Email Archiving for Healthcare

Healthcare related companies set policies, but without a way to know if their policies are being adhered to, how can they say they are in compliance? There are many benefits from an e-mail management system that monitors and regularly reports on communications that are out of policy and compliance.

The Issues:
The healthcare industry is bound by HIPAA regulations and must put into place new policies and procedures that protect medical record information, or else face fines or other sanctions.

The problem is that information regarding medical records is often transmitted via e-mail systems to vendors, doctors' offices, medical supply companies and others. Once the information enters the e-mail system, definitive, auditable control over the document is no longer in place, and records around each transaction are not in an easily searchable or reportable format.

How can a company claim they are in compliance if they have no idea that 23% of their outbound e-mails contain the words "confidential patient records" in the subject line? And further, that of those e-mails, 14% are going to e-mail accounts from providers like Yahoo, AOL or Hotmail. Wouldn't that be something that management should want to be aware of?

Management needs to investigate into those e-mails to determine if they were legitimate, and if there are other patterns that need investigating. With tens of thousands of e-mails sent or received every day in most organizations, all it takes is one e-mail to open up your company to major liability and reputation damage.

If an incident does happen that requires legal research, hundreds of hours of e-mail log file evidence discovery can cost tens of thousands of dollars by using legal forensic specialists.

The MailMeter Solution:
MailMeter captures all internal and external e-mail and stores in in a secure, tamper-proof archive. Administrators can find e-mail breaches, learn activities of their users, as well as drill down into issues and search for specific words, domains, or attachments.

Managers can enforce policies and demonstrate to auditors that their processes are in compliance.

With MailMeter, any authorized user in the company can search for any text in a message body and attachment text.

MailMeter Benefits

• Full compliance with all regulations
• Save storage in your e-mail server - faster backups, disaster recovery, and better reliability
• Dramatically reduce costs of legal investigations
• Protect intellectual property
• Reduce organization and executive exposure
• Improve employee education about risky behavior
• Increase integrity of information since transactions cannot be deleted from the archive
• Improve productivity by enforcing the E-mail Acceptable Usage Policy

Important Questions to ask your IT, Legal, and Compliance Officer
As an executive, you should be very concerned at the lack of infrastructure, process and controls for archiving e-mail in your organization. You should ask your management team these important questions. If they cannot answer these questions, you may be placing your company at serious risk.

• What would be the cost or damage if your company had to pay penalty fines, or if you were fined or sanctioned for non-compliance?
• Do you have an E-mail Acceptable Usage Policy? Do all of your employees know it?
• How do you know when your policy has been broken? How do you measure, manage and enforce your policy?
• How many times has an employee e-mailed confidential information in error? Or on purpose?
• How do you know if employees are e-mailing offensive material to others within or outside the company?
• What percentage of your company e-mail is non-work related?
• How many gigabytes of pictures, music and movie files travel through your company each week?