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Third Party Messaging Service FAQ

We understand that clinics using Jane absolutely depend on reminders and notifications to ensure patients show up on the right day and the right time. A lot of care went into choosing partners to offer these services who have a reputation of securely delivering communications with zero fuss. For example, for email accounts that support it, our third-party email service will use an encrypted connection to deliver content to those addresses. That’s a very complex (but welcome!) feature that only a trusted partner could deliver.

Jane’s third-party partners have successfully and securely delivered bucket loads (really, A LOT) of emails per month. We continue to use them because they are reliably delivering the messages clinics need to keep their businesses running smoothly.

Here are some frequently asked questions and answers about how Jane partners with third parties.

1. Does Jane use third-party vendors?

Yes.
  • Amazon Simple Email Service (SES): for sending email reminders to one patient or client at a time.

  • Twilio: for sending SMS or text messages reminders to your patient or client.

  • Mailchimp (optional): for sending newsletter-type emails in bulk to a list or group of patients or clients.

2. What data is sent to third-party vendors?

Jane never sends medical or health record data from your charts to third-party vendors. We limit the information shared to that which is necessary to effectively deliver the service. We understand, however, that even patient names and email addresses are highly sensitive, and we always treat this information as such.

3. How does my data get from Jane to the third-party?

Jane encrypts any data passed from Jane to third-party vendors.

4. How do these vendors securely handle my data?

We chose these third-parties because they have a reputation of taking security and privacy very seriously.

5. What does it mean for me as a customer to use Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) for email reminders?

Emails will be routed from the data center based on the area you signed up in.

  • Canada: Jane has two data centres, both located in the Montreal area
  • United States: Oregon
  • Australia: Sydney
  • UK and Europe: London, England
  • Rest of world: Canada (Montreal)

6. Where is my data sent when I use these services with Jane?

Jane’s third-party vendors are US-based businesses, and the minimal amount of data needed to provide you with the service will be sent to their servers in the US.

7. My clinic is in Canada, is it OK that data is sent to the US?

Yes.

Privacy laws in Canada, including college and association by-laws, allow health practitioners to disclose health-related information to third-parties when the disclosure is for the same purpose as the original collection of data. For clinics using Jane, data such as patient name, email address, and phone number are collected as a component of providing adequate health care. Laws and by-laws account for the fact that communications between a health care provider and their patient or client are a critical part of the health care process, and this includes direct email communications about scheduling or health-related topics and appointment reminder notifications. There is NO REQUIREMENT that this data stay in Canada. Even from a patient perspective, this makes sense as there’s no requirement for the patient’s email account to be hosted in Canada (e.g., a large majority of patients would use Gmail, Hotmail, Office365, or Yahoo to host their email).

Using Mailchimp with Jane for marketing purposes is entirely optional for clinics, and where a clinic chooses to use this integration, patients and clients are given the option to actively opt-out of receiving these types of messages.

8. Are there any special considerations with using Mailchimp for marketing emails?

The Mailchimp integration for marketing emails is entirely optional. When you sign up for it and start setting up your email lists, there are a number of fields for each patient/client that are automatically transferred to Mailchimp. We did so at the request of many clinic owners, who wanted to be able to automate their follow-ups with patients.

These fields are:

  • Email Address
  • First Name
  • Last Name
  • Birth Date
  • Member Since
  • Last Visit Description
  • Last Visit Date
  • Visit Count
  • Discharged
  • City, Province, Country

However, what’s permissible and what’s beneficial to your clinic can be very different things, and so that’s why there are two options:

1 - We leave this as an optional integration.

2 - You can export an email list from Jane that only includes First Name, Last Name, and Email Address. Then, when you import to Mailchimp, you only import those three pieces of information.

Head to Reports > Email Marketing Subscribers to export a list of patients who have opted-in to your marketing emails.

When you export, you’ll want to choose the “Export to CSV” option as that works best with Mailchimp. While this won’t automatically transfer the relevant email addresses into Mailchimp, you can export and upload a new copy of this to Mailchimp whenever you need to send out a newsletter or communication. Mailchimp uses the email address as the unique identifier for subscribers, so each time you upload a new list, it will ignore any clients that you already have in there and it will upload the new ones.

Still Have Questions?

Have any questions about this guide or anything else related to security? Feel free to email Privacy and Security Support at [email protected] and we’d love to clarify anything you’re unsure on!

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