Smiles International offers cosmetic and restorative dentistry and dental hygiene services. Its three offices serve approximately 3,600 patients in the Washington DC area.
Smiles International’s front-office and clinical teams use their education and understanding of restorative dentistry to improve the function and appearance of their patients’ teeth and gums following tooth loss, tooth decay, damage, or disease.
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Company snapshot |
Paubox customer since 2018 |
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Industry |
Dentistry |
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Use case |
Communicate with patients in a HIPAA compliant manner during COVID-19 |
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Goals |
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Used solution |
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Favorite features |
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We recently spoke with Dr. Ben Watkins, Dr. Gary Kaihara, and Davinder Khanna, finance and accounting manager, about their efforts to protect their patients during the coronavirus pandemic.
“We want to get out ahead of it as much as we possibly can by providing accurate information from the proper sources,” Dr. Watkins explained.
Smiles International has been proactively making changes to its policies and procedures as the coronavirus situation in Washington DC has changed.
The team first emailed patients on March 10th, explaining the additional cleaning and sanitation steps the office was taking during this pandemic.
The email helped the company avoid some cancellations because patients felt confident coming to the office, knowing that Smiles International was taking the situation seriously.
Unfortunately, as COVID-19 continues its exponential spread and the US government has recommended stricter behavioral guidelines to combat the pandemic, on March 16th, Smiles International decided to temporarily close its practice.
Smiles International has been a loyal Paubox customer for two years. When writing email updates to patients, Dr. Watkins explained that “Paubox gave us the confidence that we were communicating within an encrypted way and we were staying within compliance of HIPAA and protecting our patients’ personal information.”
Davinder went on, “We used an email system before, but that was not HIPAA compliant, so the encryption feature is what we started using by connecting with Paubox.”
In the past 12 months alone, Paubox has encrypted over 40,000 HIPAA compliant emails sent by 18 staff members, blocked 3,255 spam, 338 virus, and 92 phishing emails.
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.