Easterseals Central Illinois DataMotion Success Story
DataMotion utilizes DataMotion secure mailbox and secure contact me to integrate seamlessly into Easterseals Central Illinois’ existing email platform to secure health information exchanges and meet PHI regulations.
Background
Easterseals Central Illinois is a non profit that works to ensure that children with autism, developmental delays and disabilities can reach their full potential. They provide patient care to over 6,000 families a year and the need for services is growing at a rapid pace. A small IT team consisting of three employees within Easterseals Central Illinois is contracted to provide services to two state run Child and Family Connections (CFC) offices while supporting 160 people in over 100 rural locations across Illinois. They utilize a Microsoft Exchange
environment with three of their main sites connected through VPN’s. For their partnerships with the CFC’s, they use Office 365, SharePoint, and a program provided by the State of Illinois to do paperwork. Through these partnerships, they provide an early intervention program to help families identify any type of disability early on. The families are then referred to Easterseals Central Illinois to get the care coordination and services they need.
Requirements
- Securely exchange PHI between patients, providers, and physicians
- Seamlessly integrate with Microsoft Outlook
- Quick and easy to implement
- Easy to use for administrators and end-users
- Ability to send a secure message from any computer
- Decrease costs and waiting times between communications
Challenges:
- Small IT team supporting large customer base in over 100
locations - Frequent exchange of PHI & healthcare data between patients and providers
- Time-consuming and expensive health information exchange
- Enhance patient experience and improve quality of care
Challenges
Easterseals Central Illinois needed a way to simplify the process of securely exchanging PHI between CFC’s, patients, providers, and physicians. Their current process was timely, inefficient, and expensive.
Because there was no secure email communications or secure messaging channels, almost everything had to be done in person, by hand, or by fax. Email communication to families had to be carefully crafted to ensure that they did not include any healthcare information. Without the ability to use email for secure communications, fax was required to transmit sensitive patient information. On top of this, being in a very rural area meant that most employees without a home fax machine were required to send all sensitive information from their office, which was extremely inconvenient as most did not live close to a centralized office.
The company’s biggest driver to make a change was on the customer side. If a family needed help or an evaluation, it would often take months instead of days or even weeks to get the assistance coordinated since most information required was sensitive in nature, and they could not securely transmit the information digitally. To quickly address the problem, Easterseals Central Illinois needed a solution that was easy to implement, easy to use for a diverse staff of technical and non-technical employees, and integrated seamlessly with Microsoft Outlook and SharePoint.
“We needed a solution that integrated with Outlook, was easy to use, and was quick and easy to implement,” said Brandon Vissering, Director of IT with Easterseals Central Illinois. “The solution offered by DataMotion allowed us to do this, and it gave us the ability to have a Send Secure button in the Microsoft Outlook email client and offered a way for employees to send a message even when they were not in the office.”
SOLUTIONS:
DataMotion secure mailbox & DataMotion secure contact me
Solution
Easterseals Central Illinois evaluated DataMotion’s secure mailbox along with two other vendors. After a rigorous evaluation process, they presented their options to the State of Illinois. Ultimately, they chose the secure mailbox because of its ability to integrate with Outlook and SharePoint, its easy implementation process, and the secure contact me feature, which allows normal email recipients to initiate a secure,
unencrypted email message. It took less than one day to set up the secure mailbox Outlook plug-in for the end users and to fully implement the new solution.
“When implementing the secure mailbox, I was able to do it all on my own,” explained Vissering. “We waited until the employees had a staff meeting, gave a presentation on how to use it, then gave them their
accounts and set up the plug-in to work with their Outlook. We were able to implement everyone all at once during that meeting.”
DataMotion’s secure mailbox is an easy-to-use service which provides end-to-end security by encrypting selected email messages using the “Send Secure” Outlook button. By leveraging the Office 365 content
filtering, messages and files can be sent securely with only one-click and the sender receives confirmation when the message arrives safely and when the message is opened. An included secure contact me signature line link makes it easy for recipients to reply via their own email address with an encrypted message or file.
Results
- Ensures the company is meeting security and privacy compliance regulations
- Employees can now send a secure email from any computer by simply logging in to their Outlook account
- Families can easily send a secure response using the secure contact me signature link
- The time it takes for families to complete their introductory work now takes days rather than months
- Enables secure exchange between the patient and provider
- Employee and patient experience is simplified and enhanced
- Overall quality of care is improved
“Before using the secure mailbox, we were unaware of how much PHI was being sent out insecurely. After implementing the service, this was a surprising number to find out. With DataMotion having the secure mailbox button, it makes you think every time you send an email if the information needs to be secured,” said Vissering. “This service has not only helped to keep our information safe, but it is also keeping our organization in compliance.”
Securely Exchange in Your Self-Service Portal
By incorporating DataMotion into your self-service portal, you can improve your customers’ digital experience by leaps and bounds. They can easily ask questions and share documents in one place. Through better online support, you can find many improvements that add to your bottom line, improve communication and reduce development time.
