The transformative power of email for providers

Doctor with pediatric patient and mother

The transformative power of email can bolster patient relationships for providers without extra work. By sending follow-up instructions, appointment reminders, health and wellness management information and satisfaction surveys, to name a few uses, providers engage their population and create a stronger connection.

Many patients prefer communicating with their healthcare provider via email because it expands opportunities for consultation, treatment, and patient care. It’s surprisingly easy for providers to add HIPAA compliant email in their practice. Find out how it can transform your practice in this blog.

Download: Whitepaper: Are Patient Portals Ruining Your Healthcare Business?

Finding easy ways to communicate with patients is more important than ever

Reducing frustration and time spent in multiple-step communication processes is one of the many benefits of using simple but HIPAA compliant email.

Akin Demehin, director of policy at the American Hospital Association trade group, recently stated that “Workforce [shortages] in healthcare is an issue of national significance and is reaching a crisis in many parts of the country.” Healthcare needs to do everything possible to retain existing staff by making their jobs easier.

New tech for healthcare allows providers to easily send HIPAA compliant email

Patient portals often cause frustration because of multi-step logins and clunky user interfaces. However, new technology allows HIPAA compliant emails to be sent directly to your patients’ inboxes without the need to learn new behaviors or remember passwords. It also removes the fear of accidentally sending unencrypted ePHI, since all outbound email is encrypted by default.

This simple and elegant approach dramatically improves communications with patients.

Increased patient safety, satisfaction and outcomes

Good communication skills are a key factor in ensuring better patient outcomes and nurturing patient satisfaction. In fact, poor communication is a primary reason for filing a lawsuit in >30% of healthcare-related cases.

Let your patients get information from you, not Google

There are thousands of sites online where patients can search health information. Unfortunately, much of it is not accurate and providers spend a lot of time re-educating their patients, and even worse, convincing patients that they know more than a random blogger.

Three in four Americans leave the doctor confused and dissatisfied for reasons that include disappointment in the level of Q&A they have with their doctor, confusion about their health and feeling a need to do more research.

However, with follow-up emails, providers can address common concerns and questions after a visit, so patients feel at ease and do not need to turn to medical sites that may or may not have correct information.

The transformative power of email on your healthcare organization’s bottom line

From a business perspective, the ROI for every dollar that healthcare professionals spend on email marketing gives them $42 in return. Healthcare is not about profits, but numbers show that email marketing continues to give remarkable results to grow your practice and organization.

Decrease delinquent payments through email reminders

Health insurance deductibles are on the rise. Providers are struggling to get reimbursed because high out-of-pocket spends are hard to collect. In an Athenahealth study, providers who saw commercially insured patients collected just 12% of what they were owed at the time of service, and in two out of three visits they collected nothing upfront at all.

Sending HIPAA compliant email to patients about their medical bills is a fast and cost-efficient way to inform people about what they owe. A common challenge to mailing paper bills is patients who have relocated without providing a new address. People keep the same email address for years, so your messages will continue to reach clients even if they have relocated.

Decrease no-shows with personalized appointment reminders

Average no-show rates can range between 10-30% while setting your practice back to the tune of $150,000 to $300,000 annually per provider. In addition to the considerable financial impacts of missed appointments, there are obviously further repercussions that directly affect you and your patients. HIPAA compliant email appointment reminders can greatly reduce no-show rates. Research shows that healthcare organizations actively working to minimize no-shows can reduce them by up to 70%.

Remove concerns about email-related HIPAA violations caused by user error

The rules around ePHI and HIPAA compliance can be confusing. The majority of the HIPAA related breaches happen because of employee carelessness. For complete peace of mind, remove the risk of user error and a HIPAA violation by simply encrypting all outbound email from your organization.

Conclusion

Implementing a HIPAA compliant email system may seem like a daunting challenge. However, it’s a lot easier than you think. Paubox has a variety of products that can help you achieve security for your patients.

Paubox Email Suite automatically encrypts all outbound emails and delivers them directly to your patient’s inbox without requiring a password or portal to read the information. It works with Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Exchange.

With our Premium plan level, you also get the following features to protect your inboxes from malicious email threats:

ExecProtect – protects against display name spoofing.
Zero Trust Email – requires an additional proof of legitimacy before delivering an email to your inbox.
Email archiving – backs up all emails to a protected server and allows for easy search.
Data loss prevention – ensures that sensitive data cannot be accidentally or maliciously transmitted by unauthorized parties.

Overall, implementing HIPAA compliant email in your practice provides huge benefits for patients and practitioners alike—creating greater patient satisfaction and better outcomes.