Email overload is a painfully common problem in healthcare, and it too often destroys productivity as inboxes brim with message after message. But on top of inhibiting your and your team’s workflow, cluttered inboxes also present major compliance risks that can’t be ignored.
With regulations like HIPAA requiring stringent safeguards for patient privacy, haphazard email habits leave practices vulnerable to anything from accidental leaks to malicious attacks. And make no mistake, these attacks are increasing at an alarming rate across the healthcare industry. Over the past five years alone, we’ve seen a staggering 256% rise in significant hacking-related breaches, and things are likely to get worse before they get better.
The good news? A thorough email “detox” strategy can help to tackle both issues (productivity and compliance) in one go. Here, we’ll explore why maintaining email hygiene is critical for HIPAA email compliance, assess where you currently stand when it comes to the chaos that is a healthcare practice inbox, and walk through steps to cleaning up your approach, practicing inbox control, and staying organized while keeping sensitive patient information secure.
Why Email Hygiene Matters for Healthcare
First, it helps to understand why an orderly, efficient email system is critical for those dealing with protected health information (PHI).
For starters, phishing – those sketchy emails angling for you to click on dangerous links or attachments – is a leading root cause of healthcare data breaches. And by most accounts, attacks aimed at clinics and hospitals appear to be increasing sharply. As such, extra vigilance is needed when it comes to deciding what emails you interact with.
On top of that, as you already know, HIPAA regulations require you to have safeguards in place to protect patient privacy. When emails containing PHI get buried under piles of other messages or misfiled into wrong folders, risks of accidental data leakage increase substantially.
We are all humans, and it’s very easy for small mistakes to violate HIPAA when healthcare workers can’t find or keep track of emails containing PHI.
Take Stock of Your Current Email Situation
Before diving right into inbox control and tackling your inbox backlog, take stock of just how chaotic your current email habits are with a few key self-reflection questions.
What’s your inbox message volume like right now? Under 50 emails, over 500? Scan your inbox and flag any mailing lists you can unsubscribe from or conversations that can be automatically filtered into folders. Decluttering unnecessary emails is step one.
Do you actively file and send emails or label important messages into organized folders? Or do they languish forgotten about in your inbox? If you have no real system for keeping emails tidy long-term, it’s time to fix that.
Have any staff at your healthcare organization recently clicked on a phishing email link? Have you noticed an attachment containing PHI being sent to the wrong recipient? If you’ve observed rising errors jeopardizing data security, tightening protocols is clearly needed.
Carefully assessing your email account’s current state is key to identifying the next steps for effectively getting organized.
Craft a Custom HIPAA Email Policy
Every single healthcare organization needs clearly defined security and privacy policies for safeguarding PHI transmitted via email. For covered entities, this isn’t an option – it’s explicitly required under HIPAA.
In your official HIPAA email policy, be sure to include specifics on what types of sensitive data can and absolutely cannot be sent over email and how you expect people to archive emails that contain PHI. Set crystal clear guidelines tailored to your workplace’s communication needs so employees know what they can and can’t send.
You also need straightforward protocols for reporting suspicious emails or suspected data breaches to your IT security team. When facing risks, employees need simple clarity on the next steps. That way, they can be escalated quickly and dealt with before they become real threats.
It’s likewise important to outline the key encryption standards (more on this soon) that need to be used to secure email content and transmission and prevent intercepted PHI from falling into the wrong hands.
Roll Out Technical Safeguards
Encrypting data. Controlling access. Monitoring email activity. Technical tools are indispensable for locking down email security.
Email encryption does exactly what it sounds like – it masks content within emails and scrambles messaging in storage and during transmission so only approved parties with a digital key can decipher and read communications. This is a must-have for PHI. You also need to ensure that any solutions you have in place comply with NIST SP 800-111 for data at rest and NIST SP 800-52 for data in transit.
Another vital feature you’ll need is access controls around accounts that handle PHI. We’re talking about requiring multi-factor authentication to log in, using password managers to generate ultra-secure credentials, and potentially having employees connect through a VPN. These steps are all intended to promote inbox control and restrict unauthorized personnel from accessing inboxes with sensitive data.
Specialized data loss prevention software is also hugely important. These programs digitally monitor, control, and secure your organization’s inbound and outbound emails. They automatically scan message content and attachments for signs of protected health information. From there, they can prevent accidental data leaks by restricting outgoing mail found to contain PHI.
And consider transitioning your group from regular business email to purpose-built secure platforms explicitly designed for HIPAA compliance, encrypting all communications by default. They tightly control common risks around patient privacy in healthcare messaging. The more layers of technical safeguards you have in place, the better.
Tackle Your Inbox Step-By-Step
Policies provide guidance, and technology locks down security. Now, let’s get hands-on with practical steps for controlling and clearing out inbox clutter.
- Choose your organizational system. Will neatly filed folders work best for you? Or color-coded labels to visually categorize different types of emails in your inbox? Priority inboxes are also handy for surfacing urgent messages. Decide what system aligns best with your personal workflow preferences.
- Set up filters and rules. Automatically route the many emails flowing in each day based on sender, content type, subject keywords, or other relevant identifiers. Establish rules triggering automatic file sorting to save yourself the manual effort of dragging messages across folders.
- Archive old messages. Keep your inbox nice and lean by permanently archiving older emails that are no longer needed for frequent reference or record retention under HIPAA. Delete unnecessary threads about that team lunch last month or random sales notices.
Make Secure Email Management an Ongoing Practice
Perhaps the most crucial lesson in maintaining HIPAA email compliance is that it requires continued vigilance, not just a one-time decluttering. This is an ongoing practice.
Schedule regular security policy and protocol reviews to confirm nothing has lapsed or fallen out of date from emerging email risks. All employees must undergo refresher training on proper emailing of PHI using your institutional guidelines. There is no room for fuzzy understanding or excuses from staff.
Conduct routine audits of staff email activity to catch any improper behaviors putting PHI at risk early. It may seem overboard, but spot inspections of inbox attachments and unauthorized inbox access attempts are usually a good idea. It’s better to find leaks through checks than have problems bubble up after major HIPAA breaches happen externally.
Above all, stay on top of system checks, ensuring implemented security controls like encryption and activity monitoring are working properly month after month. Don’t let tools get outdated.
In Conclusion
Maintaining HIPAA email compliance ultimately requires a complete organizational mindset shift combined with the right security tools to safeguard precious patient health data. While an inbox overhaul demands serious work, protecting your patients from needless data exposure is the real end goal, making that effort worthwhile.
