Healthcare Marketing

Effective healthcare marketing is essential for companies looking to grow their business, enhance patient and customer engagement, and establish trust in an increasingly competitive industry. Healthcare marketing helps healthcare organizations connect with the right audience while complying with industry regulations and compliance requirements. Whether you’re a healthcare provider, payer or supplier, targeted campaigns can improve visibility and drive meaningful interactions. Stay ahead with the latest trends, insights, and best practices to optimize your healthcare marketing efforts.

Understanding Business Associate Agreements (BAAs) and Shared Responsibility

September 9, 2025
Pete Wermter

Modern-day healthcare organizations rely on a growing array of partners and vendors to provide them with the tools they need to effectively serve patients and customers.

However, while new digital solutions and healthcare ecosystems often result in greater productivity and efficiency, they also increase the number of third parties a company must communicate with and share protected health information (PHI), requiring a business associate agreement (BAA). Unfortunately, this increases the risk of PHI being exposed, as it increases a healthcare organization’s supply chain network and the number of external organizations with access to their data, significantly raising the risk of a security breach.

This is where the concept of shared responsibility comes in.

In this article, we explore the shared responsibility model for data security, explaining the concept, the role of a BAA in shared responsibility, and why healthcare companies need to know how it works and where it factors into their HIPAA compliance efforts.

What Is The Shared Responsibility Model?

Shared responsibility is a core data security principle that divides the responsibility for protecting data between a company that collects the data and a vendor that supplies the infrastructure or systems used to process said data.

The shared responsibility model grew in prominence as more companies moved to cloud-based environments and applications. In the past, when companies kept their systems and data onsite, they had more control over who could access their data and, subsequently, a better ability to mitigate data security risks.

However, in adopting cloud-based infrastructure and applications, companies have to process and store their data in the cloud – often in shared infrastructure with other vendors using the same cloud – which consequently shifts some of the responsibility of information security to the cloud service provider (CSP) itself. This marked a profound shift in the way data was handled, transmitted, and stored – necessitating an evolved approach to data security.

This fundamental shift in the way companies consume infrastructure and use apps ushered in the shared responsibility model: Where the cloud vendor provides the infrastructure or application, including HIPAA compliant and high secure environments, but it’s still the responsibility of the client to configure and use it securely.

Business Associate Agreements (BAAs) and Shared Responsibility

By detailing the respective responsibilities of healthcare companies or Covered Entities (CEs) and their vendors or Business Associates (BAs) in securing PHI, a Business Associate Agreement is a prime example of shared responsibility.

For example, the Business Associate shoulders the responsibility of providing the data safeguards required by HIPAA to secure patient data, such as infrastructure, encryption, audit logging, and even physical onsite security.

The Covered Entity, meanwhile, is responsible for conducting risk assessments, defining access control policies and processes, configuring services accordingly, workforce training, and continuous monitoring.

Additionally, both parties have the obligation to report security incidents to each other, as well as being independently accountable to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Why Shared Responsibility Is Essential for HIPAA Compliance

For healthcare companies, having a firm grasp of the shared responsibility model for safeguarding and securing PHI, and how they fit within your overall security posture is essential (for two key reasons).

Security Gaps

Firstly, clearly understanding the shared responsibility decreases the likelihood of security gaps. If CEs are under the impression that the vendor handles all aspects of data security, they won’t be as vigilant. They’ll be less inclined to configure services, educate their staff accordingly, pay appropriate attention to vendor security alerts, etc.

But the same is also true for BAs: If they assume their client does most of the heavy lifting in securing the data disclosed to them, they could be remiss in their duties to protect it. Without shared responsibility, each side simply assumes the other is covering a safeguard, opening the door for security gaps that malicious actors can exploit.

Fortunately, by detailing both parties’ (CEs and BAs) responsibilities and liabilities regarding data protection, a BAA removes this ambiguity and, more importantly, reduces the risk of security gaps. It’s critical to know the details and work with vendors building products for compliance versus implementing a tick-box approach to compliance that places too much burden on the CE.

Covered Entities (CEs) Are Ultimately Accountable

Subsequently, the second reason why it’s essential for CEs to understand the shared responsibility model, and increase their cybersecurity readiness accordingly, is that it’s the CE that’s ultimately held accountable for data breaches.

Mistakenly thinking that a BAA automatically makes them compliant may result in healthcare companies underinvesting in training, monitoring, and incident response. Conversely, understanding that even with a BAA in place, they’re the ones primarily accountable for protecting PHI gives them a greater sense of urgency to properly implement HIPAA compliant security measures.

The Covered Entity’s Role Within Shared Responsibility

Let’s look at the ways that healthcare companies have to hold up their end in the shared responsibility model.

Choose Compliance-Conscious Vendors

First and foremost, companies have to choose the right vendors to supply them with HIPAA compliant services and solutions.

Look for companies that market themselves as HIPAA compliant and display a detailed understanding of HIPAA requirements, particularly the HIPAA Security Rule. Do your due diligence and perform deeper dives on potential vendors, researching their stated security features, reviews from existing clients, whether they have certifications like HITRUST – and if they’ve been involved in any data breaches.

Naturally, a core prerequisite of being a HIPAA compliant vendor is being willing to sign a BAA, so you can immediately rule out any vendors not willing to do so. For instance, some healthcare companies may assume they can use widely adopted solutions such as SendGrid, Mailchimp, but they don’t offer a BAA.

Once you’ve confirmed a vendor offers a BAA, look through it to establish its terms and determine if it covers the services you’re interested in.

Configuration

Another core component of shared responsibility is comprehensive configuration management. While the BA’s responsibility is to provide a secure solution that satisfies HIPAA requirements, it’s the CE’s responsibility to configure it securely to fit within their IT ecosystem.

Features that often require configuration include:

Access control: Role-based access, Zero Trust, Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA).
Encryption settings: Enabling encryption, choosing encryption type, enforcing forced TLS, enabling storage encryption.
Feature restrictions: Disabling default configurations that enable integration with non-compliant tools.
Audit logging: Enabling audit logging and configuring log formats.
Retention settings: How long to retain audit logs and who is permitted to review them.

Finally, establishing a patch management strategy, i.e., when and how your organization applies software updates, is an important element of configuration. While the vendor must release updates to fix security vulnerabilities discovered in their solutions, it’s up to healthcare companies to deploy the patches.

Training

Regardless of how many security features a vendor bakes into their solutions, once deployed by a healthcare company, the tool is only as secure as the practices of their least security-conscious employee. Consequently, companies must train their staff on how to properly use a solution to process protected health information and sensitive data. The more an employee is required to handle PHI, the more thorough and frequent their training should be.

Key aspects of comprehensive cybersecurity training include:

Common cyber threats: what the most prevalent cyber threats are and how to recognize them.
Incident response: how to report a suspected security incident, i.e., who to contact and when.
Specific solution training: how to securely use systems that process PHI
Scope awareness: knowing which services within your organization’s IT ecosystem are HIPAA-compliant and which are not

Reporting

Although both healthcare companies and BAs have notification obligations to the HHS in the event of a data breach involving PHI, it’s the CE that bears most of the investigative burden.

Firstly, while a BA may report a security incident, it’s the CE’s responsibility to conduct a risk assessment to determine the probability of compromise of PHI, assess risk, and determine whether an official notification of a breach to HHS is necessary.

