What is HIPAA-Compliant Email Marketing?
Why does your organization need HIPAA-compliant email marketing? It’s simple. Email marketing is a tried and true marketing strategy that can deliver a major return on investment. Healthcare organizations can also benefit from email marketing, but they need to take steps to make sure their messages comply with HIPAA.
When Should You Send HIPAA-Compliant Email Marketing?
A HIPAA-compliant email marketing platform is essential to use whenever your organization could be sending electronic protected health information (ePHI). This includes information that is both individually identifiable and relates to someone’s healthcare.
Individually identifiable information includes identifiers like a patient’s name, address, birth date, email address, social security number and much more. Not only does the definition of ePHI cover people’s past, present and future health conditions, but it also includes treatment provisions and billing details.
While anonymous health details or individual identifiers sent by themselves are not covered by the law, when the two are brought together you need to be careful and abide by HIPAA regulations. You will need a HIPAA-compliant email marketing service whenever you send ePHI, and if you think an email may not contain ePHI, it is still best to be cautious.
Examples of HIPAA-Compliant Email Marketing
A good example of an email blast that needs to comply with HIPAA is a newsletter sent to all of a clinic’s cancer patients. At first glance, you might think the email doesn’t not contain any specific PHI. However, upon closer look, it could end up violating HIPAA regulations.
Every email in this campaign contains a personal identifier- the patient’s email address. In this example, only cancer patients received the newsletter, which is also personal medical information. A hacker could infer that anyone who received this email has cancer, which is ePHI and protected under HIPAA. If you use a medical condition to segment email recipients, the email campaign must comply with HIPAA.
It can be difficult to determine if an email contains ePHI. If you sent the exact same newsletter to a list of all current and former patients of the medical clinic, it may or may not contain ePHI. There are a lot of gray areas and it can be difficult to determine if an email contains PHI. We recommend using HIPAA-compliant email marketing for any promotional materials to reduce the risk of violations.
After reading this, you may be thinking that you should never use patient information to segment email lists. However, if you use a HIPAA-compliant email marketing solution, you can leverage ePHI to send much more effective messages. In the above example, cancer patients actively receiving treatment at your clinic are much more likely to be interested in your business updates. Targeted emails receive much higher open and click rates than those sent to a general list. Sending the right information to your patients at the right time is a very effective patient engagement strategy.
HIPAA-Compliant Email Marketing Solutions
Finding the right HIPAA-compliant email marketing platform can be challenging. Most of the common vendors aren’t HIPAA-compliant at all. Others claim compliance and will sign BAAs to protect your information at rest, but still require you to not send anything sensitive via email. Finding a provider that can suit your business needs and can also protect the actual email messages is difficult.
Thankfully, LuxSci’s Secure Marketing email platform has been designed to cater to both needs. Our platform was built with both security and compliance at the forefront. With Secure Marketing, send fully HIPAA-compliant email marketing messages to the right patients at the right time and receive a better return on your marketing investment.
