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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.

Results of leveraging PHI

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:

  1. The vendor will sign a Business Associates Agreement that outlines how they will protect your data and what happens in case of a breach.
  2. The vendor protects the data at rest using appropriate storage encryption, access controls, and other security features.
  3. 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.

The PHI Difference in Healthcare Marketing

Sunday, December 22nd, 2024

Healthcare marketers are facing complex challenges with serious stakes. Unlike in other industries, healthcare marketers share messages that can impact people’s health and livelihood. Creating the most effective messaging needs to be a priority for healthcare marketing teams. Using first-party data is one way to make a major difference in your marketing efforts. Marketers can craft highly targeted campaigns using protected health information (PHI) to deliver better results for patients. 

First-Party Data for Healthcare

In some ways, healthcare marketers are at an advantage because of the amount of first-party data they can access. First-party data is information a company collects directly from its customers. The company owns this data and can verify its authenticity. Marketers can use data like digital interactions, purchase history, and preferences to create experiences that cater to an individual’s interests. In the healthcare industry, first-party data goes way beyond digital interactions. Information about health statuses, diagnoses, and recent patient visits can all be incorporated into marketing campaigns to guide patients on their journey to better health. 

Marketers in other industries know that first-party data achieves the highest return on investment of any data type. In 2020, Google partnered with Boston Consulting Group to study how brands succeed with first-party data strategies. The report found that businesses using first-party data for key marketing functions achieved up to a 2.9 times revenue uplift and a 1.5 times increase in cost savings. In addition, as data privacy restrictions grow and third-party cookies are phased out, marketers need more control over their data sources to ensure compliance.

Why Use PHI in Healthcare Marketing?

When healthcare organizations use PHI to segment their email lists and personalize campaign content, they experience better results. Using a HIPAA-compliant email marketing solution allows marketers to leverage the data and information they have about patients to increase engagement. When using PHI, there are so many ways to customize email content that can deliver impressive results.

PHI in healthcare marketing stats

It makes intuitive sense. What would you prefer- frequent emails about products and services you don’t want, or consistent emails that relate to your goals and interests? It’s an easy decision. No one likes to be annoyed by pointless emails. Using information about your patients’ health statuses and goals to craft personalized messages increases patient satisfaction and retention, while also improving engagement.

email stats

As discussed above, healthcare patient data is an excellent source of first-party data that is more comprehensive than the information gathered in other industries. However, healthcare marketers face another hurdle. In addition to getting patient consent to use this data for marketing purposes, organizations are also strictly governed by HIPAA compliance regulations that restrict the use of PHI.

The Challenge For Healthcare Marketing: HIPAA Compliance

So what can healthcare marketers do to surmount this obstacle? First, they must understand the regulations surrounding the transmission of protected health information (PHI). Responsible healthcare marketers must comply with HIPAA when utilizing patient data in their marketing efforts.

Most marketers rely on some sort of email marketing software, CRM, or CDP to manage their marketing campaigns. However, not all platforms are able to meet HIPAA’s stringent requirements. A simple approach to evaluating marketing software for HIPAA compliance focuses on three crucial aspects:

  1. Sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA)
  2. Securely Store Data
  3. Securely Transmit Data

healthcare marketing comparison

First, any third party with access to PHI must sign a Business Associates Agreement to govern how the information will be secured and what happens in case of a breach. If they will not sign a BAA, the software should not be used to store or process PHI.

However, signing a BAA alone is not enough. Understanding the terms of service and what the provider allows is essential. If their terms of service forbid you from sending PHI, it could put your organization at risk. It’s also important to review how the data will be secured at rest and in transit. When storing patient health data in a marketing application, consider how it will be protected. Simply put, you must ensure that all PHI is encrypted and can only be accessed by people with the appropriate keys.

If protected health information is transmitted outside of the database or application via email, encryption must also be used to protect the data in transmission. At a minimum, TLS encryption (with the appropriate ciphers) is secure enough to meet HIPAA guidelines. However, many applications do not offer transmission encryption that is secure enough to comply with HIPAA. You should only send communications containing PHI if they are encrypted.