Secondly, BAs must notify the CE without unreasonable delay and no later than 60 days after discovery. Although BAs often wait to complete internal investigations before notifying the CE, the CE’s 60-day clock starts upon the BA’s discovery, not upon the BA’s report. Therefore, BA delays can create compliance risks for the CE.

To prevent this, where possible, you can include stricter contractual reporting timelines in the BAAs. This constantly keeps your company in the loop, ensuring you have sufficient lead time to complete your own investigations and your HIPAA-regulated deadlines.

LuxSci – Secure Healthcare Communications

Developed specifically to fulfil the stringent regulatory and ever-evolving data security needs of the healthcare sector, LuxSci’s secure email, text, marketing and forms solutions help companies protect PHI and personalize communications.

Equally as importantly, instead of leaving you to “figure it out” – pushing additional responsibility back onto your company – LuxSci has a reputation for the best customer support in the business, offering onboarding, detailed documentation, secure default configurations, and ongoing support to help navigate the murky waters of HIPAA compliance, while getting best-in-class performance out of your solution.

Contact LuxSci today to learn more or get a demo.

Signing a BAA Does Not Automatically Make You HIPAA Compliant

August 26, 2025
Pete Wermter

For healthcare organizations, choosing the right product and service vendors is essential for achieving HIPAA compliance. One of the key prerequisites of a HIPAA-compliant vendor is the willingness to sign a Business Associate’s Agreement (BAA): a legal agreement that outlines both parties’ responsibilities and liabilities in securing protected health information (PHI).

However, despite what some healthcare organizations have been led to believe, simply signing a BAA with a vendor doesn’t guarantee your use of their product or service will be HIPAA-compliant. In reality, a BAA is just the beginning, and there are several subsequent actions both healthcare organizations and their supply chain partners must take to ensure the compliant use of PHI, especially over communications channels like email.

With this in mind, this post explores some of the reasons why signing a BAA on its own doesn’t ensure the security of PHI and protect your organization from HIPAA violations.

Business Associate Agreements (BAAs) Explained

As touched upon above, a BAA is a legally-binding document established between a covered entity (CE), i.e., healthcare organizations, and a business associate (BA), i.e, any company that handles PHI in providing a CE with products or services. For a BA to handle patient or customer data on behalf of a CE, following HIPAA regulations, there must be a BAA in place.

A BAA details:

Each party’s roles, responsibilities, and liabilities in securing PHI.
The permitted uses of PHI by the BA and, conversely, restrictions on any other use.
The BA’s responsibilities in implementing appropriate administrative, technical, and physical security measures to best protect PHI.
The BA’s obligations to report any unauthorized use, disclosure, or breach of PHI.
That the BA is required to assist with patient rights support, i.e., data access, amendments, and accounting of disclosures, when appropriate.
The BA’s obligations in making records available for audits or investigations.
The CE’s right to terminate the contract if the BA fails to fulfil their obligations in safeguarding PHI.

Additionally, if a BA employs a third-party company, i.e., a subcontractor, that will have access to a CE’s PHI, they are required to establish a BAA with that company. This then makes the subcontractor a “downstream BA” of the CE, and subject to the same obligations and restrictions placed on the original BA. This ensures the security protections mandated by HIPAA flow down the entire chain of custody for sensitive patient and customer data.

Compliance Considerations After Signing a Business Associate Agreement (BAA)

Now that we’ve covered what a BAA is and the role it plays in ensuring data privacy, let’s move on to exploring some of the key things you have to do following the singing of a BAA to ensure HIPAA compliance.

1. Both Parties Must Implement HIPAA-Required Data Risk Mitigation Measures

First and foremost, while a BAA details each party’s respective responsibilities in implementing measures to protect PHI, both still actually need to implement those required security features to achieve HIPAA compliance.

The measures required under HIPAA’s Security Rule, including encryption and access control, are designed to mitigate and minimize the impact of data breaches. So, if a company suffers a security breach and later audits show the required security policies and controls were not in place, they would be subject to the consequences of HIPAA violations, including fines and reputation damage.

Also, while a BAA stipulates that the BA is responsible for implementing the HIPAA-required safeguards for the PHI under their care, it doesn’t specify exactly which security measures they must implement. Subsequently, that’s left to the BA to interpret based on their understanding of HIPAA requirements, and how they conduct their required risk assessments.

For example, if you have a BAA with your email services provider, that alone may not be enough to keep your company or organization HIPAA compliant. That’s because the provider may not have the security measures your organization needs, and instead have a carefully worded BAA that will leave you vulnerable.

Let’s say your email marketing service provider is a “semi-HIPAA compliant” provider. In these cases, they may not offer email encryption, or the necessary access control measures your organization needs to send PHI and other sensitive information safely. The so-called HIPAA compliance may be limited only to data stored at rest on their servers only.

In short, although a BAA outlines each party’s commitment to securing data, both parties still have to follow through on implementing risk mitigation measures. Additionally, though a healthcare company has its BA’s assurances that they’ll have the appropriate safeguards in place, CEs often only have limited visibility into its ongoing security posture. As a result, asking the right questions and working with a proven HIPAA compliant provider are critical steps healthcare organizations must take to ensure full compliance.

2. CEs Must Stick to “In-Scope” Services

While a BA may provide a CE with a range of services, many limit the coverage of their BAAs to particular “in-scope” services. As a result, if a healthcare organization were to use a service outside the coverage of the BAA, i.e., an “out-of-scope” service, they’d risk exposing patient data and incurring HIPAA violations.

And, even when a service is in-scope, the BA is still required to configure it properly for it to be compliant. These configurations could include:

Enabling encryption
Establishing access control
Activating multi-factor authentication (MFA)
Turning on audit logging

With this in mind, it’s crucial to ensure that the “complete” service or tool – not just a part of it – is covered by a BAA before using it to process PHI. Similarly, check the terms of your BAA for configuration or security best practices that offer guidance on fully HIPAA compliant use, and make sure your responsibilities as a CE are 100% clear.

3. Staff Must Be Trained to Securely Handle PHI

Another key reason that signing a BAA doesn’t automatically result in HIPAA compliance is the likely need for both parties to educate their staff on how to securely handle sensitive data, such as PHI.

Firstly, as discussed above, only some of the services offered by a BA may be covered by its agreement. Subsequently, a healthcare organization’s employees need to be sufficiently trained on the use and disclosure of PHI, namely, the services in which they’re permitted to process PHI and which, in contrast, services are non-compliant.

By the same token, as well as implementing the stipulated safeguards, BAs are responsible for training their workforce on how to use and, where appropriate, configure them. This will help ensure the limited, correct use and disclosure of PHI as allowed by the BAA.

4. Reporting Requirements

A BAA stipulates that a BA must notify the CE in the event of improper or unauthorized use of PHI. More specifically, this includes:

Reporting immediately any use or disclosure not permitted by the terms of the BAA.
Notifying the CE of security incidents resulting in the potential exposure of PHI.

However, the commitment to reporting in the BAA and the ability to deliver on that commitment are two different things entirely. Firstly, the BA must implement the policies and infrastructure that allow for timely incident reporting. This includes conducting risk analysis, implemeting continuous monitoring, and developing a robust incident response plan.

Additionally, a key aspect of prompt, comprehensive reporting includes the BA ensuring that their staff are sufficiently trained to detect and report security events. As part of their training on the secure handling of PHI, a BA’s employees must be able to recognize common security issues and threats, such as improper email configurations and phishing attempts, and how to report them.

