HIPAA-Compliant Email Marketing: How to Safely Communicate with Patients?

Communicating with patients is crucial in the healthcare world, and it can also be a double-edged sword. On one hand, you have a meaningful way of connecting with your patients and ensuring that they get access to all the necessary information. On the other hand, however, these online communication systems can be prone to hacks and data leaks. That’s why using HIPAA compliant marketing solutions is extremely important. These help increase safety, while offering the much-needed protection you need for patient data.

What does HIPAA compliant marketing mean?

At its core, HIPAA compliant marketing is designed to help any healthcare provider to connect with their patients safely. They can send educational or promotional content that could include protected health information or PHI. Naturally, that data needs to be kept safe, so making sure that there are no leaks is extremely important here.

Data including appointment reminders, preventive care tips, secure patient surveys or personalized health program updates, those are crucial and you do have to take them all into consideration. In order to maintain adequate compliance, HIPAA compliant marketing tools need to have encryption, access controls, audit logs, signed BAAs, opt-in as well as consent management, but also data storage and comprehensive deletion policies.

Why shouldn’t you use regular email platforms for PHI?

There are many reasons why you have to take that into account. For example, general email platforms don’t sign BAAs and they don’t always offer HIPAA compliance. That’s why you want to use a HIPAA compliant marketing tool. Generalized tools do allow you to send encrypted messages, but if you send PHI via these services, it violates HIPAA due to the vendor lacking technical safeguards and contractual requirements.

That’s the reason why HIPAA compliant marketing platforms will sign a BAA, they will deliver automatic encryption for the PHI, not to mention secure delivery to patients. Having comprehensive, detailed tools specifically made for these things helps a lot, and it just goes to show the results you can get from something like this.

Also, traditional email marketing tools have a shared infrastructure. There’s no real data isolation or focus on encryption. And that’s mainly because the focus is more on the general audience, not something specific to the healthcare world. That’s why it’s incredibly important to assess all the information, and once you do it correctly, it will lead to more consistent results.

How can you use a HIPAA compliant marketing tool?

Now that you know how important it is to have the HIPAA compliance for the healthcare world, the primary focus is on identifying how you use the tool properly. It all depends on the situation, but there are different things to take into account here.

1. The first thing you want to do is to perform a risk assessment, see what PHI needs to be shared, and then narrow down the right platform for you to use. Ideally, you want to work with a platform that has end to end encryption, but also secure data storage, access controls, logging and monitoring, but also the ability to sign a BAA where possible.
2. Creating secure email templates or using those offered by the platform is incredibly important. That way, you know the PHI is secured, and all the info will be kept there, without any concerns.
3. Then, you want to start personalizing the templates for each patient, depending on the use case. Naturally, this also means that you have to train the staff and make sure that they have all the necessary guidance and support in this situation.
4. Make sure that you always get the patient’s consent when you use their data for any marketing purposes.
5. Segment the email list to ensure that you will share relevant emails only to specific parts of your audience. Using encryption and secure delivery features for HIPAA compliant marketing emails is crucial, because the last thing you want is for any data to get randomly shared.
6. Lastly, you need to create a regular schedule through which you are connecting with your patients. Monitoring and auditing the performance, checking reports and ensuring compliance, all of that is extremely important, and you have to take it all into consideration.

What core features should you focus on when selecting the HIPAA compliant marketing?

Realistically, a good HIPAA compliant marketing tool will always have end to end encryption. That’s a crucial feature that you need to have, because the PHI needs to be fully encrypted. That being said, you should also have access management. It allows you to prevent unauthorized access, which can end up being very problematic a lot of the time.

Additionally, you want to have audit controls too, because the system needs to log all PHI access, along with actions taken using the info. The Business Associate Agreement also needs to be a part of this process, too.

And, as we said, the HIPAA compliant marketing tools need to have consent and opt-in management solutions, the same thing is valid when it comes to data segmentation and secure deliveries. While it’s not mandatory to have all these features, having them does help quite a bit, and it can help provide a very good result going forward.

Best practices that you can use for patient privacy and engagement

When we talk about HIPAA compliant marketing tools, it’s very important to have a true focus on privacy. But it’s not about using the tool itself. You also want to think about patient privacy, through the actions you take as well. Here are some best practices to keep in mind.

• Always make sure that you keep the emails transparent and professional. A great sense of transparency always builds confidence, and that’s certainly a very important part of the entire process.
• Keep the PHI disclosure to a minimum, so always try to disclose necessary info, nothing more than that.
• Personalization might come in handy, but you do want to mention very specific info in the message subject or body. That could include treatments, diagnoses and so on. It’s ok to mention the patient by name, though.
• A lot of the time, marketing info you share via HIPAA compliant marketing apps should focus on educational content. You can share community health updates, preventive care advice, wellness tips and anything of that nature. That way, it becomes much easier to manage the situation at hand.
• Offering secure communication channels in case the patient needs more information is a very good idea. Direct message systems with encryption are a much better solution when compared to talking via email, and that’s surely something you have to think about here.
• Set any deletion and retention policies when using these HIPAA compliant marketing tools. Ideally, you don’t want to store any PHI for more than you need it. And when you do end up deleting those tools, you want to have a secure deletion system in place. Not only will that help ensure everything is deleted smoothly, but it will also help prevent any concerns in the long term.

Mistakes you want to avoid when using HIPAA compliant marketing tools

Generally, it’s a very good idea to know how to use HIPAA compliant marketing solutions, but also the things and mistakes you want to avoid. Unfortunately, a lot of mistakes can happen, so you always have to pay a lot of attention.

• Naturally, you want to avoid using any non-compliant tools when you have to share PHI, as it will lead to issues down the line.
• Include PHI in the attachments or the subject lines, where possible.
• A frequent mistake is not getting the patient’s consent.
• You do want to ensure that you are never neglecting the staff training, as it can sometimes become problematic.
• Ignoring any of the ongoing monitoring and compliance audits is a commonly-known issue, too.
• Policies need to be updated, especially since regulations continue to evolve. Not updating those will lead to problems, and it’s certainly a thing to take into consideration here.

But what can you do when it comes to retaining the long-term compliance? A very good rule of thumb is to do some regular policy reviews, and having annual HIPAA training for your employees. On top of that, you always want to do some risk assessments, as it will help make that process better and easier to manage, something you need to keep in mind here. Stay informed with the latest industry info and updates regarding the HIPAA guidance and enforcement. And, of course, you want to work with compliance experts, where necessary.

Using HIPAA compliant marketing tools is a very good idea for any healthcare-related business. There’s a high chance that you will need to share personal medical info to patients, and sharing that via regular marketing tools can lead to compliance risks, among other problems. If you use HIPAA compliant solutions, that will help prevent issues, show a sense of transparency, while delivering excellent results for your business. And, of course, you need to gain consent from patients if you’re going to use/share any of their data!