Conclusion

Using PHI data in your healthcare marketing efforts can yield improved results. However, this approach requires careful vetting and planning by your marketing and compliance teams to ensure data is secured under HIPAA regulations. To learn more about HIPAA-compliant marketing solutions, contact LuxSci today.

HIPAA Compliant Forms

Saturday, February 3rd, 2024

When it comes to digital data collection, there is often a lot of uncertainty surrounding HIPAA compliant forms.

Do Healthcare Websites Need HIPAA Compliant Forms?

We often have customers ask if their website forms need to be HIPAA compliant.

The short answer is that securing patient data is always recommended. You never know what types of information individuals will volunteer in an online submission. It is always a good idea to prepare for the possibility of sensitive information being entered into an online form to build trust with your users.

person entering info into login form

Criteria for HIPAA Compliant Forms

HIPAA requires that all Protected Health Information (PHI) be secured to protect the privacy of the individuals identified in the PHI. If your form falls into both of the following categories, it must conform to HIPAA standards:

  1. You are a Covered Entity or Business Associate and,
  2. The form collects PHI.

Let’s look at the two criteria to determine if your forms need to be HIPAA-compliant.

1. Does HIPAA Apply to Your Organization?

HIPAA applies to your web form if your organization is a Covered Entity. It also applies if you are a Business Associate of a Covered Entity and collect data on their behalf.

HIPAA defines a Covered Entity as an organization that falls into one of the following categories:

  1. Care: You provide services or supplies related to an individual’s physical or mental health care. This includes (1) preventive, diagnostic, therapeutic, rehabilitative, maintenance, or palliative care, and counseling, service, assessment, or procedure concerning the physical or mental condition or functional status of an individual that affects the structure or function of the body; and (2) sale or dispensing of a drug, device, equipment, or other items by a prescription.
  2. Provider: A provider of medical or health services or any other person or organization who furnishes, bills, or is paid for health care.
  3. Clearinghouse: A public or private entity, including a billing service, repricing company, community health management information system, or community health information system, and “value-added” networks and switches that either process or facilitate the processing of health information.
  4. Plan: With certain exceptions, an individual or group plan that provides or pays the cost of medical care. The law specifically includes many organizations and government programs as health plans.

Covered Entities contract with Business Associates to process PHI on their behalf. In this scenario, a good example of a Business Associate is a website developer or marketing agency hired to create a website or application for a Covered Entity. They are responsible for protecting PHI on the website and must comply with HIPAA regulations.

2. Does the online form collect PHI?

So, HIPAA applies to your organization. Next, we must determine if a particular web form needs to be compliant. The second criterion is, does the form collect Protected Health Information?

What is ePHI?

ePHI is individually identifiable, protected health information sent or stored electronically. “Protected health information” can include information about an individual’s:

  1. Past, present, or future physical or mental health
  2. Past, present, or future provisioning of healthcare
  3. Past, present, or future payment-related information for the provisioning of healthcare

“Individually identifiable” information includes all information used to determine which specific individual is involved. There are 18 identifiers for an individual (listed below), and together with health information, they constitute PHI.

  • Name
  • Address (all geographic subdivisions smaller than the state, including street address, city, county, and zip code)
  • All elements (except years) of dates related to an individual (including birth date, admission date, discharge date, date of death, and exact age if over 89)
  • Telephone numbers
  • Fax number
  • Email address
  • Social Security number
  • Medical record number
  • Health plan beneficiary number
  • Account number
  • Certificate/license number
  • Any vehicle or other device serial number
  • Device identifiers or serial numbers
  • Web URL
  • Internet Protocol (IP) address numbers
  • Finger or voiceprints
  • Photographic images
  • Any other characteristic that could uniquely identify the individual

As you can see, a lot of data qualifies as “health information,” and just about every type of web form will collect individual identifiers. Even if your form doesn’t request health information, sometimes people will volunteer it to get faster responses. Covered entities are responsible for securing this data in compliance with HIPAA regulations. In many cases, it’s easier to make all online forms HIPAA-compliant rather than trying to lock them down to prevent the insecure transmission of health data.

