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What is HIPAA-Compliant Email Marketing?

Tuesday, January 14th, 2025

Incorporating HIPAA compliant email marketing into healthcare marketing practices offers a powerful avenue to engage patients and promote services by using a specifically designed healthcare marketing solution that is 100% HIPAA compliant.

It is imperative to ensure that email marketing communications comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to protect patient privacy and secure protected health information (PHI).

If you are one of the 92% of Americans with an email address, you are likely familiar with email marketing. It is a tried and true marketing strategy that delivers a superior return on investment compared to other digital channels. However, when healthcare organizations want to utilize these strategies, out-of-the-box solutions are not a good fit. Healthcare organizations must utilize email marketing platforms specifically designed to meet HIPAA’s unique privacy and security requirements.

When Do You Need a HIPAA-Compliant Email Marketing Platform?

Healthcare organizations are required to use a HIPAA-compliant email marketing platform because their messages often contain 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 more. By default, every email marketing communication includes the patient’s email address and is, therefore, individually identifiable. 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. This information is often contained in email marketing messages.

While the law does not cover anonymous health details or individual identifiers sent by themselves, you must be careful and abide by HIPAA regulations when the two are brought together. You will need a HIPAA-compliant email marketing service whenever you send ePHI. As we will see, even if you think an email may not contain ePHI, it is still best to be cautious.

Types of HIPAA-Compliant Email Marketing Communications

An excellent example of an email blast that must comply with HIPAA is a newsletter sent to a clinic’s cancer patients. At first glance, the email doesn’t contain any specific PHI. It doesn’t mention Jane Smith’s chemotherapy treatments, other specific patients, or their medical information. However, upon closer look, it may violate 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 also tells you 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 create a segment of email recipients, the email campaign must comply with HIPAA.

Sometimes, it can be challenging to identify if an email contains ePHI. If you sent the same practice newsletter to a list of all current and former medical clinic patients, it may or may not contain ePHI. Even if the newsletter contained benign info about the practice’s operating hours or parking information, if the practice is centered around treating a specific condition like cancer or depression, it may be possible to infer information about the recipients regardless of the message.

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.

The Benefits of Using a HIPAA-Compliant Marketing Platform

After reading this, you may think the answer is to avoid sending PHI in email campaigns. However, by keeping your communications bland, generic, and broadly targeted, you miss out on significant opportunities to engage your patients.

Using 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 an effective patient engagement strategy. Think about it using an e-commerce example- when a retailer sends you product recommendations based on past purchases; they use your data to influence future purchasing decisions. By utilizing patient data to create highly relevant and personalized campaigns and offers, you receive a better return on investment in your efforts.

What is Required for HIPAA-Compliant Email Marketing?

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 will not enable you to send PHI via email. Finding a provider that suits your business needs and protects the email messages requires careful vetting.

Generally speaking, a HIPAA-compliant email platform must meet three broad requirements:

The vendor will sign a Business Associates Agreement that outlines how they will protect your data and what happens in case of a breach.
The vendor protects the data at rest using appropriate storage encryption, access controls, and other security features.
The vendor protects messages in transit using an appropriate level of encryption with the proper ciphers.

Thankfully, LuxSci’s Secure Marketing email platform has been designed to meet the healthcare industry’s unique needs. Our platform was built with both security and compliance at the forefront. With Secure Marketing, organizations can send fully HIPAA-compliant email marketing messages to the right patients at the right time and receive a better return on their marketing investment.

Tags: email marketing, email marketing platform, hipaa, hipaa compliance, HIPAA-compliant email marketing, marketing, personalization, phi, segmentation
Posted in HIPAA Marketing, LuxSci Library: HIPAA
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HIPAA Compliance Checklist

Saturday, January 11th, 2025

Our HIPAA compliance checklist was designed to help organizations understand their obligations under the law. The checklist items are not a complete list, just a starting point for your compliance program. HIPAA requires a yearly risk analysis to identify new vulnerabilities. Any business process change or new technology usage introduces new risk into an organization’s security program, so it’s important to review the standards regularly.

