The Top 4 HIPAA Email Disclaimer Examples

HIPAA, otherwise known as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, applies to all healthcare providers, healthcare clearing houses, and organizations that transmit health data electronically in the United States.

Essentially, if you have access to personal healthcare data and send emails to medical patients, you MUST use an appropriate HIPAA email disclaimer.

The financial penalties are severe if you do not include a compliant HIPAA email disclaimer on all messages. In fact, the maximum fine can be over $1.5 million for each violation and even involve up to ten years of prison time.

Now, a HIPAA email disclaimer is only meant to inform patients. It does not make a company fully compliant with HIPAA law. However, HIPAA does require that your disclaimer tells the recipient the following:

• The email they are receiving is not 100% secure.

• The content placed within the message is confidential.

• They should pass the email on to the relevant person if they are not the correct recipient.

• There are consequences for misusing personal information.

Below are our top 4 HIPAA email disclaimer examples used by healthcare organizations across the U.S. to aid in their HIPAA compliance.

Implementing a HIPAA email disclaimer

So, you now realize what you need to include in a HIPAA email disclaimer. But how are you going to apply this across your whole organization? What’s to stop an employee from removing any important text or changing the font?

Sure, you could use the native functionality of Office 365 (now Microsoft 365), G Suite (now Google Workspace), or Microsoft Exchange. However, you’ll end up cluttering a recipient’s inbox with lots of disclaimer text. This ensures they won’t read the important information contained within your email.

To overcome these limitations, you should use Exclaimer email signature management solutions. You can then ensure everyone has an appropriate HIPAA email disclaimer that they cannot modify. Even better, you’ll get peace of mind from managing everything centrally within one easy-to-use console.