Examples of HIPAA Compliant Forms

Some online forms are explicitly designed to collect protected health information. Here are some examples of web forms that generally must be secured to meet HIPAA compliance standards:

  1. Appointment and Referral Requests: These will collect identifiable information about the person requesting the appointment. The request for the appointment should be considered information about “future provisioning of health care to an individual.” Furthermore, requesting an appointment may imply information about “an individual’s past, present, or future physical or mental health or condition.”
  2. Patient Intake Forms: These forms usually enable prospective patients to provide information about themselves for one purpose or another. These forms collect identifiable information about “an individual’s past, present, or future physical or mental health or condition.”

Some examples that might not be considered in the collection of PHI (depending on the exact context of the site) because, while they are individually identifiable, they may not include or imply health information for that individual:

  1. Contact Requests: The website visitor is merely asking for a call or email with no specified reason.
  2. Purchases of products that do not require a prescription: Purchasing a product does not imply who is to use it unless that product is restricted (e.g., via a prescription). Of course, this may also depend on whether you collect health information as part of the purchase for future marketing purposes.

Anything that identifies the person and relates to that person’s health or healthcare should be considered PHI and protected. It’s also important to note that as technology has advanced and online tracking has become ubiquitous, it’s possible to infer more about an individual and their health conditions indirectly. It is essential to proceed cautiously and recognize that even the smallest information you collect about a website user is part of a more extensive online profile.

Other industries can get away with not being secure. But why would you? People are afraid and paranoid about identity theft and information leakage on all sites, not just ones related to medical information. Anything a website can do to make visitors more comfortable and secure will improve trust and conversions.

What About Consent for Insecure Transmission?

As a follow-up question, we are often asked if there can be a checkbox on the form that patients can click to consent to use an insecure, non-compliant form. Presumably, if they do not click, they cannot submit the form.

This practice is highly advised against and is almost certainly not HIPAA-compliant. You should consult with a lawyer to ensure it is okay if you have a compelling reason to use this method.

To understand why this is a bad idea, consider “Mutual Consent.”

Under HIPAA, Mutual Consent to transmit ePHI insecurely seems to be allowed if:

  1. You and the patient agree that insecure transmission is okay,
  2. The patient has been appropriately advised of the security risks involved,
  3. The patient agrees in writing that insecure transmission is okay, and
  4. The option for HIPAA-compliant transmission is available by implication.

However, this overcomplicates the process. It is much simpler to have secure web forms by default. You will not need to provide waivers, keep track of who has opted in/out, and maintain two different submission options.

The only case where this could be considered possibly under the HIPAA radar (again, please consult your lawyer) is if:

  1. Your insecure form has a clear section advising the users of the risks of submitting their data via this form.
  2. That warning is understandable to most laypeople without further explanation.
  3. They must check a box (or sign their name) to consent to the insecure form transmission.
  4. You may need to show that they understood and agreed to the risks and didn’t just click without reading.
  5. When you collect the form data, you save and archive all of these consent agreements in case of a breach, and you need to prove that insecure sending was allowed and the user was well informed of the risks.
  6. You have another option available to the user if they do not accept the risks, e.g., Submitting the form securely, calling you via a phone number, printing and mailing in a physical form, etc.

You burden the end-user significantly by adding warnings and consent to online forms. No one wants to read through disclaimers and checkboxes before completing a submission on a general website form. As always with the web, keep it as simple as possible for maximum results. In this case, that means no consent, no warnings, just simple, secure submission.

Conclusion: Set Up HIPAA-Compliant Online Forms Today

LuxSci’s Secure Form solution is designed to meet HIPAA compliance requirements for online data transmission and storage. Contact our sales team today to learn more about our options for secure online engagement.

6 Email Marketing Best Practices for Healthcare

Tuesday, November 14th, 2023

Email marketing can be a powerful tool for healthcare organizations, but it requires careful planning and execution because of HIPAA compliance requirements. In this blog post, we will discuss email marketing best practices to help healthcare marketers achieve their goals. 

woman viewing email program

1. Define Your Campaign Goals

The success of any email marketing campaign depends on the goals you want to achieve. However, because healthcare organizations are often not selling products to their patients, marketers can be confused about how to set measurable goals for their campaigns that aren’t tied to revenue generation.

