Developmental Center of the Ozarks

The Developmental Center of the Ozarks (DCO) serves infants, children, and adults who have developmental or physical disabilities, or developmental delays through therapies, education, and habilitative programs.

After extensive research, DCO chose Paubox Email Suite Plus to send HIPAA compliant email due to its military-grade encryption, simple setup and ease of use.

Challenge

DCO’s mission to provide services to individuals with developmental disabilities requires the nonprofit to interact with protected health information (PHI). Therefore the company needed to find a vendor that could make its email HIPAA compliant, but in a way that would not hinder delivering services to clients.

Like many organizations looking to secure their email, DCO initially turned to the established players like Microsoft 365 and McAfee.

But trying to piece together multiple services was proving difficult to maintain and manage. “The patchwork of services we used was difficult to teach new staff and prone to difficulties,” explained system administrator Aaron Collins. “Doing system audits and keeping records were a nightmare.”

After reaching a tipping point, Collins knew they needed a better solution. His months of research led him to Paubox Email Suite Plus.

Solution

The reason for switching to Paubox Email Suite Plus came down to ease of use. It improved DCO’s security posture by removing the burden of employees accidentally sending emails that were unencrypted.

“I needed a solution that provided access control, audit control, integrity controls, transmission security and a business associate agreement. I found a few solutions but none of them were seamless like the solution offered by Paubox,” said Collins. “I must have called a dozen companies only to learn that they would not work for us. For instance, Hushmail did not work with MacOS and Email Pros only encrypted if [a user] typed ‘encrypt’ into the subject line.”

At Paubox, we pride ourselves on a seamless user experience for both the senders and recipients of encrypted email. Our technology allows users to send an email like an ordinary email, without the use of plug-ins, add-ons, or extra steps. Likewise, recipients can open secure emails without the use of email portals or extra passwords.

Paubox uses transport layer security (TLS) encryption and is HITRUST CSF certified.

In addition, Paubox Email Suite Plus's inbound security proved an invaluable asset.

“Paubox offers an innovative feature called ExecProtect. This enhanced feature has given us the ability to virtually eliminate display name spoofing attacks from our inboxes,” Collins pointed out. “The control panel lets me customize rulesets, review the mail log, see detailed statistics, and download that information for use in my audits.”

The seamless nature of Paubox’s encrypted email solution made the implementation process easy. “Their knowledgeable staff walked us through the process of setup up secure encryption. It took very little time to set up,” said Collins.

Results

In the past 12 months alone, Paubox has encrypted over 30,000 emails sent by 52 DCO staff members. Since Paubox encrypts all emails by default, no one had to spend any time wondering about whether or not to encrypt an email; it was done automatically. And all the email recipients had to do was click "open" to read an email - no password or portal required.

In addition, Paubox blocked 601 emails containing viruses, and 659 phishing attempts, any one of which could have led to a security breach and a hefty HIPAA fine.