Blue Jay Speech & Language Therapy

Jessica Bullock runs Blue Jay Speech & Language Therapy Services, a solo speech therapy practice in Vancouver, Washington. She works with kids ages 3 to 18 on communication disorders, autism, Down syndrome, and a range of speech sound disorders.

She opened in the middle of 2020. Email was central to the practice from the start, which is why she set up secure, HIPAA compliant email before she ever saw her first client.

The challenge

Bullock signed her business license in January 2020 and her lease two weeks before the pandemic shut everything down. She opened that July anyway, starting slow with six clients while she built her processes one piece at a time.

Email was going to carry most of that work. Families reach her by email, referrals come in by email, and she answers between 45-minute sessions when she cannot pick up the phone. About 95% of her client communication runs through email.

That made HIPAA compliant email a priority before anything else. The common shortcut among her peers did not sit right with her.

"A lot of my colleagues in the speech therapy private practice world do not use any sort of encryption for their emails. They believe that just by signing the BAA with Gmail, that that's secure, and they don't understand that it is totally not."

A signed business associate agreement (BAA) covers liability. It does not encrypt the message in transit. Bullock wanted the encryption, not just the paperwork.

The solution

She researched her options and found Paubox before she opened. The setup decided it.

"The process to install it and put it all in was pretty simple. The directions were easy. If it was frustrating, I probably would have gone somewhere else, but it was easy."

Paubox Email Suite encrypts her outbound email automatically and works with the email she already uses. There is no portal for families to log into and no extra steps for her between sessions. When a parent emails a quick question about an appointment or sends their child's documents, she can reply securely without thinking about it.

It also fits the way she already works. She keeps records in her practice management system and uses email for the fast back-and-forth in between.

The results

Five years in, email scaled with the practice. After Blue Jay Speech contracted with Kaiser, Bullock's caseload filled quickly, and the email setup she put in place at the start handled the growth without changes.

"The peace of mind is worth every penny to me."

She recommends Paubox to other therapists who ask what they should use, usually with her referral link attached. She has even tried to get her dad to sign up.

"I can't imagine running my practice without being able to email. I don't think I would be able to do it."