What is visual voicemail?

Traditional voicemail is a feature we all use when we have to, but it is a technology that hasn’t advanced along with the rest of the world. Your traditional voicemail inbox clogs up with messages that are so fast paced you have to listen to over and over again, or the audio quality makes it hard to understand them in the first place. 

Visual voicemail, also known as voicemail transcription, means that voicemails are transcribed and sent directly to your inbox with the original audio file attached. In a nutshell, you are able to scroll through your voicemails visually, save and archive messages, read text transcripts of each voicemail and save yourself time. Visual voicemail provides access to messages from beyond your desk phone, making it a valuable tool for remote workers and distributed teams. SEE ALSO: HIPAA compliant email While useful in everyday life, visual voicemail is especially important in healthcare. The HIPAA Privacy Rule requires that covered entities safeguard patients’ protected health information (PHI), including in voicemail messages.

 Concern for voicemail-related HIPAA breaches

HIPAA breaches happen in many different ways. One concern that was voiced during one of our Zoom social mixers was the potential of healthcare employees listening to voicemails that contain sensitive information in public on their smartphones. Essentially, the question was “Can you develop something that converts the audio attachments to text instead?”

The Paubox solution

One of our Paubox Foundations is using customer feedback as a roadmap for what to build and when to build it. So naturally, we got to work the same week our customers voiced their concern and launched our visual voicemail feature August 5th of this year.  We have leveraged natural language processing (NLP) to automatically transcribe a voicemail into text that is sent via HIPAA complaint email along with the original sound recording file. As a result, the risk of having others overhearing a voicemail containing protected health information (PHI) is limited.

This feature comes as an optional add-on to Paubox Email Suite, which enables customers to send HIPAA compliant email from their existing email platform directly to their patients’ inboxes . You can never be too protected.

The Plus and Premium plan levels of our HITRUST CSF certified solution promise you robust inbound security that will stop threats like spam, viruses, malware, phishing emails and more. Our patented ExecProtect feature that lets you say goodbye to display name spoofing emails, while Zero Trust Email leverages a proprietary email AI algorithm that requires a second form of verification before delivering any email. Looking to the future, we are also building robotic process automation (RPA) solutions for our customers in a HIPAA compliant manner. Stay tuned for more details in the weeks to follow.