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Infrastructure Requirements for Marketing and Transactional Email

Friday, June 14th, 2024

To design an appropriate email infrastructure, organizations must understand the types of emails they plan to send. Outside of regular business communications between colleagues, marketing and transactional emails are used to communicate externally with clients and customers. Although they are often lumped together, transactional and marketing emails serve different purposes and require different hardware configurations to successfully send emails with good deliverability.

What are Marketing Emails?

Marketing emails primarily contain content intended for a commercial purpose, like advertisements, promotions, or other marketing messages. Marketing emails are sent to groups of contacts that are prospects or customers to influence them to make a purchase or take a commercial action.

Some examples of marketing emails include:

Customer newsletters
Promotional offers
Event invitations
Other types of sales communications

One significant difference between marketing and transactional emails is that recipients must explicitly opt-in to receive marketing emails. It is against CAN-SPAM rules to send unsolicited marketing emails to people who have not consented to receive them. The penalties for non-compliance can be quite severe. Always allow individuals to opt out of marketing emails to stay compliant.

What are Transactional Emails?

Transactional emails are messages that relate to previous interactions or commercial relationships with a company. Users trigger email sending by taking specific actions, and the emails contain only information that is critical and relevant to the recipient.

Examples of transactional emails include:

Transaction receipts
Order updates and shipping notifications
Password resets and security notifications
Appointment reminders
Review requests

Transactional emails facilitate an already agreed-upon transaction or update a customer about an ongoing transaction. Transactional messages are exempt from most provisions of the CAN-SPAM Act, and recipients do not have to opt in to receive emails. For example, when someone orders a pair of sneakers online, the company does not need permission to email them when the order ships out.

How do I know if an email is a transactional or marketing message?

The email content determines whether a message is transactional or marketing. Some emails can contain both messages. We recommend asking three questions to ensure compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act:

What is the primary purpose of the message?
Whom is the message sent to?
Is the content misleading or deceptive?

First, what is the primary reason for sending the message? If the purpose is to remind a client of their upcoming appointment, that should be evident. Organizations can include a marketing message (perhaps offering them a coupon to use on additional services at their appointment). Still, the subject line and main message should emphasize the upcoming appointment.

Secondly, is there an existing relationship between the organization and the recipient? Did the recipient willingly join a mailing list? Or purchase a product from the company? The answer, in combination with the purpose of the email, will identify what type of mailing this is.

Finally, do not try and launder marketing messages as transactional emails. Sending an email with a misleading subject line like “Your Order Status” containing little to no information about a recent order is not permitted by CAN-SPAM.

Infrastructure Requirements

Most organizations need to send both types of email. The email sending requirements for sending bulk marketing emails differ from transactional emails. Marketing emails are one message sent in bulk to a large list of recipients. For example, a list of previous customers is sent an email promotion announcing a sale on sandals. Sending one email to thousands of recipients at the same time requires different memory and CPU than messages sent on a one-to-one basis. It typically does not matter if the sandal promotion reaches the recipient’s inbox at 10:00 am or 10:15 am. The message contents are not seriously time-sensitive. In the case of a marketing email, sending volume is more important than sending speed.

On the contrary, transactional emails are sent on a one-to-one basis and can be highly time-sensitive. Emails like password resets and order confirmations must arrive in the recipient’s inbox immediately after submission. This requires a different server configuration from marketing emails because speed is more important than sending volume. Designing different server configurations for marketing and transactional email is highly recommended to achieve sending goals.

At LuxSci, we design custom server configurations to meet the volume and throughput requirements for organizations of any size using our HIPAA compliant infrastructure.

HIPAA Requirements

Both marketing and transactional emails could fall under HIPAA regulations. Any communications that imply a relationship between a healthcare provider and a patient should be encrypted and follow HIPAA requirements. LuxSci provides both a Secure Email Marketing platform and Secure High Volume Email services to support the emailing requirements for HIPAA covered entities and their associates.

Contact LuxSci today to learn more about configuring an email infrastructure to support high volumes of marketing and transactional emails.

Tags: dedicated server, email marketing, email throughput, HIPAA email, marketing email, Transactional email
Posted in Email, HIPAA Marketing
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What are Secure Email APIs?

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2023

APIs are just one tool that organizations can use to streamline operations and automate processes. Healthcare organizations can utilize secure email APIs to save time and streamline their operations. This article explains what secure email APIs are and ways that healthcare organizations can use them while maintaining HIPAA compliance.

What is an API?

