How to Stay HIPAA Compliant When Personalizing Marketing Emails

By Your Health Magazine

Your Health Magazine

. http://yourhealthmagazine.net

More Family/Primary Care Articles

How to Stay HIPAA Compliant When Personalizing Marketing Emails

Email is one of the most valuable tools that healthcare providers have to communicate with patients and keep them engaged. It can help keep your services at the top of people’s minds and nurture one-off patients into long-term brand advocates of your practice.

Personalizing your email marketing strategy takes your results to the next level. Studies show that personalized emails are 26% more likely to be opened than generic messages, yielding higher click-through and conversion rates as well.

Unfortunately, for many healthcare providers, personalizing email marketing strategies can be tricky. HIPAA regulations place restrictions on how companies can collect, store, and share data. So, how do you create personalized campaigns, while still remaining loyal to HIPAA’s email requirements?

Understanding HIPAA Compliance in Email Marketing

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) governs how healthcare practices collect and use sensitive patient data, known as “Protected Health Information” (PHI). This covers everything from details about a patient’s name, address, age, and health conditions, to sensitive information about treatments.

Because of HIPAA, clinics need to ensure they avoid sharing sensitive information in an unauthorized manner, whether they’re communicating by phone, text message or email. This makes it extremely difficult to create highly personalized email marketing campaigns.

However, HIPAA doesn’t completely prevent organizations from investing in any kind of marketing personalization. Rather, it simply means healthcare providers need to take a cautious approach to how they create and send their emails.

Combining Email Personalization with HIPAA Compliance

In most industries, email marketing personalization involves heavily tailoring every message to the unique needs of each recipient. The right strategy can deliver huge results. Here are the steps you’ll need to take to ensure you’re adhering to HIPAA guidelines, while still personalizing your email marketing messages.

1.  Always Collect Consent for Email Marketing

This is a crucial first step for any company investing in email marketing, but it’s particularly important for healthcare providers. Making sure you receive consent from your customers to contact them via email, whether it’s with service updates, or marketing announcements, reduces your risk of regulatory fines, and can help you improve your relationship with customers.

When asking for email consent, make sure you provide patients with details on when and why they’ll receive emails from you. Outline your privacy policies carefully, and ensure your patients know you won’t be sharing their contact details with any outside parties.

When obtaining consent for email marketing, it also makes sense to give people options regarding the kind of emails they’ll receive. Asking them whether they want to get emails about specific services or topics will help you to personalize future messaging strategies.

2.  Keep Collected Data Secure

HIPAA guidelines require all healthcare organizations to ensure patient data is encrypted, collected, and stored securely. Implementing a comprehensive and documented strategy for protecting all of the data you collect about your audience, from their contact information, to their preferences, is crucial.

A strong segmentation strategy for collected data can help boost your results too. For instance, you can segment patients into different groups based on the kind of treatment they might want to receive, and implement specific policies for which data should be included in those emails.

Encryption isn’t just crucial for your data storage strategy either – it’s also crucial for all emails you send. Names and email addresses can be considered examples of personally identifiable information, and even appointment reminders can be considered PHI. This means every message you send, whether it’s transactional or for marketing purposes, needs to be encrypted.

Comprehensive TLS encryption will help to guarantee that only the sender (you), and your recipient will be able to access the content of the email.

3.  Don’t Go Too Far with Personalization

Personalization is excellent at making healthcare marketing emails more valuable and engaging for your target audience. However, you will need to be cautious about the extent to which you personalize your marketing messages. Instead of using sensitive information that relates to their health problems in your marketing strategies, it might make more sense to take a cautious approach.

Definitely avoid using specific medical details in email subject lines and previews to prevent accidental data exposure, even if your emails are encrypted.

Consider using segmentation to create broader-reaching emails that feel personalized. For instance, you could create emails that:

• Highlight a range of valuable services or products that might appeal to a range of different types of customers, based on their location or history.
• Elevate your thought leadership and credibility, by sharing articles, tips and advice on care strategies, without revealing sensitive data.
• Share generic updates about changes to your services or offerings that may be relevant to specific groups based on their interests or geographic locations.

4.  Choose a HIPAA Compliant Email Service

Perhaps the best way to ensure you remain HIPAA compliant when personalizing email is to invest in the right email platform. Standard email marketing solutions might seem affordable and convenient, but many of them lack the encryption required for HIPAA compliance, and they don’t offer access to business associate agreements (BAA).

Make sure you choose an email marketing tool offered by a software provider that will sign a business associate agreement, and uses TLS encryption automatically for all messages. The right solution will protect all of your messages and data, while still ensuring you can segment emails and send more relevant messages to your target audience.

With the right platform, you’ll even be able to send one-to-one messages to customers that include PHI, because you’ll have the encryption tools required to secure that data.

5.  Learn, Improve, and Optimize

Finally, an effective approach to personalized email marketing relies heavily on a commitment to constantly reviewing, testing, and optimizing your strategy. Regularly test your email campaigns and monitor your messages for any potential signs of non-compliance.

Train your employees on how to create email campaigns that appear personalized and relevant, without revealing any sensitive information. Ensure your teams are also kept up-to-date on changing compliance standards and regulations, as they evolve.

At the same time, make sure you constantly track who has access to your email service and from which devices, to stay aware of any possible compliance snafus.

Send Personalized, but Compliant Email Messages

Email remains one of the most valuable tools healthcare organizations have to communicate with their patients. However, if you’re going to be using email for marketing purposes, and you want to personalize the experience, you’ll need to be cautious.

HIPAA guidelines place strict limitations on what details you can include in each conversation with your target audience, but you can still segment your contact list, and create engaging campaigns that specifically resonate with the right groups.

All you need is the right email marketing software, the correct security tools, and the right policies in place to protect your customers, your data, and your brand.