Digital Marketing Agency Full Media Achieves HIPAA Compliance
Agency compliance ensures Full Media’s ability to properly manage sensitive information, protecting providers from liability and patients from potential breaches.
Chattanooga, Tennessee (October 27, 2020) — Full Media, a digital marketing agency that focuses on serving healthcare clients, has completed a company-wide endeavor to become HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliant throughout the entire organization. Achieving compliance involved training for every member of the team, as well as audits provided by legal counsel specializing in HIPAA. In addition to team member training, the company has upgraded IT and security practices to further enhance its protection of sensitive data.
Full Media has worked with healthcare clients since opening the company’s first office in 2008. When they decided to shift focus from offering digital marketing services to a variety of industries to being a healthcare-specific agency, company leadership decided to go beyond educating just their marketing team members about the particulars of HIPAA-compliant marketing practices and focused on the agency as a whole.
“We’ve always educated the marketers working on healthcare campaigns about safe management of sensitive data, but the compliance audit process has really taken that a step further,” says Rachael Sauceman, head of strategic initiatives at Full Media. “We’re very proud of our team for working together to not only learn how they can better protect our clients, but also provide an enhanced level of security for the thousands of patients our clients serve.”
HIPAA-compliant marketing and web design primarily deal with the ways in which an organization's team handles, stores, and uses protected health information (PHI). For Full Media, this means team members are equipped with the knowledge required to safely manage any PHI they may encounter. Additionally, as a HIPAA compliant partner, Full Media will be able to enter into business associate agreements (often referred to as BAAs, or formal contracts that share the liability of HIPAA compliance) with healthcare organizations.
“HIPAA compliance is a very complex and robust topic,” Sauceman says. “It requires our team to know what types of information must be protected, as well as what marketing tools can be used while keeping our clients and their patients secure.”
According to Sauceman, many people don’t understand just how important HIPAA compliance in digital marketing is — or what information is considered to be PHI. Even something as simple as a form to request an appointment on a medical practice’s website may be collecting PHI and, according to regulations set forth by HIPAA, any data received and stored through that webform must be securely stored and utilized appropriately in order to remain in compliance.
“Healthcare campaigns have many moving parts, and marketers at the organizations we serve are handling everything from messaging and brand awareness to call tracking and data storage,” Sauceman says. “Historically, we’ve seen that many agencies leave the burden of HIPAA compliance to fall on their healthcare clients’ shoulders; we wanted to stand that on its head. HIPAA compliance is our responsibility too, and we hope that our current and future healthcare partners can breathe a sigh of relief in knowing that we’re here to share in that load and serve as a trusted and expert partner.”
Because HIPAA rules and regulations are ever-evolving, the Full Media team will undergo continual training, engage in regular security and process audits, and stay on top of the latest HIPAA-compliant digital marketing tools on behalf of their clients.
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About​ Full Media:
Full Media is a digital marketing agency that specializes in website development, search engine optimization, and search engine marketing. We have been serving healthcare organizations in Chattanooga and North Georgia since 2008.