First, let’s take a minute to review what an API is. API is an acronym that stands for “Application Programming Interface.” APIs enable companies to open their applications’ data and functionality to external third-party developers, business partners, and internal departments. They leverage each other’s data and functionality through a documented interface. APIs simplify app development by allowing applications to work together.

APIs help business and IT teams collaborate. Let’s look at a simple example to illustrate how they work. If a smartwatch developer wanted to display the weather on the watch face, they could use the Weather Underground API to source current weather data and local forecasts. Application developers do not have to create an entirely new weather database and keep it updated. Instead, the API permits them to use the Weather Underground’s meteorological data in their application.

APIs enable information to flow both ways. The smartwatch can display Weather Underground forecasts, and the API can report data back to the Weather Underground. This functionality enables interoperability and data sharing.

What Are Email APIs?

An email API allows applications to send emails and deliver email data to other systems. Email APIs are often used to send transactional emails from applications like CRMs, EHRs, and other databases. Trigger-based emails are ideal for sending with an email API. In this situation, emails are sent when pre-determined conditions are met. For example, an order confirmation is a transactional, trigger-based email. A person buys a product online, the transaction is processed within the e-commerce application, and an email is sent to the buyer with their transaction details. The email is sent automatically with an email API and pulls data about their purchase from the application into the email message to provide a personalized record of their order details. The API can also return data to the application about the email delivery, including information about who opened and clicked on a link within the message.

When to Use Secure Email APIs?

When transmitting information that may be sensitive, it’s essential to utilize email APIs that offer additional security features. For example, suppose healthcare organizations want to use email APIs to send appointment reminders from their electronic health record system. As a covered entity subject to HIPAA regulations, those emails contain ePHI and must be encrypted to protect that data as required under the HIPAA Security Rule.

Organizations subject to regulatory compliance regulations should ensure they utilize a secure email API service that enables them to encrypt their email messages (in addition to meeting other technical security standards).

What is Required for Email API Security?

Email encryption is essential to help organizations meet compliance requirements and protect data. However, secure email APIs also include additional features to help protect employee accounts and client data. Some key email API security features include:

Authentication

Controlling access to the API is essential to ensure unauthorized users cannot send emails. Email APIs use access tokens to grant specific users access to resources and data and ensure that only authorized users can send emails.

You can also enable DMARC, SPF, and DKIM with email API sending to prevent spoofing and build trust with your users. These protocols help prevent impersonation and improve email deliverability.

Access Controls

Access to the API should be logged and reviewable to make it easy to detect suspicious activity. To meet compliance regulations, you must keep audit logs that track who accessed sensitive data and when.

Benefits of Secure Email APIs

Imagine if it was an employee’s responsibility to create and send every unique appointment reminder email for a practice. It would be completely overwhelming. Besides saving time, some of the main benefits of email APIs include:

1. - Easy to use and implement
  - Cost savings
  - Email deliverability improvements
  - Email list management
  - Reporting and analytics functionality
  - Personalization and customization
  - Enterprise-grade security

Secure Email APIs Use Cases for Healthcare

Healthcare organizations are under increasing pressure to improve the patient experience. Online shoppers expect to see those order confirmation emails within a few minutes of finalizing their orders. Healthcare consumers using online communication tools expect the same experience from their providers. By expediting and personalizing patient communications, email APIs can help increase patient satisfaction.

Some examples of the types of emails that healthcare providers can send using an email API include:

Welcome emails
Appointment reminders
Patient satisfaction surveys
Flu shot and vaccine reminders
Password resets and other transactional emails

It works like this: the developer creates the email templates in advance and the criteria for email sending. The email is automatically sent when the conditions are met. For example, a developer may trigger a welcome email to send when:

1) a new patient is added to the database, and

2) their first appointment date is set.

Email APIs can also pull information from the patient record to personalize the email. The welcome email may include the patient’s name and the date of their first appointment.

Other than updating the patient record, office administrators do not need to take additional actions to send the email. The email API automatically sends customized emails when appropriate, saving time and stress for administrative employees.

Conclusion

Email APIs are an essential part of digital health transformation and interoperability. Healthcare organizations should explore how APIs can improve their workflows and improve efficiency. LuxSci provides HIPAA-compliant and secure email APIs with Secure High Volume Email Sending. Contact us today to learn more.