5. Subcontractor BAAs

While CEs must sign BAAs with their BAs for the compliant use and disclosure of PHI, they don’t have to sign such agreements with any subcontractors the BA may employ. Instead, it’s the responsibility of the BA to enter into their own business associate agreements with their subcontractors. As a result, the original security obligations are passed all the way down the data’s chain of custody.

While a CE can take certain measures to enforce this, such as requesting proof of subcontractor BAAs – or even the ability to review subcontractors before beginning engagement – ultimately, they have little control over their security postures. Ultimately, this means that they have to trust that the original service BA does their due diligence in selecting security-minded subcontractors, with the right PHI safeguards in place.

HIPAA Compliance Beyond a BAA with LuxSci

LuxSci’s secure healthcare communications solutions – including HIPAA compliant email, text, marketing and forms – are designed specifically with the stringent compliance requirements of the healthcare industry in mind.

LuxSci also provides onboarding, comprehensive documentation, and support to ensure your infrastructure configurations align with HIPAA requirements, so you can confidently include PHI in your healthcare engagement communications campaigns.

Contact LuxSci today to discover more about achieving compliance beyond obtaining a BAA.

How Hypersegmentation Drives Greater Healthcare Marketing Engagement

August 20, 2025
Pete Wermter

In healthcare marketing, effective engagement is crucial. It’s imperative that healthcare providers, payers, and suppliers know how to connect with their patients and customers, keeping them aware of all aspects of their healthcare journey – and empowering them to participate as much as possible.

This is where segmentation comes in.

Instead of sending out healthcare marketing email communications that appeal to as many people as possible, segmentation enables healthcare companies to appeal to specific individuals or groups. It opens the doors for scenarios in which patients and customers see a message in their inbox and think, ‘this message is for me’.

With that goal in mind, this post explores use cases and best practices in segmentation, why it’s so important for healthcare companies, and different ways that marketers can segment their audiences for optimal patient and customer engagement.

What is Segmentation?

Segmentation is the process of dividing your contact list, or audience, into smaller groups based on shared data, including protected health information (ePHI) characteristics. This could include demographics (age, gender, geographic location, etc.), medical conditions, risk factors, behaviors, and so on.

Why Segmentation is Essential in Healthcare Email Marketing

For healthcare organizations, segmentation is a highly effective, and essential, strategy for sending patients and customers personalized email messaging. Personalized emails are more relevant to the recipient, which greatly increases the chance of them capturing their attention and subsequent engagement.

This allows healthcare companies to successfully achieve the objective of their email campaigns, whether that’s reducing the number of appointment no-shows, increasing adherence to care plans, securing payments, or boosting sign-ups or sales. More importantly, patients and customers are more involved in their healthcare journey, staying on top of upcoming appointments, receiving applicable advice and recommendations, and becoming aware of products and services that may prove beneficial to their health, improving overall outcomes.

Additionally, dividing audiences into distinct groups gives healthcare organizations invaluable insights into the behaviour and needs of different segments at different stages of the healthcare journey.

For instance, an email campaign targeting a particular segment may reveal that they’re more likely to miss appointments than other groups. Similarly, segmentation may highlight that a certain high-risk group neglects to book recommended health screenings. Such insights enable healthcare providers, payers, and suppliers to improve their email engagement strategies, to drive more desirable outcomes and, ultimately more satisfied, loyal, and, above all, healthier patients and customers.

How Can Segmentation Aid HIPAA Compliance?

Another considerable benefit of segmentation for healthcare organizations is that it supports their HIPAA compliance efforts. Because segmentation necessitates setting precise rules that control which individuals receive particular emails, it greatly mitigates the risk of accidentally sending sensitive patient data to the wrong person.

Let’s say, for instance, that you want to conduct an email campaign targeting expectant mothers. By creating a segment comprised of pregnant patients or customers using the appropriate data field, you ensure that sensitive, pregnancy-related information is only sent to relevant parties. By reducing the likelihood of disclosing PHI to the wrong individuals, segmentation not only helps maintain regulatory compliance, but also preserves patient trust and confidence in your organization.

Different Ways to Segment Your Audience

Demographic Segmentation

This involves grouping individuals by shared demographic attributes such as:

Age
Gender
Location
Ethnicity
Education Level
Employment Status
Marital Status
Family Status
Socioeconomic Status (Income)
Spoken Languages / Preferred Language
Income
Insurance Coverage Type
Religious or Cultural Affiliations

Demographic information is a very powerful way to segment audiences to send them valuable, highly relevant information, for example:

Sending mammogram or prostate screening recommendations to women or men over a certain age.
Sending health alerts to people in a certain region or ZIP code in response to the emergence of a disease in their area (e.g., flu, a new COVID strain).
Making educational material easy to understand and informative.

Clinical Segmentation

Here, individuals are grouped according to medical criteria, such as:

Health conditions
Prescribed medications
Treatment plans
Recent surgeries or medical procedures
Recent lab test results
Hospitalization history
Vaccination status

This enables healthcare organizations to craft a wide range of specific communications that hone in on particular patients and customers, including:

Disease management and preventative care advice for people suffering from certain conditions, e.g, how diabetic patients can best monitor and manage their blood sugar.
Recovery guidance for post-operative patients.
Feedback requests for individuals on particular treatment plans, in an effort to optimize them.

Healthcare Journey Stage Segmentation

This divides individuals according to their position in their care journey within your organization.

For healthcare providers, new patients should receive onboarding materials, explanations of services and how to make the most of them, and similar materials that help them feel welcome and informed. Existing patients, meanwhile, can be further segmented into active, overdue (inactive), or high-risk groups – all of which have different needs and ways in which they should be communicated with:

Active patients: appointment reminders, educational materials, event and service recommendations, satisfaction surveys, etc.
Overdue and inactive patients: appointment or payment reminders, re-engagement communications, etc.
At risk patients: more frequent communications, care coordination messages, or support service referrals

Behavioral Segmentation

This method of segmentation is based on how recipients interact with emails or services, including:

How often they open emails.
If they click through on links.
If they use patient portals.
If they complete forms.
How often they attend scheduled appointments.

This segmentation empowers healthcare organizations to tailor the content type, frequency, and calls-to-action based on real engagement insights, and also carry out automated workflows based on each individual’s interaction with an email.

Supercharge Your Segmentation with LuxSci

LuxSci’s empowers healthcare organizations to effectively segment their contact lists into distinct target audiences for greater engagement in the following ways:

LuxSci Secure Marketing features powerful hypersegmentation capabilities for granular targeting that increase opens, clicks and conversions for your healthcare marketing campaigns.
LuxSci Secure High Volume Email enables companies to execute campaigns encompassing hundreds of thousands or millions of emails, targeting specific groups and audiences.
Easy integration with EHR, CDP, and CRM systems to leverages deeper levels data for highly targeting, highly personalized email campaigns.

Reach out today to learn how LuxSci can help you reach more patients and customers, drive more engagement and conversions, and improve overall outcomes.

How Automated Workflows Boost Engagement for Healthcare Marketing Campaigns

August 13, 2025
Pete Wermter

Due to the fact that it’s simple, instantaneous, cost-effective, and nearly universally adopted, email is an essential part of all healthcare marketing engagement strategies. However, consistent, personalized email engagement – particularly at scale – can be challenging.

Fortunately, Automated Workflows offer a solution, allowing healthcare companies to deliver the right messages to the appropriate individuals at the right time, based on their individual engagement with emails..

