“I was blown away by how simple it was to access the encrypted content as a non-Virtru licensed recipient. We had been investigating several clunky encryption solutions and as soon as I opened the Virtru email, I knew that was the solution for Annexus.” – Brad Frazier, Co-Founder, President, and COO at Annexus Health
Annexus Health enables providers to help patients gain access to financial assistance by reducing the administrative burden and challenges across the patient journey. Because Annexus is in the healthcare tech space, protecting patient data under HIPAA is a top concern. We spoke with Brad Frazier, Co-Founder, President, and COO, to learn why he and his team selected Virtru as their HIPAA-compliant data protection solution. With Virtru, Annexus was able to:
“Personal health information (PHI) is protected at all times within all of our environments, databases, and our product, specifically—but there is also a need to exchange sensitive data outside of our product. For example, if a customer submits a support case to us, we need to be able to interact with the customer via email to resolve their issues. We are keenly focused on making sure that our customers’ data remains secure no matter how or where it is shared.
“HIPAA requirements are such that we must encrypt PHI. Our Chief Information Security Officer pays extremely close attention to what we do from an encryption standpoint—from picking the best solutions and the best partners to ensuring that we have the right data security policies and procedures in place. Outside of our product’s own security features, we must work with vendors that protect our communication methods, and ultimately, our data.”
“Recently, I got an email from one of our partners who was using Virtru. I had never seen a Virtru encrypted email before and I was blown away by how simple it was to access the encrypted content as a non-Virtru licensed recipient. We had been investigating several clunky encryption solutions and as soon as I opened the Virtru email, I knew that was the solution for Annexus. The user experience of the Virtru approach is seamless and efficient.
“I immediately called up the individual who had sent the email and asked him all about his Virtru experience. Long story short, implementing Virtru as our encryption provider was a no-brainer. It all came down to ease of use and direct Gmail integration. The technical implementation is super easy. We use Google Workspace, so having the plug-in for Gmail is very straightforward. As for rolling it out to the company, we gave everyone a heads up that this new solution was coming and reached out to Virtru for some assistance with training materials. Change management is always a hurdle, but with the help of Virtru, we managed the conversion successfully and in a timely manner.”
“One metric for success that I look for is not having any compliance issues—even with brand new employees who have never worked in health care. With Virtru, I can rest easy at night knowing that we have so much security baked in and so many features available to help protect against any accidental actions that could put an individual employee or the company at risk.”
For more information on how to protect PHI and other forms of sensitive data, please contact Virtru today.