Read the rest of this post »

Tags: addressable, compliant, encryption, ePHI, hipaa, hipaa checklist, hipaa compliance, hitech, omnibus, phi, protected health information, security
Posted in LuxSci Library: HIPAA
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Healthcare Marketing Trends

Thursday, January 2nd, 2025

Here are some healthcare marketing trends you should consider adopting.

Email Deliverability

Thanks to Google and Yahoo, significant changes happened for email marketers in 2024. As we’ve previously written about, Google and Yahoo are implementing new requirements for bulk email senders that will involve a lot of coordination and effort for marketers. Beyond the initial implementation of technical requirements like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records, marketers must pay close attention to their spam rates in the future. Keeping your spam reports below 0.3% will be essential to ensure that Google and Yahoo aren’t blacklisting your emails. Marketers must keep their email lists clean, craft relevant campaigns, and use technology to remove unengaged contacts promptly. Over two billion people use Google or Yahoo as their email provider, so adopting these standards is not optional.

Artificial Intelligence

Healthcare marketers are also looking at ways to use artificial intelligence to save time and automate processes with tools like ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Midjourney. Now, marketers are seriously evaluating tools that can assist with business processes like copywriting, graphic design, data analysis, and other functions.

However, it’s essential to carefully vet any artificial intelligence tool if you plan to use it in your marketing efforts. What data sets is it trained on? Are they biased? Some tools introduce legal compliance risks, and it’s essential to understand the risks thoroughly.

Trust is essential in healthcare marketing, and relying too heavily on AI tools can create a negative patient experience. AI tools should not replace marketers. At best, these tools can help marketers complete their work. Guardrails are required when it comes to AI tools, and healthcare marketers should be cautious to ensure their brands are well-represented by the output of these tools.

Automation and APIs

Another way to save time and measure results is using APIs and automation. Many marketers are turning to automation tactics to streamline operations in the face of increasing budgetary pressure. Advanced email marketers can use email APIs to trigger email campaigns when specific criteria are met and use dynamic content to personalize the email content. These tactics make email marketing scalable and ensure your audience receives the proper communications at the right time.

APIs can also be used to organize the results of your marketing efforts. Email APIs can deliver data about your campaigns (delivery status, open and clicks, unsubscribes, etc.) back into your marketing dashboards and databases. This is a way to help you make informed decisions and improve your marketing results. Expect to see more marketers embrace automation alongside AI tools this year.

Personalization

Personalization continues to be extremely important to successful healthcare marketing efforts. This is a challenge for healthcare providers because they must comply with HIPAA regulations in their email communications. Luckily, with the right tools and patient permission, it’s possible to personalize emails to create relevant campaigns. When healthcare marketers have access to zero-party patient data and the right tools to execute, they can go beyond practice newsletters to create email campaigns that deliver results.

One bonus personalization tip- create culturally competent emails and use the patient’s preferred language. Healthcare communications should not leave anyone behind. With the right tools, it’s easier than ever to segment your audience based on their language preferences and create alternate content that resonates.

Proving Impact and Delivering ROI

Healthcare providers continue to face a challenging economic situation and may be forced to cut marketing budgets. Although some advertising channels may be forced to take a hiatus, email marketing should not be one of them. Not only do patients want to receive marketing communications via email, but email marketing also delivers one of the best returns on investment compared to other channels.

However, the way we track and measure the impact of marketing campaigns must also change. In 2024, open rates are unreliable indicators of marketing success. Apple Mail’s privacy features and the increasing prevalence of email filtering and spam tools mean that marketers will need to rely on different metrics to judge the success of their campaigns. Tracking the clicks and what actions users take in other channels after receiving the email is crucial to understanding the effectiveness of your campaigns. Also, keeping email lists clean and removing unsubscribed and inactive users is more important than ever to keep your IP addresses from being throttled.

Tags: artificial intelligence, email api, email automation, email deliverability, email marketing, healthcare marketing, hipaa, personalization, reporting metrics, spam
Posted in HIPAA Marketing
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7 Ways You Could be Unknowingly Violating HIPAA

Wednesday, August 14th, 2024

Non-compliance with HIPAA can easily lead to unintended breaches where PHI data is exposed to unauthorized parties. This can be very expensive! Violating HIPAA can cost anywhere from $100 to $70,000 per violation (or per data record).

