HIPAA compliant email

[cleizer]

Is there any way to link the Microsoft Outlook that works with Orthotrac Cloud to a HIPAA compliant/encrypted email service? I currently have an outside Outlook service with a HIPAA compliant add-on but I would love to be able to send PANs via email directly from imaging to referring doctors.

Thanks.

[Anon · Accepted solution]

Good day Dr. Leizer,

Most email encryption companies' primary method for implementing the encryption is by installing an add-in for Outlook.  Unfortunately, for reasons of security, we do not at this time support installing add-ins per user for the Cloud version of Outlook, or allowing the user to install the add-in, so that is not an option in this case.

However, the company Protected Trust has another option they call the "API Gateway", or SMTP Gateway.  For this option, you set up a special email address (in addition to your normal email address) in Outlook.  Then, any time you want to send an email as encrypted, you would change the "From"  option in Outlook for the email to be from that special email address. When you want to send normal un encrypted email, just send from the normal email account. When you want to read incoming email, you would still just also view the normal email account in Outlook.

Here are the steps for setting up the API Gateway in Outlook:

1) First, create the API access credentials.

a. Log in at https://protectedtrust.com

b. Click My Account

c. Click API Access Credentials (on the left).

d. Enter a name in the textbox (e.g. Outlook SMTP) and click Generate

e. The Access ID will be your Outlook SMTP username.  The Access Key will be your Outlook SMTP password.

2) Secondly, set up a new account in Outlook Cloud for each workstation that needs to send using this method. 

a. "Your name" can be whatever you want and the email address field should be the email address you normally send from (the one connected to the Protected Trust account).

b. smtp.protectedtrust.com for outgoing and incoming servers

c. Use Port 465 or 587 for outgoing (try one or other if it doesn’t work right away, they use different types of encryption). Also choose SSL or TLS. Setting can be found in More Settings>Outgoing Server.  Make sure you also go to the Outgoing Server tab and check off "My Outgoing server requires authentication" and make sure "Use same settings as incoming mail server" is selected.

d. For username/password, use the Access ID/Access Key you generated above.

If you have any other questions about this setup, please reach out directly to our Product IT department at  dental-usd-product-it@carestream.com   since they are familiar with the Protected Trust product and its implementation.

[matt_ackerman]

There are many services that exist that can do this sort of thing; we just haven't researched all of them yet.  I am in the process of discussing this topic with a few companies that appear to be the most attractive from a reliability, confidence and pricing standpoint.  I expect to be able to make a strong recommendation by the end of this month.