Atlas Counseling PLLC is a child and adolescent counseling practice based in Seattle, WA. Founder, owner, and director Jordan Klekamp launched the practice in 2017 and quickly grew in response to the overwhelming demand for child therapy services in the Seattle area. Today, Atlas Counseling has nine therapists and an administrator. The practice offers talk therapy and play therapy for children, adolescents, and young adults.
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Industry |
Behavioral health |
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Use case |
Communicate information to multiple patient families at once |
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“Email has historically been an unruly beast in the field of mental health,” Klekamp said. Many mental health organizations prohibit therapists from using email to communicate with clients because they want to avoid the risk of a HIPAA breach. However, email is such a popular method of communication that Klekamp felt strongly about making it available for the families Alas Counseling serves. And in order to do that, she needed a solution that would ensure HIPAA compliance with every email.
“Families are used to using email, and not using email in my practice would have placed an undue burden on the clients in my care,” Klekamp noted. “Email is also a good way to document information, which can be useful to families going through divorce or family court proceedings.” Klekamp searched for a secure, user-friendly email solution that was easy for parents to use, and she found Paubox Email Suite.
After several years of successfully using Paubox Email Suite to automatically encrypt every email Atlas Counseling sends, Klekamp began to investigate the possibility of building an email list and sending emails to the practice’s entire client roster. To do that, she would need an email marketing solution that offered the same high level of HIPAA compliant security as Paubox Email Suite does for individual emails. Paubox Marketing met all of these needs.
Paubox Marketing is a HIPAA compliant email marketing solution that allows providers to securely compose and send marketing emails that include protected health information (PHI) as a part of secure patient outreach. With Paubox Marketing, practices like Atlas Counseling can segment their audiences and send personalized email marketing directly to recipients’ inboxes – all without relying on passwords or portals.
Paubox Marketing has proven especially valuable in the COVID-19 era and the ensuing pivot to telehealth. “One aspect of our workflow that suffered from the switch to telehealth in 2020 was that there was no easy way to keep our clients up to date with the latest changes to our practice, from insurance changes to office closures,” Klekamp explained. Therapists had to send individual encrypted emails to every family they worked with, costing significant time.
Paubox Marketing changed all that. “With Paubox Marketing, we can easily communicate with our clients en masse without wasting so much time,” Klekamp said. Patient families can now easily receive practice updates, reminders about verifying benefits, and information about deductible resetting. All emails are in one place, and they are all sent with the click of a button.
“For me, it was a no-brainer. I also liked how easily Paubox Marketing integrated with my existing Paubox Email Suite account,” Klekamp added.
Atlas Counseling sent three emails using Paubox Marketing over a one-month period. Open rates for all three emails exceeded 77 percent. The practice also used Paubox Marketing to advertise a new therapy small group. Three-quarters (75 percent) of the therapy group’s participants said that they signed up for the group because of the information they received via email.
The practice has been receiving positive feedback from patient families as well. “Our client care coordinator has received many emails from parents thanking us for the helpful reminder emails about insurance changes at the beginning of the year. The families we serve are finding the service really useful,” Klekamp shared.
Going forward, Altas Counseling is planning to use Paubox Marketing to streamline the intake process for new patient families. The team is also creating sublists among its patient families for different interests or different-aged patients so that the practice can send clients helpful, relevant information.
“We want to flip the typical counseling paradigm and provide as much information as we can right away,” Klekamp said. “We’re planning to use Paubox Marketing to help us do that.”