Healthcare marketers want to use email marketing campaigns for various purposes, including patient engagement, education, and retention. Some possible objectives of your campaigns could be:

  • New patient acquisition
  • Re-engaging lapsed patients
  • Spreading awareness about vaccines, treatments, or medical conditions
  • Increasing treatment or medication adherence
  • Collecting survey responses or patient-reported outcomes

All of these campaign objectives will correlate with different metrics. Identifying the campaign goal and the corresponding metrics you need to track is critical before selecting the audience and crafting the content.

2. Select Your Audience

Gone are the days of sending giant email blasts to your entire contact list. The best email marketers are creating highly targeted campaigns for specific audiences. Healthcare marketers using patient data in their audience targeting efforts are at an advantage. They can use patient information to create distinct audience segments. Targeting a patient population with common attributes makes it easier to craft a relevant message to drive clear results. For example, marketers can create more relevant campaigns when they can divide their patient population into subgroups based on shared characteristics like diagnoses, risk factors, and demographic data.

3. Personalize Your Content

Once you have clearly defined your goal and your audience, it’s essential to use personalization techniques to craft relevant messaging. Healthcare consumers expect more personalization from their providers and want to receive messages that tie into their past experiences. Generic, irrelevant messaging is more likely to annoy patients than get them to act. Healthcare marketers are lucky to have a wealth of data points to use in their messaging, but they must be aware of patient privacy and take steps to secure their messaging. When you have taken the appropriate steps to secure patient data, including protected health information in email messages is possible. This improves the patient experience and makes it easier for healthcare marketers to achieve their objectives.

4. Use A Clear Call-to-Action

Your emails should include a clear call-to-action (CTA) that encourages your audience to take the desired action. These actions may include scheduling an appointment, downloading a resource, logging into a patient portal, filling out a survey, or contacting your organization. Ensure that your CTA is prominent, stands out from the rest of your content, and ties back to the goal of your campaign. Most importantly, implement appropriate tracking technologies so you can see how many email recipients followed through on the CTA.

Don’t include too many calls to action in one message! Including multiple prompts may confuse the recipient and make it more difficult for your team to understand how the campaign performed.

5. Review Your Data

Finally, it’s essential to monitor your email metrics to evaluate the success of your campaigns. Some key metrics may include open rates, click-through rates, surveys completed, successful logins, appointments scheduled, and other relevant metrics that tie back to your goals. Use this data to refine your email marketing strategy, trigger follow-up campaigns and marketing activity, and optimize future campaigns. Use APIs or webhooks to ensure your email campaign statistics are tied into marketing dashboards to get a holistic view of how your campaigns are performing.

6. Choose an Email Marketing Platform Designed for Healthcare

Finally, to use the tactics recommended above, it’s necessary to use a HIPAA-compliant email marketing platform. Segmenting audiences and personalizing content requires the use of protected health information. Therefore, it must be secured in compliance with HIPAA. You must select a platform that can protect data both at rest and in transit to utilize the power of your data fully.

LuxSci’s HIPAA-compliant Secure Marketing was designed to meet the needs of healthcare marketers and enables the use of PHI at scale. Contact our sales team to learn more about our capabilities and email marketing best practices.

Overcoming Barriers to Successful Digital Health Patient Engagement

Tuesday, October 31st, 2023

Effective patient engagement is a goal for many healthcare organizations because of the benefits. When patients are engaged in their healthcare, illnesses are diagnosed sooner, bills are paid faster, and patient satisfaction is increased, leading to better business outcomes for the healthcare organization. Advances in technology have made it easier to achieve successful digital health patient engagement. Nevertheless, barriers remain when using digital channels to engage patients effectively. This article discusses the main barriers to digital patient engagement and how to overcome them to drive better results.

hand pointing at ipad with digital health symbols

Barriers to Digital Health Engagement

Patient engagement involves encouraging patients to make informed decisions about their health. Engaged patients are activated patients, meaning they participate in positive behaviors to manage their health. Proactive management of healthcare conditions helps improve outcomes and achieve lower costs. Digital health tools offer scalable ways to engage patients but must be thoughtfully implemented and deployed to achieve the best results.

Let’s review the most common barriers to digital health patient engagement and potential solutions for these issues.

