LuxSci vs. Virtru: Choosing the Right HIPAA-Compliant Email Provider

There are many factors to consider when developing and executing successful healthcare email communication campaigns. First and foremost, you must ensure you handle protected health information (PHI) securely, as detailed by Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations.

Deploying a HIPAA-compliant email provider is a prudent method of ensuring that you have the right security infrastructure, policies, and controls in place to safeguard sensitive patient data. With the right email provider in place, healthcare providers, payers, and suppliers can securely utilize PHI in their patient and customer engagement efforts while adhering to HIPAA’s tight regulatory guidelines.

To help you choose the best HIPAA-compliant email provider for your healthcare organization’s email objectives, this post evaluates two leading HIPAA-compliant email delivery platforms: LuxSci and Virtru. We’ll compare the two platforms’ performance on several criteria, helping you to decide which email provider best fits the needs of your organization and will help you better engage with your patients and customers.

LuxSci vs. Virtru: Evaluation Criteria

We’ll compare LuxSci and Virtru on the following criteria:

• Data Security and Compliance: the extent to which each platform secures PHI as per HIPAA guidelines 
• Performance and Scalability: the provider’s ability to facilitate high-volume email engagement campaigns, and scale them as a company’s outreach efforts increase.
• Infrastructure: if the email service provides the necessary security infrastructure, processes and controls to both protect sensitive patient data and support bulk email campaigns.
• Marketing Capabilities: if the platform provides features that allow you to optimize and refine your patient engagement strategies.
• Ease of Use: how easy each platform is to get to grips with
• Other HIPAA-Compliant Products: if the service offers complementary features that will aid your healthcare communication objectives.

Having discussed the parameters by which we’ll be comparing each email delivery service, let’s move on to seeing how LuxSci and Virtru stack up against each other.

LuxSci vs. Virtru: How They Compare

Data Security and Compliance

While being HIPAA-compliant and, consequently, allowing for the inclusion of PHI in your organization’s email communications, Virtru may not provide as many encryption options. Virtru offers flexible encryption configurations but doesn’t enforce Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption or allow always-on encryption as an automated data safeguard.

LuxSci, in contrast, provides comprehensive encryption functionality, including end-to-end, flexible, and automated encryption with always-on capabilities. Additionally, as well as being fully HIPAA-compliant, LuxSci is HITRUST-certified, signifying additional adherence to data security regulations to further ensure PHI is safeguarded.

Performance and Scalability

LuxSci may be a better option for high-volume email marketing campaigns, providing the necessary dedicated infrastructure (i.e., throughput – 1000s of emails per hour) and functionality to enable healthcare companies to securely deliver hundreds of thousands to millions of emails per month. Conversely, Virtru offers limited capabilities as far as bulk email engagement efforts are concerned, as it may not support the required high throughput to deliver large numbers of emails.

Both Virtru and LuxSci excel when it comes to comprehensive reporting functionality that will help your organization refine its email campaigns.

Infrastructure

Although both email providers perform well in this category, LuxSci excels when it comes to infrastructure. Firstly, LuxSci offers secure email hosting, while Virtru does not; similarly, though Virtru can accommodate some dedicated infrastructure needs, LuxSci offers a range of single-tenancy options for companies with stringent data security needs.  Fortunately, both platforms offer scalability without having to install additional equipment, as well as high availability and disaster recovery capabilities.

Marketing Capabilities

Of the two platforms, only LuxSci provides marketing functionality, offering automation for streamlining email marketing campaigns, and, customization and branding options.

It’s important to take this with a grain of salt, however, as neither email provider categorizes itself as an email pure-play marketing platform. For a detailed comparison of HIPAA-compliant email marketing solutions, download your copy of our Vendor Comparison Guide.

Ease of Use

Both LuxSci and Virtru are easy to deploy and intuitive to use, allowing your teams to hit the ground running when executing your HIPAA-compliant healthcare email communications and campaigns. LuxSci distinguishes itself slightly in this category, with best-in-class customer support.

Other HIPAA-compliant Products

Lastly, as it pertains to complementary capabilities, that could also feature in your patient and customer engagement strategies, LuxSci offers secure texting functionality, secure forms for HIPAA-compliant data collection, and secure file sharing.  Virtru, in contrast, provides secure file sharing.

Get Your Copy of LuxSci’s Vendor Comparison Guide

To discover how LuxSci and Virtru stack up against the other leading HIPAA-compliant and general purpose email providers on the market, take a look at our Vendor Comparison Guide.  Evaluating 12 email delivery platforms, the Comparison Guide offers insights on what to consider when selecting a provider – and how to determine if a vendor provides the necessary features to adequately secure sensitive patient data in your healthcare communications.

You can grab your copy here, and reach out to us with any questions.