Since 1981, Harbors Home Health & Hospice has offered skilled nursing care and therapy at home in order to help people function at their highest level of independence. The agency serves people in Grays Harbor and Pacific Counties in Washington state.
|
Company snapshot |
|
|
Industry |
Home healthcare provider |
|
Use case |
Send HIPAA compliant email by default |
|
Goals |
|
|
Used solution |
|
|
Favorite features |
|
Harbors at-home nursing staff works in various locations; not everyone is under one roof.
This means the company needs a simple IT solution that does not require complex deployment or management. This includes security measures to mitigate the risks of a data breach.
This is especially important since healthcare providers are being targeted more than ever by cybercriminals.
“For our staff to do their job, we need technology that affords them the ability to perform at the highest level,” said David Dutton, chief technology officer for the nonprofit. “That means little to no extra work for the end-user, so they can concentrate on providing great services to our clients.”
“With 80% of communication being electronic, the big question is how do you protect the patient information you so carefully collect?” asked Dutton.
Like so many healthcare providers, Harbors relied on its staff to follow guidelines to ensure no protected health information (PHI) was transmitted via email.
But policies can only go so far, and they can slow down operations.
Harbors Home Health & Hospice CEO, Joel Stephens, found Paubox’s HIPAA compliant email solution after online research and left it to Dutton’s expertise to evaluate the product.
“It was a no brainer,” explained Dutton. “It was simple for end-users and completely seamless of an experience. As admins, we need to know how messages are encrypted and what Paubox is doing, but the end-user doesn’t need to know. They just need to know an email is sent and received.”
The result was maximum protection with minimum management, but still under the administrators' control.
Paubox Email Suite Premium does not require users to log in through a portal. Every email is encrypted—all a user needs to do is click “send.” It can be integrated with any commonly used email platform, including G Suite, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Exchange, and it works with most mobile devices.
Paubox Email Suite Premium also comes with inbound security tools that block email threats with advanced email security features like ExecProtect, which immediately identifies and quarantines attacks, never letting them get to the inbox.
In addition, the Premium level also provides email DLP (data loss prevention) which prevents unauthorized parties from accidentally or maliciously emailing data whose disclosure could put the organization at risk.
In addition to outbound email DLP, Paubox was the first company to implement Inbound DLP to identify and route incoming emails that may contain sensitive information.
“[DLP] gives us the ability to protect data and not let it out without someone approving it,” said Dutton. “It’s an enhanced level of data protection to a major pipe of communication. And the goal is not to get people in trouble or babysit them, but protect a data flow we’re required to secure.”
Paubox customers have the added security of knowing that our products are HITRUST CSF certified, the gold standard for HIPAA compliance in the healthcare industry.
After Dutton decided to use Paubox, getting the system up and running only took a few days after signing a business associate agreement (BAA) with Paubox, included for every customer.
Paubox focuses on developing products according to what customers want, and that’s never been more true than with our DLP features and our relationship with Harbors Home Health & Hospice.
“It’s really important that we have a relationship with the Paubox team,” noted Dutton. “It’s huge that we have a voice in the product development.”
The company's feedback has helped us fine tune our DLP features, which includes which types of user notifications are sent, increasing the type of attachments that can be scanned, and the inbound DLP option.
It’s a mutually beneficial partnership that can only help Paubox get better at providing value to our customers.
In the past 12 months alone, Paubox has encrypted nearly 8,000 emails sent by 28 Harbors 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 over 10,000 spam emails, 285 messages containing email viruses, and 878 phishing attempts, any one of which could have led to a security breach and a hefty HIPAA fine.