In this post, we’ll explore the concept of Automated Workflows, the considerable benefits they offer healthcare companies, and the variety of ways they can be used to increase engagement and result in greater satisfaction and better healthcare outcomes for your patients and customers.

What Are Automated Workflows?

An Automated Workflow is a sequence of actions, known as’ Steps’ in LuxSci Secure Marketing, that a Contact (i.e., a patient or customer) moves through over time, based on a series of pre-defined rules or triggers.

Each Step is programmed to automatically perform a specific function, such as sending an email or updating a Contact, when certain conditions are in place. These conditions could include:

A Contact opening a message.
A Contact clicking through on a link.
A specified amount of time having elapsed..
A data update via an API call

By evaluating conditions to initiate the appropriate Step, Automated Workflows facilitate more timely, consistent, and personalized communication with Contacts (patients and customers ). As a result, healthcare companies can effectively harness Automated Workflows to develop dynamic, personalized email engagement journeys that adapt according to your patients and customers’ needs and prior interactions.

What Are the Benefits of Automated Workflows?

Let’s look at the various advantages that Luxsci Automated Workflows offer.

Reduced Administrative Workload

Arguably, the most significant benefit of Automated Workflows is the extent to which they lower the administrative burden of email engagement campaigns for healthcare organizations.

First and foremost, Automated Workflows eliminate the need for an employee to manually send your Contacts messages. As well as the manual effort, it removes a great deal of thought from the process – as someone isn’t required to remember to send an email.

By the same token, this reduces the scope for human error, preventing the possibility of an employee neglecting to send an important message, sending it to the wrong person, or worse, accidentally exposing patient data, i.e., electronic protected health information (ePHI).

The effort that Automated Workflows reduce is typically repetitive work that staff are glad to be free of, giving them additional time to focus on tasks that provide greater value and better contribute to better patient care and/or the customer experience.

Enhanced Scalability

The time saved by employing Automated Workflows increases with the size of your Contact List and the scale of your engagement campaigns. In fact, enterprise-scale campaigns, with volumes of hundreds of thousands to millions of emails, are only feasible through the use of automation.

Similarly, Automated Workflows enable healthcare organizations to run differing, personalized email campaigns aimed at unique patient or customer segments. As well as automatically sending each message at the appropriate time, they provide tracking capabilities to determine the outcome of each message.

Increased Consistency in Communication

Because Automated Workflows remediate the risk of emails going unsent, they facilitate more timely and consistent communications with patients and customers. This makes healthcare providers, payers, and suppliers appear more reliable and consistent, building trust and greater levels of satisfaction from Contacts. More importantly, recipients are better able to track what’s happening with their healthcare and assume a more proactive role overall healthcare journey..

Finally, creating an Automated Workflow requires healthcare organizations to carefully consider how they communicate with different Contact segments. Namely, the likely journey, or communication path, different types of Contacts take, i.e., information they need to know at a particular stage in their healthcare journey, the optimal order in which information needs to be presented, etc. This allows healthcare companies to become more in-tune with their patients’ and customers’ needs, enabling them to craft more valuable email communications that boost engagement.

Personalized Healthcare Engagement

Perhaps the most significant benefit of Automated Workflows is that they enable adaptive, personalized engagement for healthcare marketing and communications campiagns. Instead of manually tracking where each Contact is in a given engagement sequence, or worse, merely having to guess, you know precisely where they are. Consequently, you’re acutely aware of their needs and the exact nature of the emails you need to send them next.

This, in turn, enables more effective Contact nurturing, i.e, strengthening your organization’s connection with each individual. When at its most effective, this may allow you to anticipate your Contacts’ needs, enabling you to send them communications, such screening or testing recommendations, educational materials, or product and service suggestions, that support their healthcare journey and enhance their quality of care.

Automated Workflow Use Cases

Automated Workflows are a powerful tool for increasing healthcare marketing and communications engagement because they can be applied to a wide range of use cases. Let’s take a look at some of the most common and impactful ways email automation can be used by healthcare companies.

New Product Announcements: keeping patients and customers in the loop on your company’s latest offerings, as well as improvements to existing products and services that are likely to be of interest, based on their data and past actions.
Personalized recommendations: suggesting products or services based on the recipient’s past purchases or engagement history.
Re-Engagement Campaigns: Automated Workflows can also be used to reconnect with Contacts with whom engagement has waned or was never completely established, sending them personalized messages to encourage specific actions or reignite interest.
New Member Onboarding: welcoming new patients or customers with a structured series of emails that introduces your services, provides technical assistance (where applicable), details subsequent steps, and explains how to get the most value from your products or services.
Appointment Reminers and Follow-Ups: sending reminders, care instructions, medication adherence advice, or details on how to book subsequent appointments, for instance, after a patient visit.
Patient Education Campaigns: taking patients through a structured curriculum on managing their medical condition or required lifestyle changes to improve their health..
Preventative Care Communications: proactively sending reminders for screenings, check-ups, vaccinations, etc., based on PHI such as a patient’s age, gender, health condition or lifestyle risk factors.

Milestone Communications: sending personalized messages to acknowledge birthdays, enrollment anniversaries, and other pertinent dates. These can also be combined with preventative care communications, to send recommendations or other advice, based on the contact’s age, for instance.
Feedback Collection: acquiring patient and customer feedback by sending follow-up surveys a set amount of time after a visit, procedure, purchase, etc.

How Automated Workflows Work in LuxSci Secure Marketing

To round off this post, let’s take a deeper look at how Automated Workflows work within LuxSci’s Secure Marketing solution. LuxSci’s Automated Workflows enhance your organization’s HIPAA compliant healthcare marketing and email campaigns by giving you complete control of:

When each email is sent
Which Contacts receive particular communications according to their behavior, needs, and other PHI-based attributes
Which engagement path or branch a Contact takes based on their email actions

Here’s a look at LuxSci’s Automated Workflows key capabilities in greater detail.

Smart Event-Based Branching and Conditions

You can branch Workflows to trigger targeted messaging based on a Contact’s attributes or certain engagement events, resulting in more relevant and effective healthcare journeys with more desirable outcomes.

User actions:
- Mailing list sign-ups
- Form completion
- Downloading a resource.
Time-based triggers:
- A set period after a visit or procedure
- A defined period of inactivity or lack of contact
- Milestones, e.g., birthdays, anniversaries.
Behavioral triggers:
- Email opens
- Clicking on links
- Visiting particular pages on a site or
- A lack of engagement with previous emails.
Transactional triggers:
- Purchasing a product or service
- Signing up for an event
- Order confirmations or shipping updates after a purchase.
API-triggered events
- Lab results or similar correspondence becoming available
- Changes to data in EHR systems, CDP platforms, or CRM systems..

Automated Segment Management

Automated Workflows can be used to dynamically add Contacts to segments based on demographics, past behavior, purchase history, and similar events. This enables more precise targeting and email personalization as they progress through specific Steps in each Workflow.

Navigation Across Steps

Automated Workflows are also capable of navigating Contacts across different Steps or completely different Workflows depending on engagement outcomes and updates to a Contact’s PHI. Better still, if a Step has already been visited, LuxSci Secure Marketing automatically prevents repetition and infinite loops.

Automate Your Healthcare Marketing and Engagement Efforts

LuxSci Secure Marketing is a HIPAA compliant healthcare marketing solution especially designed for the stringent security and regulatory requirements of the healthcare industry. Our solution enables healthcare organizations to confidently communicate with patients and customers at scale without risking compliance violations, driving increased engagement and boosting the ROI of their marketing campaigns in the process.

