Workflow automation for HIPAA compliant voicemail transcription

During a Zoom social mixer last week, several customers asked us to build a secure transcription solution for their corporate voicemail attachments. This post covers why our customers asked us for a HIPAA compliant voicemail transcription service and how we did it.

Voicemail attachments and HIPAA privacy

As we've covered in detail, HIPAA breaches can occur via myriad ways. Along these lines, a central tenet of the HIPAA Privacy Rule is that covered entities must have appropriate administrative, technical, and physical safeguards in place to protect the privacy of protected health information (PHI). In our customer's case (hospital system in the Midwest), their Director of Information Systems was acutely concerned over emails sent from their voicemail system containing audio attachments. More precisely, his concerns lay with the potential of his end users opening these attachments in public on their smartphones. In his opinion, the risk of PHI being overheard in public obligated him to establish elevated safeguards for his organization. With this in mind, his question to us was, "Can you develop something that converts the audio attachments to text instead?"

Workflow automation for HIPAA compliant voicemail transcription

Workflow automation has been on our radar this year and the request hit me with serendipity. Incidentally, several more customers on the zoom quickly chimed in and also asked for the same solution. Keeping with our intense focus on using customer feedback as a roadmap of what to build and when, we instantly knew this was something to act on. In fact, we got to work on it this week. In a nutshell, Paubox Email Suite allows us to provide inbound security and seamless inbound encryption for our customers. We're able to do this by being the sole MX record for our customers' domain names. In addition, Paubox Email Suite is HITRUST CSF certified. With this inbound email security infrastructure in place, we leveraged Natural Language Processing (NLP) to detect and transcribe these audio files on the fly. We then insert the transcribed text into the message body and securely deliver the email to the end user, leaving the original audio attachment in place. I'm pleased to say we launched a HIPAA compliant voicemail transcription service for our first customer today.