Healthcare has been transformed by technology in the form of email. And in every place that email has made positive change, its effectiveness and security remain essential to its continued success:

Email and Healthcare: Impact on Every Area

• Clinical delivery:  The changes to patient care made possible by
  technology are among the most visible and most reported.  In this area, email plays a critical role in helping providers across multiple facilities communicate faster and more accurately with each other and their patients.
• Transaction management: Healthcare organizations now use email
  to process millions of transactions a day—at a fraction of traditional, hard-copy costs and in a fraction of the time. With email, healthcare organizations not only do business more efficiently and cost-effectively, but also more responsively.
• Infrastructure support: No modern industry is complete without
  email and healthcare is no exception. Email has become a mission-critical component for every individual and group in the organization—from those on the front lines of patient care to those who oversee the daily management of business operations.

Email enhances every facet of across the continuum of 21st century healthcare. But if left unguarded, email can also interfere—with devastating effect—with healthcare’s primary mission: providing effective, high-quality care.

Why can’t healthcare organizations afford to ignore email health?
Spam, virus, phishing, fraud.  Every one of these email threats—in both blended and separate forms—has the potential to devastate networks, frustrate users, and compromise delivery of care. Additionally, IT managers of healthcare organizations face additional challenges when fighting email threats:

• Managing the multiple provider and patient groups that increase as their organizations acquire more network providers and members.
• Maintaining the performance of remote, diverse email server configurations from an office sometimes hundreds of miles away.
• Keeping the entire organization and its email safe, up, and running to deliver patient care whenever and wherever it is needed. 

But managing email is not just a tactical concern.  There are also strategic implications to keeping email effective and productive that the healthcare IT manager must address:

• Positioning email as a valuable part of providing quality healthcare. Email’s capabilities and potential make it a necessary part of modern healthcare delivery; healthcare IT companies must seek ways to enhance its value while ensuring its security.
• Controlling communication cost. Email communication saves time and money; no healthcare organization can afford to lose it.
• Identifying a solution scales with ever-increasing email volume and message size. Email is used on a 24/7 basis to transfer mission-critical and patient-critical information; it can’t be interrupted or limited.

All these demands on healthcare IT executives and their managers illustrate the formal recognition of technology as a critical component of  healthcare business model. As noted by Healthcare Informatics Online, IT executives and their managers

"…[are] facing unprecedented demands to deliver--on present as well as future strategic and technological challenges, such as …improving patient safety and care quality, increasing efficiency, cutting costs and responding to demands for greater accountability."
Healthcare Informatics Online
October 2004

What does MailFrontier prescribe for healthcare email management?
MailFrontier provides healthcare organizations with comprehensive inbound email protection that blocks spam, virus, phishing, and fraud. With these threats stopped at the network gateway, healthcare organizations can prevent network service interruption and see extended processing power and life out of their existing system configurations

MailFrontier delivers healthcare organizations three key immediate benefits:

• Reduced management time and cost
  We’ll end the hours you spend dealing with keyword lists and content filters.  We’ll stop the phone calls from frustrated users looking for “lost” emails. MailFrontier knows the way to satisfy every one of your network users, groups, and administrators with one email security solution. And in five steps and a handful of mouse clicks, you can too.

• 98 percent effectiveness
  The MailFrontier Anti-Spam, Anti-Virus, and Anti-Fraud modules combine to offer a r integrated, real-time, multi-technique approach to email security.  If you’re at the mercy of a series of point solutions solution that seem to have an arbitrary concept of “good enough”, MailFrontier offers one solution that works against every threat, on every email, every time. 

• Improved return on investment
  As your organization acquires more provider groups and customers, email volume increases as well. By keeping unwanted email out of your network altogether, you stop wasting valuable processing power on email that threatens your productivity and security. The result is longer life and use of your current IT investment—without significant additional cost.

MailFrontier healthcare customers keep their email productive and reduce email management time and burden with our entire line of MailFrontier Gateway™ products. The MailFrontier solution is implemented in healthcare organization of every size and protects email systems of every type of system configuration. From the moment of deployment, MailFrontier is immediately at work in the healthcare IT environment using multi-technique anti-spam analysis, time zero virus protection and market-leading fraud detection. MailFrontier ensures that healthcare organizations can keep their email productive, reduce email management time and burden, and refocus resources on improving business process, enhancing clinical delivery, or preparing to meet impending regulatory requirements.