Tags: api, email api, email automation, email workflows, hipaa compliant api, operational efficiency, secure api, secure email api, Transactional email
Posted in Email, HIPAA Marketing
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New Feature: API Priority Queue

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2022

Maximize efficiency by employing our new email-sending prioritization features. Secure High Volume Email customers utilizing APIs for sending can now set a message priority to determine the order in which messages are sent out.

What is the API Priority Queue Feature?

This feature allows customers to set a priority on email messages sent via API. Customers can pass an optional parameter in their API to set the message priority on a scale of 0 – 9. Zero is the lowest priority, nine is the highest, and four is the default priority setting.

The API priority queue feature allows customers to send out higher-priority messages faster when the sending queue is already long.

Why is the API Priority Queue Useful?

Traditionally, all customer emails were processed in a “first come, first serve” method. Customers can now use the priority queue to determine the sending order when they simultaneously send transactional and marketing messages via the API.

For example, time-sensitive password resets could be stuck in the queue while a large blast of marketing emails is transmitted. Depending on the size of the email list and server capacity, the password reset email could be held up for several minutes to even hours. This situation is unacceptable for many business use cases.

Customers can designate transactional emails as high-priority with the API priority queue feature enabled. When transactional emails are given a high-priority status, they can jump the line and go out before less time-sensitive emails like marketing messages.

How to Utilize the API Priority Queue

This feature is only available to Secure High Volume Email customers utilizing APIs to send emails. It does not work for SMTP sending. Customers can add the optional parameter and desired value while crafting their API call to send emails. Additionally, customers can use the API configuration editor in the LuxSci UI to change the default priority value for all messages. You can review the details of our API by going to: https://luxsci.com/rest-api.html.

Tags: api, email api, luxsci news, marketing email, new feature, password reset, secure high volume, secure high volume email, sending priority, sending queue, Transactional email
Posted in New Feature Announcements
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Prevent Patient No-Shows with Automated Appointment Reminders

Tuesday, September 6th, 2022

Missed medical appointments are not only bad for your business, but they can also negatively impact patient health outcomes. You can improve attendance and health outcomes without adding to administrative overhead by automating appointment reminders and customizing them according to patient preferences.

Why Implement Automated Appointment Reminders

There are many reasons to introduce automated appointment reminders. People are busy, and many rely on digital calendars to stay organized. Many businesses outside the healthcare industry use digital appointment reminders to improve attendance and make scheduling and rescheduling appointments as easy as possible.

Changing Consumer Preferences

Most (88%) of customers said receiving automated appointment reminders via phone and text is important to them, according to a CVS Health survey. The rapid digitization of the healthcare system due to the Covid-19 pandemic has led patients to expect a healthcare experience that fits into their lifestyles. Reminders for haircuts, car appointments, and other personal care services are extremely common, and people expect that from their healthcare providers. In addition, communication preferences are changing. Very few people answer phone calls from unknown numbers. Instead, the majority of patients prefer less intrusive email and text reminders.

Improved Health Outcomes for Patients

As the saying goes, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Skipping appointments or delaying care puts patients at risk of developing more serious illnesses. Catching conditions like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer early drastically improves prognoses and allows for less expensive and intrusive interventions. Most people don’t intend to skip medical appointments, but life happens. Sending timely appointment reminders before the visit gives overbooked individuals an opportunity to reschedule without a potentially costly missed appointment.

Reduced Administrative Overhead

If your administrative staff members are tasked with making phone calls to confirm appointments, automated reminders can allow them to prioritize other tasks associated with patient care. Keeping the phone lines open to help care for patients with urgent questions improves the patient experience and keeps staff members engaged.

How to Implement Automated Appointment Reminders

Most automated reminders are sent via email, text messaging, or phone calls. We recommend surveying your patient population to find out which communication methods they prefer. By sending the message according to their preference, it increases the likelihood that they will see it and respond appropriately.

Once that is determined, use a tool like LuxSci’s Secure High Volume Email or Secure Texting to integrate with your CRM or EHR and set up trigger points and reminder templates that pull information from the database. For example, maybe you find that five business days before the appointment is the best time to send the reminder. Patients need to have enough time to read the notification and reschedule if necessary. When the appointment is five days away, a message is automatically sent to the patient reminding them of the appointment. Ideally, this message will also include rescheduling options.

One caveat- notice that we mentioned “secure” email and texting. Appointment reminders imply information about health conditions and are PHI that is protected under HIPAA regulations. These messages must be encrypted and follow other HIPAA requirements for access controls, audit logs, and more. Review our HIPAA Compliance Checklist for more information.