The latest version of LuxSci’s Secure Marketing solution with Automated Workflow functionality streamlines your company’s outreach efforts, saving considerable time, reducing human effort, and facilitating intelligent Contact management.

What’s more, LuxSci’s reporting capabilities empower you to carefully track the results of your healthcare engagement campaigns, gaining insights at every step, including:

Which Contacts received particular messages
Who engaged with email communication, and how
Precise points where drop-offs in engagement occur
The engagement achieved with each Step in the Workflow

To learn more about LuxSci’s Secure Marketing solution and how Automated Workflows boost engagement for your healthcare marketing and communications campaigns, contact us today.

What Is Healthcare Marketing Management For Medical Practices?

August 11, 2025
Erik Kangas

Healthcare marketing management coordinates promotional activities, patient acquisition strategies, and compliance oversight to help medical practices attract new patients while adhering to HIPAA privacy regulations and professional advertising standards. Medical facilities require healthcare marketing management to oversee digital campaigns, traditional advertising efforts, community outreach initiatives, and patient retention programs across multiple promotional channels while ensuring all activities meet regulatory requirements and produce measurable patient acquisition outcomes.

So, why do some medical practices thrive while others struggle with patient acquisition? The answer is effective healthcare marketing management. Without dedicated oversight, promotional efforts scatter in different directions, budgets vanish without measurable results, and compliance violations create expensive legal problems.

Patient Demographics in Healthcare Marketing Management

Understanding your target audience begins with data analysis. Age groups, geographic boundaries, insurance coverage patterns, and prevalent medical conditions within your service area shape every promotional decision. Healthcare marketing management teams dive deep into existing patient records, uncovering referral patterns that reveal which sources generate the highest value patients.

Competitive intelligence gathering takes multiple forms. Some practices hire mystery shoppers to evaluate competitor services. Others analyze online reviews, pricing structures, and promotional messaging. Smart management uses this intelligence to identify market gaps rather than copying unsuccessful strategies from neighboring practices.

Budget Allocation in Healthcare Marketing Management

The amount practices should spend on digital versus traditional advertising depends on patient demographics, local market conditions, and practice specialties. Younger patients respond better to social media campaigns, while older demographics prefer direct mail and radio advertising. Healthcare marketing management level these preferences against available budgets.

Compliance costs eat into promotional budgets more than most practices realize. Legal reviews for promotional materials, staff training on privacy regulations, and business associate agreements with vendors all require financial investment. Practices that skip these expenses face much larger costs when regulatory violations occur.

Digital Campaigns & Healthcare Marketing Management

Your practice website is the digital front door for new patients. But websites alone don’t generate appointments. Search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, social media engagement, and content marketing must work together seamlessly. Healthcare marketing management orchestrates these elements to create comprehensive digital presence.

Content creation poses challenges in healthcare. Educational articles about medical conditions can attract patients searching for information. However, any content featuring patient stories or treatment outcomes requires careful authorization management. One unauthorized patient photo or testimonial can trigger costly HIPAA violations.

Compliance Integration Protects Promotional Investments

HIPAA violations from promotional activities result in average penalties exceeding $100,000 per incident. Healthcare marketing management prevents these disasters through systematic compliance integration. Every promotional campaign, vendor relationship, and content piece undergoes privacy review before launch. Documentation proves compliance during regulatory audits. Smart practices maintain detailed records of patient authorizations, vendor agreements, and staff training completion. These records protect practices when investigators examine promotional activities for potential privacy violations.

Community Outreach to Build Healthcare Marketing Management

Local health fairs provide face-to-face patient interaction opportunities that digital campaigns cannot replicate. However, these events require careful planning to maximize return on investment while protecting patient privacy. Healthcare marketing management coordinates booth staffing, educational materials, and follow-up procedures to convert event contacts into scheduled appointments. Referral relationships with other healthcare providers generate consistent new patient flows. But referral agreements must comply with anti-kickback laws and fraud prevention regulations. Healthcare marketing management navigates these legal requirements while building mutually beneficial professional relationships.

Performance Analytics Guide Healthcare Marketing Management Optimization

Which promotional channels generate the most valuable patients? Website analytics, call tracking systems, and appointment scheduling data provide answers. Healthcare marketing management uses this information to optimize budget allocation and eliminate wasteful spending on ineffective promotional channels. Patient lifetime value calculations reveal which acquisition strategies produce the best long-term results. Some promotional channels attract patients who schedule one appointment and never return. Others generate loyal patients who refer family members and friends.

Implementation Coordination

Successful promotional campaigns require precise timing and resource coordination. Campaign launches, content publication schedules, and community event participation must align with practice capacity and seasonal patient demand patterns. Healthcare marketing management prevents promotional success from overwhelming practice operations. Seasonal planning creates promotional opportunities that many practices miss. Flu vaccination campaigns, summer sports injury prevention, and back-to-school wellness checks all present timely promotional angles. Healthcare marketing management preparation captures these opportunities while competitors scramble to react.

How To Create a Healthcare Marketing Plan?

August 4, 2025
Erik Kangas

A healthcare marketing plan establishes strategic promotional activities, target audience identification, budget allocation, and compliance protocols to attract new patients while adhering to HIPAA privacy regulations and state advertising laws. Medical practices develop these documents to guide their promotional efforts across digital platforms, traditional media, and community outreach programs, ensuring all patient acquisition activities comply with healthcare privacy requirements and professional advertising standards.

Medical practices compete intensely for patient attention in saturated healthcare markets. Developing promotional strategies without proper planning leads to wasted resources, compliance violations, and missed opportunities to connect with patients who need specific medical services.

Target Audience in Healthcare Marketing Plan Development

Patient demographic research identifies age groups, geographic locations, insurance coverage types, and medical conditions that align with practice specialties and service offerings. Healthcare organizations analyze existing patient data to understand referral patterns, appointment scheduling preferences, and communication channel effectiveness for different population segments.

Competitor analysis reveals promotional strategies used by similar practices, pricing structures for comparable services, and market gaps that create opportunities for differentiation. This research helps practices position their services uniquely while avoiding oversaturated promotional approaches that fail to generate meaningful patient engagement.

Budget Allocation

Financial planning allocates resources across promotional channels based on expected return on investment, patient acquisition costs, and practice revenue goals. Digital advertising usually receives 40-60% of promotional budgets due to measurable results and targeted audience capabilities, while traditional media and community events receive smaller allocations.

Compliance costs including legal reviews, authorization management, and privacy training must be factored into promotional budgets to ensure all activities meet regulatory requirements. Practices that underestimate compliance expenses often discover their promotional activities violate privacy laws or professional advertising standards.

Digital Strategy to Drive Modern Patient Acquisition

Website optimization, search engine marketing, and social media presence are the core of contemporary promotional efforts outlined in every healthcare marketing plan. Practices invest in professional website design, patient portal integration, and mobile-responsive layouts to capture patients researching medical services online.

Content creation including blog posts, educational videos, and patient resources helps establish expertise while providing valuable information to potential patients. However, all content must avoid using patient information without authorization and cannot make unsubstantiated medical claims that violate advertising regulations.

Compliance Integration Protects Promotional Activities

HIPAA authorization procedures, business associate agreements with promotional vendors, and state advertising law compliance must be woven throughout every aspect of promotional planning. Healthcare marketing plan development includes legal review processes, privacy impact assessments, and staff training protocols to prevent violations.

