PlateJoy offers custom meal plans of healthy recipes that fit in with individual’s schedules, locations, and eating preferences, to make adopting a healthier lifestyle easier.
In 2017 PlateJoy’s diabetes prevention program was recognized by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and health plans, and employers began to pay for PlateJoy subscriptions.
However, that came with a need to comply with HIPAA regulations as well as to meet target milestones in order to be paid by health insurance companies.
The milestones were tied to engagement, so PlateJoy needed a way to reach people beyond the app and bring them in to perform tasks.
Mobile push notifications and SMS were not HIPAA compliant, so they weren’t viable for anything other than generic messages. They’re also only good for tasks that can be completed at the moment—they don’t stay visible as a reminder so people can perform a task when it’s convenient.
PlateJoy quickly realized that it wanted to engage people through the ubiquitous tool everyone uses and already knows how to fit into their lives: email.
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Company snapshot |
Paubox customer since 2017 |
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Industry |
Health technology |
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Use case |
Send HIPAA compliant email notifications |
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Goals |
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Used solution |
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Favorite features |
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PlateJoy CTO Daniel Nelson began looking at different options to send email notifications that didn’t require clunky portals.
“We were going to be sending a lot of messages, and we realized that an inbox full of ‘You have a message from PlateJoy’ was not going to get people to click through and read the messages," Nelson said. "Email is powerful because even without clicking into a message, people get a quick idea of what it’s about from the subject line. And they can use all the tools of email to deal with messages how and when it works for them—read/unread indicator, Gmail’s snooze feature, etc.”
Nelson knew that every extra step a user has to take would mean a drop off in engagement, and engagement was directly tied to payment.
PlateJoy needed a better way to send email notifications to engage with participants.
Nelson was introduced to Paubox through another SaaS company that was already using Paubox Email API.
“When I learned about Paubox, I knew it was exactly what I needed. There wasn’t really even a question,” noted Nelson. “For the vast majority of users, the experience would just be email—familiar, ubiquitous email.”
PlateJoy used Paubox’s SMTP relay to start sending secure email messages that would be delivered like normal email. Paubox Email API also has a REST API option for developers working with Node.js, Ruby on Rails, Python, C# and more.
This allowed PlateJoy to focus on making sure participants have the best experience using their app, while remaining fully HIPAA compliant.
The result was a successful launch of PlateJoy’s diabetes prevention program. Participants are sent a series of email coaching reminders to help them stay engaged with their plan and get healthier.
In the past 45 days, PlateJoy has transmitted over 160,000 emails with the help of the Paubox Email API. That's 160,000 points of contact with participants to help them achieve their milestones.