Top 5 Use Cases for High-Volume HIPAA-Compliant Email

In the modern healthcare landscape, effective communication is a cornerstone of connected care: engaging with patients and customers and encouraging their active participation in their respective healthcare journeys.  

High-volume HIPAA-compliant email not only modernizes operations but also drives significant ROI for your organization, enhancing organizational efficiency, and, most importantly, improving patient and customer engagement. Whether you’re a healthcare provider, payer, or supplier, leveraging secure, scalable email solutions that include PHI data can be transformative, resulting in more favorable health outcomes, while improving engagement, conversions and results for your business. 

With this in mind, this post explores five high-impact use cases for high-volume HIPAA-compliant email in healthcare, and their value to organizations.

1. Patient Engagement Campaigns: Preventative and Proactive Care

Companies that offer In-Home Care and other virtual care or even telehealth services can use high-volume HIPAA-compliant email to encourage preventative and proactive care in several ways:

• Preventative care: sending patients advice, instructions, and other materials relevant to their health. This helps improve patient adherence to care plans and, in some cases, reduce costly hospital readmissions.
• Appointment reminders: use email to remind patients of upcoming appointments, lowering no-show rates in the process. Similarly, you can harness high-volume HIPAA-compliant email communication to send patients reminders for recommended screenings (e.g., mammograms, colonoscopies, annual checkups, etc.).
• Early detection self-assessments: email can be used to send patients personalized risk assessments or surveys that can be used to detect the early warning signs of conditions such as heart disease or cancer. This requires effective use of protected health information (PHI), as assessments will be sent based on risk factors such as health history, lifestyle, age, or family history. 
• Seasonal health advice: alerting patients to health concerns in their area, e.g., flu that could adversely affect their health – particularly in the case of existing or chronic conditions. Subsequently, you can also offer patients prevention tips and information about related vaccination drives.
• Feedback collection: high-volume HIPAA-compliant email with secure forms can be used to collect feedback from patients, e.g., via surveys that can be used to gauge patient satisfaction. These insights will then help healthcare providers identify areas of improvement and how to be of better service to their patients. 

ROI Insight: a Deloitte study shows that preventative care campaigns can reduce hospital admissions by up to 20%, saving an average of $104 per patient per year. Engaging thousands, or even millions, of patients efficiently through secure email is pivotal in achieving this.

2. Insurance Notifications and Health Plan Updates

For health insurance and health plan providers, high-volume HIPAA-compliant email that use PHI to deliver highly personalized and prescribed messages is an ideal way of communicating with customers and members for a variety of value-adding reasons. This includes: 

• Payments and reminders: email is a quick and effective way to remind customers and members about payment and premium due dates – which can be sent multiple times in the run-up to their expiration. Similarly, insurers and plan providers can inform members about upcoming changes and how to administer necessary changes if they require their consent or input.
• Savings advice: an effective use of high-volume HIPAA-compliant email is providing members with cost transparency, i.e., how their plan works and how to extract maximum value from it. This can extend to offering cost-saving tips, information on rebates for which the patient may be elegible, and potential discounts or incentives for adopting health-promoting behaviors, e.g., quitting smoking.
• Member retention: knowing that attracting new members costs more than keeping existing ones, marketing departments are always looking for cost-effective ways to retain members – and high-volume HIPAA-compliant email provides such a solution. Using PHI, insurers can make personalized offers to members to get them to renew or upgrade their plans or policies.
• Preventative health campaigns: insurers can capitalize on high-volume HIPAA-compliant email to educate members about the preventative care services covered by their plans (e.g., health screenings, annual checkups, etc). On a related note, they can also promote any wellness programs or other health-related services offered by their partners – alongside potential discounts reserved for their members.
  

ROI Insight: emails can be automated for increased efficiency and decreased administrative overhead. Automated member communication can administrative costs by an average of 15%, saving insurers and plan administrators significant costs annually.

Order Confirmations and Promotions for Retail Healthcare

Online healthcare retailers, such as online vision care providers and prescription healthcare product providers, can reap the benefits of secure, high-volume HIPAA-compliant email in a number of their vital business processes:

• Confirming orders and prescriptions: a common and effective use of email by online healthcare retailers is confirming orders and verifying prescriptions. Though this sounds simple, it’s important for those who aren’t as accustomed to online purchasing – such as older patients. Additionally, these email confirmations often act as receipts (if a separate one isn’t issued), which allows patients to better track their healthcare journey and expenses. 
• Order status notifications: subsequently, email can be used by healthcare retailers to inform customers of their order status, e.g., when it’s been shipped, etc. This is especially important if a patient is in urgent need of their prescription or if there’s a shortage of medicine; keeping the patient up-to-date will help alleviate their anxieties and, in staying on top of their order, increases their trust in the retailer. 
• Reminders: high-volume HIPAA-compliant email is an effective way to remind large segments of customers to reorder prescriptions based on their condition. Better still, this can be automated, according to their prescription frequency, for instance, to be sent out at set intervals. 
• Product launches: bulk email marketing campaigns are an excellent way to inform customers of new products and services that might be of interest to them based on their unique health situation. These can be carefully tailored, through patient data such as purchase history, health conditions, family history and particular demographics to appeal to specific patients and increase the likelihood of engagement. 
• Promotions: by the same token, PHI can be utilized to segment patients by condition, age, gender, etc and emails can be sent to them with targeted special offers. This can also be applied to seasonal sales, coupons, and other periodic promotions to boost revenue at certain times of the year. 
• Customer acknowledgement and rewards: personalized high-volume email campaigns are a great way to foster customer loyalty and strengthen your brand connection. Sending birthday messages accompanied by special discounts, loyalty rewards, and tailored recommendations based on past purchases.

ROI insight: Email confirmations and verifications improve delivery efficiency and reduce customer support inquiries, lowering operational costs while enhancing the patient experience. Accurate, encrypted communications not only ensure compliance but also boost customer satisfaction.

 4. Medical Equipment Usage and Upgrades

Much like online retailers, suppliers of medical equipment use high-volume HIPAA-compliant email to engage with their customers in a number of ways:

• Order status notifications: informing customers of their order status and when they can expect delivery helps manage their expectations and retain a sense of control over the process. This is particularly the case if the customer anticipates the equipment as part of a larger project and needs to keep others appraised of its progress. 
• In-home appointments: high-volume HIPAA-compliant email can be used to confirm appointments, including for set-up and training, and ongoing appointments by a care provider or technician. Automating the scheduling and confirmation process can significantly reduce missed appointments. 
• Promotions and discounts: as with online healthcare retailers, medical equipment suppliers can utilize high-volume email campaigns to promote new products or upgrades to current products. In addition to general promotions, suppliers can hone in on the purchase history and anticipated needs of their customers to send them personalized offers and discounts. 
• Preventative maintenance reminders: high-volume HIPAA-compliant email is a cost-effective way to remind customers about scheduled maintenance visits or to consider replacing parts of previously purchased medical equipment.
• Compliance updates: bulk email campaigns are ideal for communicating with large numbers of customers about regulatory changes, product recalls, or any other emerging factor that may affect their use of medical equipment.

ROI Insight: Streamlining supplier-provider-patient communication minimizes delays and errors, and reduces missed appointments, improving engagement with new products and services, while lowering the costs of equipment-related issues.

5. Test Results from Medical Laboratories and Testing Services

Laboratories can securely deliver diagnostic test results to healthcare providers, or directly to patients, using encrypted email: minimizing wait times for patients while ensuring regulatory compliance and patient privacy at all times. 

Let’s look at the key benefits of using high-volume HIPAA-compliant email for delivering test results: 

• Convenience: first and foremost, email makes it easier for patients to receive and review their results. Instead of an in-person visit or a phone call, they can receive them at work or from the comfort of their homes.
• Cost: consequently, in not having to dedicate personnel to delivering results to patients over the phone or in-person, healthcare companies can cut costs. Additionally, this frees up staff for other tasks – reducing their administrative overhead and increasing operation efficiency.
• PHI Usage: the ability to include sensitive patient data, including PHI, in your communications enables you to communicate more information in every email, including results and educational content.
• Follow-up facilitation: being available immediately, healthcare providers can use lab results emails to communicate next steps, e.g.,  scheduling an appointment, additional testing recommendations, treatment planning, etc.

ROI Insight: Transitioning from paper to secure digital delivery can reduce the cost of delivering test results per report while speeding up delivery times with direct, secure connections to customers that do not require human intervention.

Why Choose LuxSci for High-Volume HIPAA-Compliant Email?

At LuxSci, we specialize in secure healthcare communications, offering solutions that enable large-scale, personalized, and HIPAA-compliant email communications and campaigns. With over 20 years of experience and billions of emails sent, we’ve helped healthcare organizations enhance their engagement efforts: better connecting with their patients and customers, while boosting efficiency and results and adhering to HIPAA compliance.

Our flagship Secure High Volume Email solution ensures that protected health information (PHI) is encrypted and delivered at success rates of 95% or more. Beyond email, we offer a comprehensive suite of secure healthcare communications solutions, including Secure Marketing, Secure Forms, and Secure Text.

Ready to enhance your email communications? Connect with LuxSci to learn how our HIPAA-compliant solutions can drive ROI, streamline operations, and improve patient and customer engagement at scale. 

Contact us today to schedule a consultation with our experts.