Documentation requirements for promotional activities include consent forms, vendor contracts, and approval workflows that demonstrate compliance with healthcare privacy laws. Practices without proper documentation face significant penalties when regulatory investigations uncover promotional activities that violate patient privacy protections.

Community Outreach Builds Local Patient Relationships

Health fairs, educational seminars, and community partnerships create opportunities for practices to connect with potential patients through face-to-face interactions. These activities require planning to ensure patient privacy protection while maximizing promotional impact through relationship building and trust development.

Referral programs with other healthcare providers, local businesses, and community organizations can generate new patient leads when structured appropriately. Any financial incentives for referrals must comply with healthcare fraud and abuse laws to avoid legal complications.

Performance Measurement Guides Strategy Optimization

Patient acquisition metrics, appointment conversion rates, and promotional channel effectiveness data help practices evaluate their promotional success and adjust strategies accordingly. Healthcare marketing plan implementation includes tracking systems for website traffic, phone inquiries, and new patient appointments generated by different promotional activities.

Return on investment calculations compare promotional spending with revenue generated from new patients to determine which activities provide the best financial results. Practices use this data to reallocate budgets toward high-performing promotional channels while eliminating ineffective strategies.

Implementation Timeline

Monthly promotional calendars coordinate campaign launches, content publication schedules, and community event participation to maximize promotional impact while avoiding resource conflicts. Healthcare marketing plan execution requires detailed project management to ensure all activities launch on schedule and within budget constraints. Seasonal considerations including flu shot campaigns, wellness check promotions, and holiday health messaging opportunities require advance planning to capitalize on increased patient interest during specific time periods. Practices that plan these campaigns well in advance may achieve better results than those that react to opportunities without preparation.

What Is Healthcare Marketing Compliance for Medical Practices?

July 21, 2025
Erik Kangas

Healthcare marketing compliance involves strict adherence to HIPAA authorization requirements, state privacy regulations, and industry advertising standards when using patient information for promotional purposes. Medical practices must obtain written patient consent before incorporating protected health information into testimonials, case studies, or targeted advertising campaigns, while ensuring all business associate agreements with promotional vendors include appropriate data protection clauses and breach notification procedures.

Medical practices pursue new patient acquisition through promotional activities while protecting existing patient privacy rights. Marketing departments frequently discover that their most compelling promotional ideas involve patient stories, treatment outcomes, or demographic data that require extensive legal review before implementation.

Written Authorization for Healthcare Marketing Compliance

Patient authorization must precede any use of PHI in promotional materials, specifying exactly which information will be disclosed, identifying all recipients of promotional communications, and explaining patient rights to revoke consent. These forms require expiration dates, signature requirements, and plain language descriptions that patients can easily comprehend without legal expertise.

Organizations cannot combine promotional authorization with treatment consent forms or condition medical services on patients agreeing to promotional uses of their information. Patients who decline promotional authorization must receive identical treatment quality and cannot experience discrimination or reduced service levels because of their privacy choices.

State Privacy Laws

California’s Consumer Privacy Act, Texas Medical Records Privacy Act, and other state regulations impose requirements that exceed federal HIPAA standards for promotional activities. Some states require opt-in consent for all promotional communications, while others mandate specific disclosure language or waiting periods before promotional authorization becomes effective.

Multi-state healthcare systems must comply with the most restrictive state requirements across all their operations to avoid violating patient privacy laws. Organizations operating in states with enhanced privacy protections cannot rely solely on healthcare marketing compliance but must incorporate additional state-specific requirements into their promotional practices.

Digital Advertising Platforms

Social media advertising, email promotional platforms, and website analytics tools frequently request access to patient contact information, demographic data, or behavioral tracking that falls under privacy protection laws. Healthcare marketing compliance requires careful evaluation of third-party technology vendors to ensure they provide appropriate business associate agreements and data protection measures.

Retargeting campaigns that track patient website visits or online behavior present particular risks when healthcare organizations use advertising pixels, conversion tracking, or audience segmentation tools. These technologies may inadvertently transmit protected information to advertising networks without proper authorization or contractual protections.

Vendor Management Protects Marketing Activities

Advertising agencies, promotional consultants, and marketing service providers need business associate agreements before accessing any patient information for campaign development or audience analysis. These contracts must specify permitted uses of protected data, establish security requirements, and outline breach notification procedures when privacy violations occur.

Organizations retain full liability for vendor compliance failures, making thorough due diligence essential before selecting promotional partners. Healthcare marketing compliance programs should include vendor auditing procedures, contract review protocols, and performance monitoring systems to ensure privacy protection throughout promotional activities.

Content Creation Within Privacy Protection Guidelines

Patient testimonials, success stories, and case studies require detailed authorization forms that specify exactly how patient information will be used across different promotional channels and time periods. De-identification offers an alternative approach but requires removing all identifying elements according to HIPAA standards, including dates, locations, and demographic details that could reveal patient identity.

Photography and video content featuring patients or their treatment areas need separate consent documentation covering future use, distribution methods, and duration of permission. Healthcare marketing compliance includes behind-the-scenes content, facility tours, and staff interviews that might inadvertently capture patient information in background elements.

Staff Education Prevents Privacy Violations

Marketing personnel, communications staff, and external vendors need education about distinguishing between permissible healthcare communications and restricted promotional activities requiring authorization. Training programs should cover identification of protected information, authorization requirements, and escalation procedures for situations requiring legal review.

Updates cover new promotional channels, technology platforms, and changing regulatory interpretations that affect healthcare marketing compliance standards. Organizations benefit from establishing clear approval workflows for promotional materials and designating privacy personnel to review campaigns before launch.

Enforcement Actions Shape Compliance Priorities

Recent OCR investigations have targeted healthcare organizations using patient information in social media posts, email campaigns, and website content without proper authorization. These enforcement actions show increasing federal attention to promotional activities and willingness to impose financial penalties for privacy violations.

Settlement agreements frequently require organizations to implement comprehensive compliance programs, conduct staff training, and submit to monitoring for extended periods. Healthcare marketing compliance programs that consider these enforcement priorities can minimize violation risks and avoid costly regulatory investigations.

Know the Biggest Email Threats Facing Healthcare Right Now

July 16, 2025
Pete Wermter

Due to its near-universal adoption, speed, and cost-effectiveness, email remains one of the most common communication channels in healthcare. Consequently, it’s one of the most frequent targets for cyber attacks, as malicious actors are acutely aware of the vast amounts of sensitive data contained in messages – and standard email communication’s inherent vulnerabilities.

In light of this, healthcare organizations must remain aware of the evolving email threat landscape, and implement effective strategies to protect the electronic protected health information (ePHI) included in email messages. Failing to properly secure email communications jeopardizes patient data privacy, which can disrupt operations, result in costly HIPAA compliance violations, and, most importantly, compromise the quality of their patients’ healthcare provision.

With all this in mind, this post details the biggest email threats faced by healthcare organizations today, with the greatest potential to cause your business or practice harm by compromising patient and company data. You can also get our 2025 report on the latest email threats, which includes strategies on how to overcome them.

Ransomware Attacks

Ransomware is a type of malware that encrypts, corrupts, or deletes a healthcare organization’s data or critical systems, and enables the cybercriminals that deployed it to demand a payment (i.e., a ransom) for their restoration. Healthcare personnel can unwittingly download ransomware onto their devices by opening a malicious email attachment or clicking on a link contained in an email.

