HI folks,
I'm interested in doing more email communication with my patients. The click box inside A/C opens Outlook but of course it isn't secure or encrypted on its own. My current email and web hosting company (Network Solutions) has a nice little plug in... for $9.99 per month per email address (!) and it doesn't even work with Outlook 2007. That'd be $240 a year for my wife and me, just to send encrypted emails. Buncha crooks.
What I'd like is an easy plug-in solution to encrypt email that also works with Outlook, so I can access send email from within AC. (Or, some other solution that allows me to send email to a particular patient with a single click.)
I've found 2 products so far: AT&T has a Secure Mail product that's $5 a month per email address to send (free to receive) and encrypts using a "secret common password" which you have to agree upon with your patients, who have to enter this key in order to read encrypted messages. I'm a little concerned that this really isn't that secure, since hundreds if not thousands of your patients would be using the same code word!
Mirrasoft looks like a pretty decent solution - it's under $4 per month and has an Outlook 2007 plug-in, and requires end-users to register one time to access your encrypted message on a separate server. It's also free for end-users who only need to read, not encrypt.
Any other thoughts? Who's using secure email effectively? One barrier is that there doesn't seem to be an easy way to get sent emails saved as part of the medical record automatically when they're sent. That'd be a nice feature...
Jim, who'd rather be in front of a computer all day than outside in New Orleans in late-July.
