alt Hacker NewsThose "message centers" aren't just about security, they're also about compliance. For example, insurance companies need to be HIPAA-compliant which requires that they can only send health-related info to other HIPAA-compliant systems, which means signing a BAA (a contract) with those other systems. There's no way to do that with email (your insurance company can't sign a contract with every potential email host in the world, and they don't even know where the email will ultimately end up after they send it) so practically speaking, they're not legally allowed to send any health info via email.
It's extremely difficult to accurately identify which emails have health info and which ones don't (even something like a person's name or IP address could count depending on the context) so they just default to sending everything through their message center. No amount of email security could change that.
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I think a lot of the HIPAA compliance can be signed away when you authorize them to send your medical information over email/voicemail/sms, but I'm not a lawyer, and my doctor doesn't email me anything but a link to log in to their EPIC portal.
It is frustrating to know that we can digitally sign and encrypt messages but don't because "it's too hard for normal people".
With HIPAA, is it not possible to simply encrypt the message? The "forgot password" flow for their message center is probably email anyway.
I can upload my public key to SourceHut and all email from them becomes signed and encrypted. It's a one-time process to generate long-lived keys and another to set up with SourceHut and that's all I need to do.
So much work is done for HIPAA compliance, and then the only authentication required is a birth date.
Somehow they mail letters with info.
Encrypted email wouldn’t require a BAA.