HIPAA-Compliant Personalization With PHI: A How-To Guide

Email remains one of the most effective communication and marketing channels, offering healthcare organizations a simple, cost-effective, and scalable way to engage with patients and customers.

Better still, most people prefer email for healthcare communications. Research has revealed that 80% of patients prefer to use digital communications to interact with healthcare companies, with over 50% preferring email over all other forms of communication.

The good news for healthcare providers, payers, and suppliers that are looking to engage with patients and customers through email is that their efforts can be made considerably more effective with personalization. However, as many healthcare organizations have come to discover, this is a double-edged sword. Effective personalization requires the strategic use and inclusion of sensitive patient data in emails, i.e., protected health information (PHI) – for which its use is tightly regulated by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA): designed to maintain patients’ right to privacy and prevent the exposure of PHI.

With HIPAA regulations, and suffering the consequences of non-compliance, many healthcare companies refrain from including PHI in their email communications and marketing campaigns. In doing so, they likely fail to capitalize on opportunities to personalize their communications and better engage with their patients and customers.

With all this in mind, this post discusses the importance of safeguarding patient data, as per HIPAA’s requirements and, subsequently, how to use PHI to personalize your email communications to achieve better results.

What Is PHI?

Before we discuss ways to protect PHI and, how to use it to personalize communications, here’s a quick refresher on what actually constitutes protected health information.

HIPAA’s Privacy Rule defines PHI as individually identifiable information that pertains to:

• A person’s past, present, or future physical or mental health or condition(s)
• The provision of a person’s healthcare
• Past, present, or future payment for the provision of said healthcare

Many healthcare organizations assume that sensitive patient data includes private information such as their:

• Name
• Address
• Email Address
• Social Security Number
• Insurance Details

However, while such data is indeed sensitive and must be secured, it isn’t necessarily PHI – rather, this counts as Personally Identifiable Information (PII), and in regards to HIPAA regulations, they are called identifiers. When paired with data regarding a person’s healthcare journey, it becomes PHI. This is a key distinction to bear in mind when using PHI to personalize your patient and customer outreach campaigns.

Why Secure Email Communications

Despite its many advantages, one of email’s fundamental shortcomings is that, at its most basic, it is insecure. The message, subject lines, and metadata are sent as plain text, which means that anyone who intercepted it in transit could read the content – before going on to use it for their own malicious purposes.

For this reason, secure email is a key requirement of HIPAA compliance, and its regulations, though stringent and occasionally complex, are carefully designed to prevent PHI from being exposed and exfiltrated by cyber criminals.

Now, with the potential fallout from exposed PHI being so detrimental to patients and customers, there are also considerable consequences for healthcare organizations that fail to comply with HIPAA regulations. These include:

• Financial implications: which could include fines, legal fees (in the event of a lawsuit) and compensation. In some cases, a company may also be subject to financial penalties from the state they operate in.
• Operational complications: your operations will be affected (including your ability to deliver services or products to customers and patients (and the quality at which you can deliver your offering), while the breach is contained and additional mitigation measures are implemented to ensure it doesn’t recur.
• Reputational damage: perhaps the most significant consequence of all is the potential damage to your company’s reputation, as patients and customers will feel you can’t trusted with their private information.

What’s Required For HIPAA-Compliant Personalization In Email?

Now that we’ve discussed the consequences of HIPAA non-compliance, how can you personalize your email marketing campaigns while safeguarding PHI accordingly? Here are a few essential steps:

• Encrypting Data at Rest and in Transit: you must encrypt data where it resides, i.e., at rest, and when including it in communications sent to patients and customers, in transit. This makes it incomprehensible to cybercriminals even if they intercept it in the course of its delivery, further ensuring the security and privacy of patient data.
• Sign a Business Associates Agreement (BAA) With Your Email Provider: a BAA is an essential component of HIPAA compliance: outlining your and your email provider’s responsibilities in safeguarding PHI. An email provider highlighting the fact they can offer a BAA is a strong sign they have the security measures in place to offer HIPAA-compliant email communication. Conversely, the lack of BAA from an email service provider, such as Mailchimp, should not be used to transmit PHI.
• Obtain Patient Consent: you must get an individual’s permission to use their PHI; this could be done digitally (i.e., when entering data into an online form), in writing, or even verbally over the phone.

How To Use PHI To Personalize Your Emails

Now that we’ve discussed the importance of safeguarding sensitive patient data, as well as some of the specific ways to keep it secure, let’s move on to exploring some of the ways you can utilize PHI to personalize email communications, boost engagement, and drive better health outcomes.

Targeted Promotions: sending targeted promotional emails to your patients, based on their particular conditions and health needs boosts the chance of engagement, and alongside it, your conversion rates.

New Product Offers: similarly, patients are likely to be more receptive to information on emerging, innovative products or services that could improve their health or quality of life, or products related to their specific health conditions.

Appointment Reminders: you can use personalized email to remind patients of upcoming appointments, reaffirming details like its date, time, and location, while confirming the appointment in the process to reduce no-shows. Better still, appointment reminders are a great example of emails that can be automated, as they can be scheduled to go out at a certain time, such as a week or day before the appointment.

Reminders for Annual Physicals: encourage patients to schedule an annual checkups and regular exams based on their last appointment date or specific health condition.

Appointment Follow-Ups: you can take the opportunity to provide the patient with personalized aftercare instructions based on a recent visit or medical procedure.

Test Results: secure email can be used to notify patients of their test results, as well as information they may need to complement said result, e.g., how to book a follow-up appointment.

Medication Adherence Support: this could include refill reminders or educational content about medications prescribed to the patient.

Chronic Disease Management: sharing educational materials and advice, such as diabetes management tips,  based on a patient’s diagnosed conditions.

Preventive Care Recommendations: using the patient’s age, gender, and health history to recommend screening appointments, e.g., mammograms, colonoscopies, etc.

Events and Educational Programming: providing program recommendations based on diagnoses and other significant changes in their life, e.g., ante-natal classes for expecting mothers, cessation courses for smokers, etc.

Vaccination Reminders: informing patients about upcoming flu shots, vaccination boosters, and other immunizations relevant to the time of year, their location, health history, etc.

Local Health Alerts: similarly, email communications can be used to inform patients about public health concerns, such as flu outbreaks, in their area based on their address.

Birthday or Anniversary Greetings: reach out to congratulate patients on recent occasions or milestones in their lives – while subtly promoting wellness checkups or services.

Get the How-to Guide on HIPAA-Compliant Personalized Healthcare

If you’d like to discover more about the benefits of personalization and how you can use it to enhance your patient and customer engagement campaigns, download our How-to Guide on Personalized Healthcare Journeys with HIPAA-Compliant Email.

You’ll learn how to ensure your email communications and campaigns are both HIPAA-compliant and as personalized as possible, driving better health outcomes for your patients, while helping your organization reach its growth objectives.