You don’t want to be caught in a situation where inaction, neglect, or lack of knowledge can result in violating HIPAA. Many small and large organizations are often unknowingly using systems in a way that is either already in breach or which results in frequent sporadic breaches.’

If any of the following scenarios apply to you, it is worth bringing them up to the person responsible for your IT or compliance (your HIPAA Security Officer) to include them in your mandatory yearly Risk Analysis.

Is the risk of breach worth continuing with “business as usual?”

1. “Automatic” Email Encryption

Hopefully, by now most people know that Electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI) and email don’t mix unless you have a HIPAA compliant email provider who has signed a Business Associate Agreement with your organization. However, in our experience, most HIPAA compliant email security is not automated or automatic. With manual email encryption, messages are sent insecurely unless the sender explicitly designates that it needs encryption (e.g. checking a box or entering a word such as “secure” in the message subject).

These manual or opt-in systems are popular because (a) messages are HIPAA compliant when encryption is chosen, and (b) when not sending ePHI, it is “email as usual.” People are not required to change or think about it … they just use email as they always have.

However, this is the fatal flaw with 0pt-in or manual systems, especially for HIPAA marketing. If the sender simply “forgets” (or doesn’t think, or maybe can’t be bothered) to enable encryption, then the ePHI-laden message is sent insecurely and violates HIPAA. This happens all the time with opt-in systems.

When it is up to a person to determine for every message whether encryption is needed, it is guaranteed that sometimes the wrong choice will be made or the person will forget to choose, and ePHI will go out insecurely in breach of HIPAA. It’s human nature. Even data loss prevention systems, which automatically encrypt when a message has specific words, phrases, or patterns, are imperfect and cannot be relied on to catch all messages with ePHI.

The risk of using manual encryption is simply too great. It is much better to either encrypt everything that is sent from an email address that sends or receives ePHI (e.g. have one email addresses for sensitive material and another separate one for regular correspondence) or to employ an opt-out mechanism. With opt-out, all messages go securely unless the sender explicitly indicates that the message does not contain ePHI.

When it is up to the sender to explicitly choose if a message is allowed to be insecure, it is very much harder to send ePHI insecurely “by accident.” The senders are automatically accountable for the security, or lack thereof, of messages sent. Opt-out email encryption stops employees from violating HIPAA and creates accountability on the part of the sender.

2. Violating HIPAA When Sending Text Messages

Medical professionals (e.g. doctors, nurses, psychologists, therapists, dentists, etc.) frequently text each other and even text patients (e.g. for scheduling appointments). Texting is easy and patients like to communicate via text. However, many of these text messages (even scheduling ones) contain ePHI. Sending them using your regular phone texting system is violating HIPAA.

It would seem that many people do not yet realize that texting falls under the same HIPAA security rules as does email, and that sending regular texts can be a violation. Continuing to send ePHI over text constitutes willful neglect of HIPAA and can result in the largest of fines.

Instead, if you want to use a text-like real-time communication system, you need to use a HIPAA-compliant secure text application for your mobile devices. This must provide, among other things, strong encryption, audit trails, archival, and a Business Associate Agreement.

3. Email and Text Appointment Notifications

If your office sends email or text messages that indicate a patient has a doctor’s appointment, this almost always includes ePHI. Appointment confirmations are ePHI because they indicate that a particular person (i.e. this is “identifiable” via the patient’s email address, name, or phone number) has an appointment with a specific health care provider (i.e. gives information about the “future provisioning of health care”).

This information must be sent securely … and too many times it is not.

If your organization sends electronic appointment reminders, it’s critical to deliver these notifications securely to your patients, otherwise you are violating HIPAA. For example, delivery can be via a tie-in to a HIPAA-compliant email or text messaging system.

4. Insecure Web Forms

Every day we find medical web sites that have web forms for “getting more information” for general intake and for other purposes. These forms are often not encrypted and the form submissions themselves are not processed in a compliant manner. They are often insecurely emailed to an administrative assistant for processing.