In recent years, ransomware has emerged as the email security threat with the most significant financial impact. In 2024, for instance, there were over 180 confirmed ransomware attacks with an average paid ransom of nearly $1 million.

Email Client Misconfiguration

While a healthcare organization may implement email security controls, many fail to know the security gaps of their current email service provider (ESP) or understand the value of a HIPAA compliant email platform, leaving data vulnerable to email threats, such as unauthorized access and ePHI exposure, and also, subsequently, a greater risk of compliance violations and reputation damage.

Common types of email misconfiguration include:

Lack of enforced TLS encryption: resulting in emails being transmitted in plaintext, rendering the patient data they contain readable by cybercriminals in the event of interception during transit.
Improper SPF/DKIM/DMARC setup: failure to configure or align these email authentication protocols correctly gives malicious actors greater latitude to successfully spoof trusted domains.
Disabled or lax user authentication: a lack of authentication measures, such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), increases the risk of unauthorized access and ePHI exposure.
Misconfigured secure email gateways: incorrect rules or filtering policies can allow phishing emails through or block legitimate messages.
Outdated or unsupported email client software: simply neglecting to download and apply the latest updates or patches from the email client’s vendor can leave vulnerabilities, which are well-known to cybercriminals, exposed to attack.

Social Engineering Attacks

A social engineering attack involves a malicious actor deceiving or convincing healthcare employees into granting unauthorized access or exposing patient data. Relying on psychological manipulation, social engineering attacks exploit a person’s trust, urgency, fear, or curiosity, and encompass an assortment of threats, including phishing and business email compromise (BEC) attacks, which are covered in greater depth below.

Phishing

As mentioned above, phishing is a type of social engineering attack, but they are so widespread that it warrants its own mention. Phishing sees malicious actors impersonating legitimate companies, or their employees, to trick victims into revealing sensitive patient data.

Subsequently, healthcare organizations can be subjected to several different types of phishing attacks, which include:

General phishing: otherwise known as bulk phishing or simply ‘phishing’, these are broad, generic attacks where emails are sent to large numbers of recipients, impersonating trusted entities to steal credentials or deliver malware.
Spear phishing: more targeted attacks that involve personalized phishing emails crafted for a specific healthcare organization or individual. These require more research on the part of malicious actors and typically use relevant insider details gleaned from their reconnaissance for additional credibility.
Whaling: a form of spear phishing that specifically targets healthcare executives or other high-level employees.
Clone phishing: when a cybercriminal duplicates a legitimate email that was previously received by the target, replacing links or attachments with malicious ones.
Credential phishing: also known as ‘pharming’, this involves emails that link to fake login pages designed to capture healthcare employees’ usernames and passwords under the guise of frequently used legitimate services.

Domain Impersonation and Spoofing

This category of threat revolves around making malicious messages appear legitimate, which can allow them to bypass basic email security checks. As alluded to above, these attacks exploit weaknesses in email client misconfigurations to trick the recipient, typically to expose and exfiltrate patient data, steal employee credentials, or distribute malware.

Domain spoofing email threats involve altering the “From” address in an email header to make it appear to be from a legitimate domain. If a healthcare organization fails to properly configure authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, there’s a greater risk of their email servers failing to flag malicious messages and allowing them to land in users’ inboxes.

Domain impersonation, on the other hand, requires cybercriminals to register a domain that closely resembles a legitimate one. This may involve typosquatting, e.g., using “paypa1.com” instead of “paypal.com”. Alternatively, a hacker may utilize a homograph attack, which substitutes visually similar characters, e.g., from different character sets, such as Cyrillic. Malicious actors will then send emails from these fraudulent domains, which often have the ability to bypass basic email filters because they aren’t exact matches for blacklisted domains. Worse still, such emails can appear authentic to users, particularly if the attacker puts in the effort to accurately mimic the branding, formatting, and tone used by the legitimate entity they’re attempting to impersonate.

Insider Email Threats

In addition to external parties, employees within a healthcare organization can pose email threats to the security of its PHI. On one hand, insider threats can be intentional, involving disgruntled employees or third-party personnel abusing their access privileges to steal or corrupt patient data. Alternatively, they could be the result of mere human error or negligence, stemming from ignorance, or even fatigue.

What’s more, insider threats have been exacerbated by the rise of remote and flexible conditions since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has created more complex IT infrastructures that are more difficult to manage and control.

Business Email Compromise (BEC) Attacks

A BEC attack is a highly targeted type of social engineering attack in which cybercriminals gain access to, or copy, a legitimate email account to impersonate a known and trusted individual within an organization. BEC attacks typically require extensive research on the targeted healthcare company and rely less on malicious links or attachments, unlike phishing, which can make them difficult to detect.

Due to the high volume of emails transmitted within the healthcare industry, and the sensitive nature of PHI often included in communications to patients and between organizations, the healthcare industry is a consistent target of BEC attacks.

BEC attacks come in several forms, such as:

Account compromise: hijacking a real employee’s account and sending fraudulent messages.
Executive fraud: impersonating high-ranking personnel to request urgent financial transactions or access to sensitive data.
Invoice fraud: pretending to be a vendor asking for the payment of a fraudulent invoice into an account under their control.

Supply Chain Risk

Healthcare organizations increasingly rely on third-party vendors, including cloud service providers, software vendors, and billing or payment providers to serve their patients and customers. They constantly communicate with their supply chain partners via email, with some messages containing sensitive patient data; moreover, some of these organizations will have various levels of access to the PHI under their care.

Consequently, undetected vulnerabilities or lax security practices within your supply chain network could serve as entry points for email threats and malicious action. For instance, cybercriminals can compromise the email servers of a healthcare company’s third-party vendor or partner, and then send fraudulent emails from their domains to deploy malware or extract patient data.

Another, somewhat harrowing, way to understand supply chain risk is that while your organization may have a robust email security posture, in reality, it’s only as strong as that of your weakest third-party vendor’s security controls.

Download LuxSci’s Email Cyber Threat Readiness Report

To gain further insight into the biggest email threats to healthcare companies in 2025, including increasingly prevalent AI threats, download your copy of LuxSci’s Email Cyber Threat Readiness Report.

You’ll also learn about the upcoming changes to the HIPAA Security Rule and how it’s set to impact your organization going forward, and the most effective strategies for strengthening your email security posture.

Grab your copy of the report here and begin the journey to strengthening your company’s email threat readiness today.

What Are the HIPAA Marketing Compliance Requirements?

July 14, 2025
Erik Kangas

HIPAA marketing compliance requires healthcare organizations to obtain written patient authorization before using protected health information for promotional communications, with strict exceptions for treatment communications, appointment reminders, and health-related benefits descriptions. Organizations must distinguish between permissible healthcare operations communications and restricted promotional activities, ensuring that any PHI used for advertising purposes receives explicit patient consent through properly executed authorization forms that detail the intended use, recipients, and patient rights.

Healthcare organizations tend to struggle with the boundary between acceptable patient communications and prohibited promotional activities. Marketing materials that reference patient experiences, treatment outcomes, or demographic information without proper authorization create immediate HIPAA marketing compliance violations.

Authorization Requirements & Marketing Boundaries

Written patient authorization must precede any use of PHI for promotional purposes, including testimonials, case studies, or targeted advertising campaigns. These authorization forms must specify the exact information to be used, identify recipients of the promotional materials, and explain the patient’s right to revoke consent at any time. Healthcare organizations cannot condition treatment or payment on patients providing authorization for promotional activities.

