needs of your organization, you can get our complete HIPAA-Compliant Email Vendor Guide here.