Tags: appointment reminders, digital health, digital transformation, high volume email, operational efficiency, patient engagement, secure texting, Transactional email
Posted in HIPAA Marketing, Business Solutions
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Is Medical Billing Information Protected Under HIPAA?

Tuesday, August 9th, 2022

Electronic medical billing requires access to protected health information to accurately bill and receive payment for medical treatments. While not covered entities, medical billing companies are often contracted as business associates and fall under HIPAA regulations.

Title II of HIPAA applies directly to medical billing companies. It dictates the proper uses and disclosures of protected health information (PHI) and simplifies claims and billing processing.

What is Protected Health Information (PHI)?

Protected health information is “individually identifiable” health information. It specifically refers to three classes of data:

An individual’s past, present, or future physical or mental health or condition.
The past, present, or future provisioning of health care to an individual.
The past, present, or future payment-related information for the provisioning of health care to an individual.

As listed in item three, payment-related information tied to healthcare provisioning is protected data under HIPAA. This can include information about insurance carriers and payments, billing statements, receipts, credit card numbers, bank accounts, and other financial information.

To be classified as PHI, payment-related information must be tied to an individual identifier. For example, a medical bill with a patient’s address can be tied back to a specific individual. These identifiers can sometimes be quite indirect. There are 18 types of identifiers for an individual (listed below). Any of one of these, combined with information on healthcare payments, would constitute PHI:

Name
Address (all geographic subdivisions smaller than a state, including street address, city, county, 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 number
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

The Risks to Medical Billing Companies

It should be evident that medical billing companies work with a lot of PHI. As such, they must take steps to protect that information under HIPAA regulations.

Third-Party Risk

Many healthcare systems contract medical billing companies to process claims and bill patients and insurance companies. These companies can present significant risks to protected health information if not adequately vetted. All third-party companies that handle PHI on behalf of a covered entity must sign a business associate agreement. This document discusses how sensitive medical billing information will be stored, secured, and transmitted. It is also essential to ensure that the billing companies understand their obligations under the privacy and security rules and have implemented the proper physical, technical, administrative, and organizational standards. This can be verified via security audits and assessments.

Third parties like medical billing companies are often targets for cyberattacks. From 2020 to 2021, cyberattacks on business associates increased by 18%. The rich trove of financial and health data they have is often more comprehensive and less secure than a hospital’s electronic health records system. Unlike covered entities who frequently work under HIPAA regulations, third parties may not wholly understand it. As a result, they may fail to take the technical steps needed to secure sensitive data.

How to protect electronic medical billing information

Like many healthcare organizations, financial institutions are also undergoing digital transformation and are moving to digitize healthcare payment processes. Digitization is an effective way to reduce payment times and improve patient satisfaction. However, it also introduces risk. Digital systems that contain healthcare billing information must implement the proper safeguards, including:

Organizational requirements that describe how policies and procedures will be implemented and obligations concerning business associate contracts.
Administrative requirements related to how employees access PHI.
Physical safeguards that encompass the security of computer systems, servers, and networks, access to the facility and workstations, data backups and storage, and the destruction of obsolete data.
Technical safeguards that ensure the security of data transmitted over an open electronic network and the storage of that data.

Protecting Electronic Medical Billing Information In Databases

Digital billing information that is stored in electronic databases or online web portals must be secured in the following ways:

Using a secure and HIPAA-compliant web and database host.
Limiting access to only authorized users.
Requiring unique logins and complex passwords with multifactor authentication to access ePHI.
Encrypting the contents of the database so they cannot be accessed if there is a breach.
Making regular backups of the database and storing them independently of the main system.

Sending Healthcare Billing Notifications Digitally

Many people now prefer to receive electronic medical billing notifications via email. A survey of 3,000 US consumers found that 85% are already using e-billing, and 47.6% find it is faster to pay bills electronically. However, using email, text messaging, or other digital communication forms introduces new risks and requires remediation to protect ePHI in transmission. These safeguards include:

Encrypting messages in transit
Authenticating user identities and sending domains
Requiring unique user logins and complex passwords
Protecting against threats with anti-virus software, email filtering, and other malicious scanning tools.
Creating audit logs and reviewing them for suspicious activities.

Services like LuxSci’s Secure High Volume Email can integrate with existing systems to send automated encrypted billing notifications via API or SMTP.

Tags: email automation, email marketing, ePHI, high volume email, hipaa, hipaa compliance, hipaa-compliant email, medical billing, phi, Transactional email
Posted in Email, HIPAA Marketing
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