Email marketing is a powerful tool for growing your business. Although those in the healthcare industry face restrictions on how they can use it, they can still mount successful campaigns with HIPAA-compliant email marketing software.
They can also take things one step further, maximizing their efficiency and effectiveness by integrating their email marketing software with their EMR or EHR systems.
What Are EMRs?
Electronic medical records (EMRs) are basically what their name suggests. Just like email (electronic mail) is essentially a digitized version of mail, EMRs are like your old paper medical records, but updated for the digital world.
EMRs are sometimes also referred to as electronic health records (EHRs). Although these terms are often used interchangeably, there are slight distinctions between them.
EMRs are basically just electronic versions of patient charts. They record a patient’s medical history and treatments at one hospital or practice. EMRs tend to stay at the practice, even if a patient switches to a new location.
On the other hand, EHRs contain a more holistic record of a patient’s medical history and treatment. They are records that offer long-term insight into a patient’s health, following them even as they seek healthcare from different providers. EHRs are designed for sharing, and can help to facilitate care even when patients visit new clinics or hospitals.
Both EMRs and EHRs come with many of the same benefits and downsides as other forms of digitized information. The data is easier to find, access and share, which can help to speed up medical treatment, and even be the difference between life and death in some situations. However, if the right data protection mechanisms aren’t in place, EHRs and EMRs are susceptible to data breaches and violations of privacy.
An EMR or EHR system is simply the system used to manage or process these respective types of records.
The Benefits of Integrating Your EMR or EHR System with Your Email Marketing
One of the main advantages of integrating the two is automation. If a patient is checked in to your EMR or EHR system during an appointment, you can automatically trigger follow-up emails. Perhaps the message could prompt them to review your practice, or send out an information package based on relevant health practices.
If you integrate your EMR or EHR system with your email marketing, you can set up automatic emails for a wide range of different actions. Whenever there is relevant activity or an update on a patient’s chart, you can send off emails without having to lift a finger.
Ultimately, combining the two serves to make it easy to promote your organization and keep your brand at the forefront of the minds of your patients. By having the marketing emails triggered by specific events, rather than just at random times, it makes it more likely for the email to be relevant to the patient’s needs. This is critical for your overall email marketing and patient education strategy, because sending useful information will make it far less likely for recipients to click the unsubscribe button.
The Risks of Integrating Your EMR or EHR System with Your Email Marketing
Unless you take the right precautions, any actions involving your EMR or EHR systems can bring risks to your organization. The HIPAA laws that govern medical records are especially stringent, and it’s easy to accidentally violate them and end up facing serious repercussions.
Despite these challenges, services like LuxSci’s HIPAA-compliant Secure Marketing are specifically designed to help navigate the complex intersections of the regulations and email marketing.
Our solution makes it as simple as possible to launch successful marketing campaigns that contain ePHI. It contains analytics tools, email templates and many of the other features you need for email marketing, all without having to constantly worry about regulatory violations.