Authorization forms require language elements including expiration dates, patient signature requirements, and clear descriptions of how PHI will be used in promotional contexts. Organizations must maintain signed authorization documents and respect revocation requests immediately upon receipt, stopping all ongoing promotional activities involving that patient’s information.

Treatment Communications Receive Different Standards

Healthcare organizations can communicate directly with patients about treatment alternatives, appointment scheduling, and health-related services without obtaining separate authorization. These communications fall under treatment or healthcare operations rather than promotional activities, allowing providers to send appointment reminders, medication adherence information, and preventive care notifications without additional consent.

Communications that promote third-party products, include financial incentives for referrals, or advertise non-medical services require authorization even when sent to existing patients. Organizations must evaluate each communication to determine whether it serves legitimate healthcare purposes or constitutes promotional activity requiring consent.

Third-Party Vendor Relationships Create Additional Obligations

BAAs with promotional vendors must address PHI handling requirements and specify permitted uses of patient information. Vendors creating promotional materials, managing patient communications, or analyzing treatment data for promotional purposes need appropriate legal frameworks governing their access to protected information.

Healthcare organizations are liable for vendor compliance failures, making careful selection and monitoring of promotional partners essential. Contracts must include breach notification procedures, data destruction requirements, and audit rights to ensure HIPAA marketing compliance with patient information protection standards.

Challenges of Digital Advertising Platforms

Social media advertising, email campaigns, and online promotional activities often involve sharing patient data with technology platforms that may not meet HIPAA requirements. Healthcare organizations must avoid uploading patient contact lists, demographic information, or treatment details to advertising platforms without proper authorization and business associate agreements.

Retargeting campaigns that track patient website visits or online behavior require careful evaluation to ensure no PHI is shared with advertising networks. Organizations should implement protections to prevent accidental transmission of patient information through website analytics, social media pixels, or advertising platform integration.

Patient Testimonials and Case Studies

Using patient stories, photographs, or treatment outcomes in promotional materials requires detailed authorization forms that specify exactly how patient information will be used. These authorizations must address potential future uses, distribution channels, and the duration of consent to prevent compliance violations when promotional materials are repurposed or distributed broadly.

De-identification of patient information offers an alternative to authorization but requires removing all identifying elements according to HIPAA standards. Organizations must ensure that demographic information, treatment dates, and outcome details cannot be combined to identify patients when creating promotional case studies or success stories.

Staff Training & HIPAA Marketing Compliance Violations

Employees involved in promotional activities need training on distinguishing between permissible healthcare communications and restricted promotional activities. Staff must understand authorization requirements, recognize when business associate agreements are necessary, and identify situations requiring legal review before implementing promotional campaigns.

Training updates address new promotional channels, new technology platforms, and changing regulatory interpretations of HIPAA requirements. Organizations should establish clear approval processes for promotional materials and designate compliance personnel to review campaigns before launch.

Common Violations

Recent OCR enforcement cases display the penalties incurred for using patient information in promotional materials without authorization, sharing PHI with advertising vendors without business associate agreements, and failing to honor patient requests to opt out of promotional communications. These violations result in significant financial penalties and corrective action requirements.

Healthcare organizations face scrutiny of their promotional activities, particularly digital advertising campaigns and patient outreach programs. Compliance programs must include audits of promotional materials, vendor relationships, and patient authorization procedures to identify and address potential violations before they result in enforcement actions.

Why is High Email Deliverability Essential for Healthcare Companies?

June 30, 2025
Pete Wermter

With email communication playing a critical role in the customer engagement strategies of virtually every organization, high email deliverability rates are vital to success across all industries. In the healthcare sector, however, the stakes can be far higher. An undelivered email isn’t merely an inconvenience or a lost sales opportunity; it could mean a missed appointment, a delay in a prescription refill, or a failure to get a patient critical healthcare information. Or worse, the email could end up in the hands of an unintended recipient, including bad actors and cybercriminals.

With this in mind, this post details why high email deliverability is essential for healthcare companies, as well as how your organization benefits from reliable and rapid email delivery.

Speed and Efficiency

The primary reason that high email deliverability is crucially important to healthcare organizations is to best guarantee essential communications that directly impact an individual’s healthcare journey reach them promptly. These transactional emails can include appointment reminders, prescription renewals, product order confirmations, test results, explanation of benefits notices, payment reminders, and invoices. Administrative notifications related to software or systems that a patient might use, such as a password reset for an online portal, also fall under the category of transactional emails.

When transactional emails are delayed or fail to reach people altogether, they can compromise a patient’s ability to access care, adhere to treatment plans, stay informed on key facets of their healthcare journey, and, ultimately, achieve optimal health outcomes.

When a patient fails to receive an expected email, such as a prescription confirmation, for example, it can leave them feeling confused and unsure of what to do next. For individuals who are sick, elderly, or managing chronic conditions, this can cause unnecessary stress, anxiety, and even compromise adherence to care plans.

In contrast, high email delivery rates create the opposite effect, helping patients get the communications and information they need. This increases their trust in your company and gives them a firmer sense of control over their healthcare journey.

Compliance with HIPAA Regulations

While the above point stresses the importance of reliable email delivery for the patient’s and customer’s benefit, healthcare companies also have a vested interest in ensuring communications reach the intended recipient for regulatory and patient privacy reasons.

To comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), emails that contain sensitive patient data, i.e., electronic protected health information (ePHI), must be securely delivered to the intended recipient. If, on the other hand, a communication containing ePHI fails to reach the intended recipient patient, that represents a failure in secure communications and a potential HIPAA violation for your organization.

After all, where did the patient’s data go? Was it delivered to the wrong person? Was it blocked by a spam filter and is left sitting unencrypted on a server somewhere?

If you can’t answer these questions, you could be exposed to a data breach, and it could result in a HIPAA violation, meaning your organization incurrs the associated consequences, including financial penalties and reputational damage. Conversely, deploying a fully HIPAA compliant email solution, such as LuxSci, supported by a dedicated infrastructure and designed for high email delivery enables your organization to include patient data in communications with confidence and ensure you messages land in the recipient’s inbox.

Greater Levels of Personalization and Engagement

Finally, high email deliverability rates are essential for healthcare organizations because they help drive greater levels of engagement with patients and customers. Higher email deliverability means better inbox placement, leading to more emails being opened, more links being clicked, and more conversions for your communications and campaigns.

In the case of healthcare retailers, for example, this equates to converting more prospects into customers and, consequently, maximizing the ROI of email marketing campaigns, in some cases with up to 80% better results.

While healthcare marketers, understandably, focus most of their efforts on crafting attention-grabbing headlines, personalizing the message content, and the email’s design elements, these factors are rendered irrelevant if the message fails to reach the recipient in the first place! When you take this into account, high email deliverability is a crucial component in optimizing the ROI of email communications and campaigns, and an all too often overlooked component at that.

Get Your Copy LuxSci’s Achieving High Email Deliverability Best Practices Paper

To learn more about the importance and value of high email deliverability for healthcare companies, download your copy of LuxSci’s latest Best Practices Paper: How to Achieve High Email Deliverability in Healthcare. You’ll discover:

How to opitmize performance for the different types of healthcare emails.
Powerful strategies for increasing your company’s email deliverability rates.
How small increases in email deliverability can have considerable effects on your marketing ROI

Grab your copy of the report here, and learn how to enhance your email deliverability rates today.

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