If your web site is requesting and collecting ePHI via forms, then your web site is required to handle that information with care commensurate with HIPAA standards.

Check your web site and see what forms you have there, what they collect, and how the information is handled. You may need to update your site to secure your forms with TLS and to incorporate a secure form processing solution to properly deliver that sensitive data to you and also store it securely. Without this, every form submission may be in breach.

5. Sharing a Login

Sharing logins and email addresses is easy and cheap. Everyone just knows the shared login and password and logs into the same system. HIPAA, however, requires unique logins for everyone in an organization. HIPAA also requires auditing to indicate when people do what (e.g. who logged in when?). When you are sharing a login, you lose accountability and that can be a direct violation of your HIPAA requirements.

Are you sharing logins? Add that to your HIPAA Risk Assessment to see if its worth it. In many cases, there are ways to achieve the same results and still have unique logins for everyone.

6. No Risk Assessments or Training?

This is the situation in many smaller organizations:

Employees are not trained on HIPAA, on how to do their jobs in a compliant way, and on how to deal with and report breaches.
Yearly Risk Assessments are not performed, resulting in no action being taken to mitigate the risk of breach.

These requirements apply even if you are the only person in your business (e.g. a sole practitioner). In this case, you are the the “HIPAA Compliance Officer,” and you must be sure that you are trained on HIPAA. Uou must perform your Risk Analysis, and you must be sure that all ePHI under your purview is safe.

If you are neglecting these basics and something goes wrong, your HIPAA fines will be much larger due to apparent “willful neglect.” If you are in this situation, start with a detailed Risk Assessment to see where you stand. Then start mitigating your risks, training your employees, putting policies into place, and working continuously to minimize the possibility of data leakage. HIPAA compliance is an ongoing process as the security landscape and your business’ processes and vendors change over time.

7. I Took Care of HIPAA Last Year

Smaller companies, especially, tend to make a push to become “HIPAA compliant” and then forget it, assuming that they are all set. They have limited resources and would rather devote as little time and thought to HIPAA as possible; that is completely understandable from a business point of view. However, HIPAA mandates yearly reviews of your policies and risk. You need to update yours and your employees training, as well as your organization’s policies yearly. There are even some things that you may need to be doing on a quarterly basis. Keep a calendar and make sure that you are devoting the appropriate time and resources to both continued compliance and continued risk management.

How to Get Started

While this may seem very intimidating, especially if you have limited resources, getting started and addressing your HIPAA requirements and the concerns presented here will pay off in the long run. Simply knowing where you are at risk, in many cases, goes a long way towards enabling you to mitigate that risk through changes in behavior, vendor, or policy. The fact that you are working on it, know where you stand, and are taking steps to improve (however fast or slowly based on the resources at hand and the degree of risk) can also goes a long way toward turning breaches due to “willful negligence” … to much less expensive fines if something goes wrong.

Finally, there are many companies whose focus is on helping you meet your HIPAA compliance requirements. From performing a Risk Analysis, to writing internal policy documents, to outsourcing your email, web, and text messaging services. Getting help from third party expert companies reduces your liability, reduces your workload, reduces the burden of knowledge and expertise on you, and ensures that your needs are taken care of by specialists.

LuxSci specializes in HIPAA compliant email, text, marketing and forms. Contact us to learn more.

Tags: asymmetric key encryption, encryption, ePHI, hipaa, hipaa compliance, web forms
Posted in LuxSci Library: HIPAA
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17 Questions To Ask Before Sending A HIPAA-Compliant Marketing Email

Saturday, April 20th, 2024

You’ve just been told that your email marketing program is putting your company at risk of violating HIPAA. What now? If you want to continuing using email to communicate with patients, you must implement HIPAA-compliant email marketing.

Start by breaking down that goal into two components: becoming HIPAA-compliant and achieving your HIPAA marketing objectives. Setting up HIPAA-compliant systems and procedures will ensure your patient data is protected. However, you don’t have to let your marketing objectives suffer for the sake of security. Implementing a HIPAA-compliant marketing program can actually help you achieve better marketing results.

Ask yourself these 17 questions to ensure your email marketing plan aligns with your business goals and HIPAA.