Limited Access to Technology

Digital patient engagement tools may be a poor choice for patients without access to the internet, smartphones, or other digital devices. Though broadband access and smartphone users have risen over the past few years, the individuals without access are often the most in need of patient engagement efforts.

Solution: Invest in Consumer Technology

Some organizations have experimented with providing low-income, at-risk populations with the tools they need to monitor their health digitally. Providing smartphones, internet-connected medical devices, and even mobile hotspots can help increase access to digital health tools that drastically improve patient lives.

Low Health Literacy

If you’ve ever received a bloodwork report and struggled to understand what it meant, you can relate to the struggles that patients with low health literacy face. Suppose the digital health patient engagement tactics you employ are heavy with medical jargon and unclear to lay people. In that situation, patients cannot act on the information to improve their health.

Solution: Create Content for Users

Strip technical jargon from patient communications and keep patients from being overwhelmed with information. Engagement messages should be easily understood and clearly define the patient’s next step.

For example, if you use remote patient monitoring tools for patients with diabetes and send weekly reports on their average A1c levels, you must 1) make sure the patient knows what the reading means and 2) provide a clear direction for what the patient should do with that information. If the reading is too high, clearly state that and provide some next best steps. If the reading looks good- celebrate that and encourage them to continue to make the right choices to manage their diabetes.

Privacy and Security Concerns

It’s no secret that healthcare data is valuable to cybercriminals, and many high-profile breaches have made patients wary about digitally sharing health information. Patients may be concerned about the privacy and security of their personal health information, particularly if they are unsure how it is used.

Solution: Invest in Tools Designed for HIPAA Compliance

Ensure that the digital tools you use to engage with patients have recommended security features, including encryption and access controls like multifactor authentication. You can also work with your legal and security teams to craft policies that outline how patient data is used and when it will be securely disposed of. Patients have a right to control their data, and these policies can help build trust and increase confidence in your patient population to boost the adoption of digital health tools.

Limited Provider Support

Patients may be less likely to engage with digital health tools if they do not receive adequate support or encouragement from their healthcare providers. Even basic patient portals are more likely to be used by patients to review their health information only once prompted by their healthcare provider.

Solution: Work with Providers to Encourage Adoption

Digital health patient engagement tools must have buy-in from providers to be effectively deployed. Eighty-five percent of patients say they always trust their healthcare providers, meaning their support can influence patient adoption rates. Having providers explain the solution, why it is in use, and how patients can utilize it to improve their health can significantly increase engagement with the tools.

Age and Cultural Differences

Patients from different ages and cultural backgrounds may have different preferences and expectations regarding digital health tools. We are all familiar with the stereotypes of older people not understanding how to use technology. That does not mean digital health engagement tools cannot be used, but instead must be deployed in a culturally specific way.

Solution: Improve Accessibility and Invest in Training

Based on the patient’s comfort level with technology, allocate resources to help educate and train individuals on how best to use the tools. Make sure any technology you use is adequately designed to support individuals with disabilities, i.e., is accessible by screen readers and can support assistive technologies. Also, make sure the digital health tools support the patient’s first language and are personalized to their cultural context.

Lack of Personalization

Digital health engagement tools that do not account for individual patient preferences or needs may not be as effective at engaging patients as tools tailored to their specific needs. After the 2020 pandemic, patients have higher expectations for personalized digital experiences. 90% of patients surveyed want to receive communications that reflect where they are in their healthcare journey. If your tools cannot provide a personalized experience, you may be annoying patients rather than helping them.

Solution: Adopt Tools That Enable the Use of PHI

Use digital health engagement tools that are secure enough to transmit protected health information. When patient data is adequately protected, it can be used to transform your digital patient engagement efforts and improve the patient experience.

Conclusion: Successful Digital Health Patient Engagement starts with the Right Tools

Digital health tools for patient engagement can be quite effective if properly configured and deployed. When looking at ways to improve patient engagement, ensure you are using tools that are easy for patients to use and fit seamlessly into their day-to-day lives. With over 90% of adults already using email, secure email messaging is an effective way to reach patients and provide them with the information they need to improve their health. Contact LuxSci today to learn more strategies for improving patient engagement with digital health tools.