The Colorado Center for Clinical Excellence

The Colorado Center for Clinical Excellence is a group of Denver psychologists and psychotherapists who provide exceptional therapy by measuring patient outcomes, using diverse treatment approaches, and honoring clients’ preferences.

The practice is well ahead of the curve when it comes to analyzing data to ensure it is delivering the best possible treatment outcomes, but when it came to utilizing communication technology, the practice was lagging behind.

Challenge

“We’ve always been very concerned about privacy and security for our clients,” explained Jason Seidel, director of the Colorado Center for Clinical Excellence. “There are so many stories of people who wound up in hot water by just making honest mistakes and screwing up and running afoul of basic privacy laws, which in a lot of cases in mental health, are much more strict with much greater consequences than HIPAA. So when you mess up, you can not only lose your insurance, but also your license.”

Yet, the abundance of caution was being challenged by patient expectations.

“Patients have come to expect electronic communications as a standard thing they can get from therapy,” said Seidel. “So we felt like we were getting too far behind the times in terms of what people expected, but we couldn’t find a solution that was affordable and practical.”

The problem with most platforms Seidel considered was the extra steps required to send HIPAA compliant email which would interrupt staff workflows and necessitate extra training and management.

“We knew if we were going to do this at all, that we needed something that created virtually no disruption," noted Seidel. “Because therapists, like other medical providers, run on very, very thin margins. We don’t have a lot of extra time to screw around with things, and need it to be super simple.”

Solution

Fortunately, a trusted colleague referred Seidel to Paubox.

“A colleague in another part of the country had been using G Suite paired with Paubox and told me about her experience with it, and that’s what led me to Paubox,” Jason explained.

That vote of confidence and a lack of competitors meeting his requirements made the choice to utilize Paubox easy. All other providers were “either too complicated in the reviews I read, or at a price point that didn’t make sense for us,” stated Seidel. “There really didn’t seem to be a whole lot of comparison to Paubox.”

Paubox Email Suite is a HIPAA compliant secure email solution that does not require users to log in through a portal. Every email is encrypted—all a user needs to do is click “send.” Also, Paubox Email Suite is HITRUST CSF certified, the gold standard in the industry.

For Seidel, Paubox's biggest differentiator is its seamlessness.

“Just the fact that it operates in the background, everyone gets a little footer on their email showing that it’s encrypted. But other than that, there are no extra steps. That was the whole thing for us, that it was that simple,” said Seidel.

Results

“As the business owner, what I notice whenever I introduce a new methodology, or a new service, or a new technology, is how much blowback do I get from my employees?” said Seidel. “But I got virtually no blowback from my employees except for the initial change to G Suite. And that was short-lived. They saw it was virtually identical to regular Gmail.”

“We feel secure about what we’re sending and receiving, and our patients are happy to be able to send something to us or receive a form from us,” continued Seidel. “I feel much more secure knowing that all of my people are following the rules, doing it in a safe way, and even if our clients aren’t particularly aware of specific risks, we’ve got them covered.”