What is HIPAA Compliant Email Marketing?

If you are a healthcare organization, you are familiar with HIPAA. For every patient you treat, you must abide by HIPAA to protect his or her protected health information (PHI).

But in order to protect patient data, you need to have patients in the first place. That’s where a marketing strategy comes in.

Why is it useful to include PHI in email marketing?

Healthcare organizations have been sending email newsletters for years. However, due to HIPAA regulations and the requirement of protecting PHI, standard email marketing platforms only allow for the most generic communications and massive blasts versus targeted campaigns using patient data to deliver personalized emails with information specific to the patient’s treatment or health goals.

In order to send more specific, targeted marketing emails or share PHI in an email campaign, to be safe you should use a HIPAA compliant email marketing service.

What makes an email marketing campaign HIPAA compliant?

As a healthcare organization, you should have a HIPAA compliant email provider in place already for direct email. 

However, most marketing email services are not HIPAA compliant; HIPAA requires that you store any hosted PHI safely, and an email address can be considered PHI. 

In addition, unless the solution is installed on-premise, the email marketing vendor must sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with its customers.

Data stored at-rest with the vendor will invariably contain PHI, so you must keep it properly safeguarded. 

Most importantly, if you are sending PHI in a marketing email, you must use a HIPAA compliant email marketing solution.

What is the best HIPAA compliant email marketing solution to use?

There are very few email marketing solutions out there that will sign a BAA and also have a seamless recipient experience to view secure emails. That’s why we’re introducing our own solution, Paubox Marketing, powered by our HITRUST CSF certified Secure Email API. 

Paubox Marketing allows you to segment and send secure emails using your patient data to drive more engagement and results. All while staying HIPAA compliant.

Conclusion

Healthcare marketing emails must:

• Abide by HIPAA regulations

• Use HIPAA compliant email marketing services (such as Paubox Marketing)

Try Paubox Marketing for free and make your email marketing HIPAA compliant today. START FOR FREE