We hear HIPAA entities around the United States use Tucows hosted email for business use in healthcare. We know the HIPAA industry is vast so we can empathize with just how many people need to use email in this sector. In previous posts, we’ve covered email providers like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Outlook, and AOL and their capabilities for HIPAA compliance. The purpose of this post is to determine if Tucows offers HIPAA compliant email or not.
About Tucows
Tucows Inc. is a publicly traded Internet services and telecommunications company. Headquartered in Toronto, they are one of the largest domain registrars in the world. They also operate Hover and OpenSRS. Their Hosted Email offering is done through OpenSRS.
Tucows and the Business Associate Agreement
We’ve previously talked about how a Business Associate Agreement is a written contract between a Covered Entity and a Business Associate. It is required by law for HIPAA compliance. We checked the Tucows and OpenSRS websites and found their Privacy Policy and their Master Services Agreement. We could not find a single mention of “HIPAA” or “Business Associate Agreement.” In addition, we could not find any mention of HIPAA compliance, or Business Associate Agreement on the OpenSRS website.
Does Tucows Offer HIPAA Compliant Email?
The Business Associate Agreement is a key component to HIPAA compliance between a covered entity and a business associate. Since we could not find any mention of Tucows or OpenSRS offering to sign one, we conclude they are not in the business of offering HIPAA compliant email.
Conclusion: Tucows Hosted Email is not HIPAA compliant.