As a healthcare provider, it’s very important to make sure that you get the best HIPAA-compliant email solution available. Not only is it important to find an email service that’s professional and comprehensive, but you also want to focus on consistency and value. Yet at the same time, you need to narrow down the right solution to fit your requirements. With that being said, investing your time in finding the best email service is going to help immensely, and here’s what you need to know.
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Why Does the HIPAA Email Service Compliance Matter for Healthcare Providers?
Healthcare organizations tend to share a lot of personal information via emails. That’s why having the best HIPAA compliant email is extremely important. You need to ensure that info like billing, diagnoses, lab results, appointment dates, patient names, all of that info is extremely important. If the info is not stored with appropriate safeguards, you will encounter issues. These can be anything from reputational damage to breach notification obligations and so on. It’s crucial to have the right email partner, so you can’t just take things for granted.
Things To Look for When Selecting the Best HIPAA-Compliant Email Provider
If you want to find a great HIPAA-compliant email provider, there are certain elements that you do want to take into account, as follows:
- The vendor should sign BAA covering services which will cover the PHI.
- HIPAA-focused onboarding and support are necessary here as well.
- Business continuity and incident response features are also mandatory.
- Deletion and retention controls are a necessity here.
- Secure reply and threads handling will be crucial to consider.
- Flexible recipient delivery.
- Data loss prevention and automatic encryption policies.
- Audit reporting and logging.
- Multi factor authentication and access controls.
- Powerful encryption at rest and in transit.
These are some of the main things to focus on when it comes to getting the best HIPAA-compliant email option. Of course, it also comes down to your specific requirements from an email tool. But generally, this is what you need to be looking out for.
Professional HIPAA-Compliant Email Services
1. Luxsci
Luxsci is widely known for being a healthcare marketing platform and end to end secure email solution. Some of the key features are the SecureLine gateway technology, but also the very powerful infrastructure option and flexible encryption system. They also have the automated policy enforcement, BAA support, and great healthcare tools.
What sets it apart is the flexible delivery, along with the healthcare focus and options for the dedicated infrastructure. On top of that, you have compliance guidance and BAAs, all of which are extremely powerful and effective. The downside is that it can be quite expensive. It’s a good option for the smaller healthcare providers, mental health practices and clinics that routinely send PHI using email and want a powerful HIPAA solution with secure delivery.
2. Paubox
Paubox is designed to deliver great HIPAA email encryption that also integrates with existing email services. On top of that, it has phishing protection, outbound encryption is delivered by default, and you have phishing protection tailored for healthcare. The secure delivery is great, because you are not forced to use a separate portal, something that other services would force upon you.
Additionally, the sender experience here is very seamless, and you also have default outbound encryption. The service has healthcare-oriented security features, including phishing protection, threat intelligence and other similar solutions. With that in mind, it lacks advanced marketing tools and it focuses more on security. It still has reporting, mass patient engagement and other features that you might be interested in.
Paubox is ideal for companies that want a low-friction system with an always-on encryption. It allows clinicians to continue using the email system they want, while also maintaining the desired HIPAA requirements. That’s certainly effective, and it helps provide a much more consistent result than expected.
3. Virtru
Virtru is excellent for those that want client-side encryption, but also other things like data protection overlays. What makes it very different is that it has persistent protection. Yet at the same time, it also integrates with the most common business workflows. That alone makes it one of the best HIPAA-compliant email solutions on the market at this time. Not only that, but it has FIPS validated cryptography for the regulated environments. Their strong cryptographic posture and the fact that it has authorizations at a government scale does make the solution extremely powerful and super effective.
That being said, it does have tons of complexity for the mass campaigns, and the advanced controls will come at a higher cost. However, it’s good for organizations that want to have tight control and also auditability over the PHI shared using email. It’s effective, comprehensive and highly professional.
4. Zix by Webroot
Zix has been around of the industry for a very long time, and it’s been one of the top players in the data loss prevention and email encryption sector. It offers very good encryption solutions, along with the ability to quarantine or encrypt messages that have sensitive content. It also has multiple methods of delivery, so you can ensure security, but also reliability at the highest level.
Zix does come with some usability tradeoffs. The challenge here is that it could lead to false positives if you don’t fine tune the encryption system and just stick with the automated option. Then, complex setups can be suitable for organizations that feature a centralized IT team. It’s still one of the go-to options if you are a part of an enterprise or large health systems that need a centralized DLP along with a robust policy engine. Those things alone make it well-worth checking out, especially in the long term.
5. Sendgrid
Sendgrid does a good job at offering comprehensive solutions and the value for money that it brings to the table is nothing short of powerful. It allows you to turn your emails into revenue with help from a professional and highly effective email platform. Not only that, but they also have great deliverability, along with powerful email expertise and the ability to scale with confidence all the time.
The email marketing features that they provide are very intuitive and you will find the solutions to be extremely powerful. It’s designed to be adaptable for any enterprise, but it works great for the health sector as well. It also features a plethora of guidelines and resources to get started. That way, it becomes much easier to use, and it helps convey an exceptional return on investment. While it’s not as commonly used in the healthcare sector due to various compliance concerns, it’s still worth considering.
6. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is considered to be the go-to options for email marketing, and it could be a good option if you want a reliable solution for healthcare. Unlike the other options shown above, this one isn’t really geared towards the healthcare world. With that being said, it does come with some very powerful marketing automation systems that make it a go-to for many people in the industry.
It also allows you to customize the customer flow, while also making it easy to build relationships and maintaining a high level of consistency. Another advantage with this tool is that it’s built to help you automate things, and it can be streamlined to your, specific needs. That alone makes it a game-changer for many users. It’s just not ideal for healthcare-specific requirements, as there are more comprehensive options.
Implementation Tips You Need to Keep in Mind
If you are very serious about implementing the best HIPAA-compliant email tool, there are certain things you might have to take into consideration. These include:
- Always create approve templates and train your staff in order to avoid any accidental PHI exposure that could happen.
- Moreover, you want to segregate the PHI and the non-PHI channels. Having separate marketing tools for each one is recommended.
- Enforce MFA, but also role-based access. That will help improve your security, while eliminating any possible concerns that will eventually arise.
- Monitoring and losing everything and auditing is always going to help, not to mention it will eliminate a lot of potential challenges.
- Moreover, document the risk analysis and keep records of the vendor BAAs, where possible.
- Test the delivery to external recipients, too. You want to verify how good the patient experience is, secure the link UX, but also assess the mobile behavior. In the end, you always want it to be very seamless to patients, so try to use that to your advantage.
These are the best HIPAA-compliant email tools that you can start using today. Not only are they very comprehensive, but they are easy to customize and offer great security. That’s important in the healthcare industry where you are always dealing with patient information and other sensitive information. Thankfully, with these great HIPAA-compliant email tools, it becomes much easier to communicate with clients, offer them the right solutions, while also saving time and resources on your side. That’s why these are well-worth using today, and it’s a good idea toc heck each of them to see what fits your needs and use case the most!
