Healthcare Email Marketing

Before we write a single email, we sort your messages into two groups. The first is care-related communication with your own patients, such as appointment reminders, prep instructions and follow-up. The second is marketing, such as promoting a new service, a seasonal clinic or a cash-pay offering.

HIPAA treats these groups differently. Using protected health information (PHI) for marketing can require written patient authorization, with some exceptions. Any vendor that handles PHI for you, including an email platform, should sign a business associate agreement (BAA). Many popular marketing platforms do not sign one, so tool choice matters.

We keep the line clear. Marketing emails go to people who opted in, use general wording and do not segment by condition unless your authorization process covers it. Your compliance officer or counsel makes the final call. We build to their guidance.

Your patient data lives in an EHR or practice management system, such as Epic, athenahealth, eClinicalWorks or NextGen. We keep protected health information in your secure systems and out of marketing email, and we do not pull clinical records into a marketing tool. We discuss a business associate agreement with you before any work that could touch patient data. We sync only what each email needs, such as name, email, preferred location and last visit date.

For emails that involve PHI, we help you choose a platform that signs a BAA and supports encryption, access controls and audit logs. For general marketing to the public, such as a health fair invitation, a standard platform may be fine. Many organizations use both, with clear rules about what goes where.

We also set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC so inbox providers can verify your emails and they are harder to spoof. Patients are right to be wary of fake medical emails, and authentication helps.