Interview: Hoala Greevy, Founder & CEO, Paubox
The HIPAA Journal has spoken with Paubox founder and CEO, Hoala Greevy to find out more about their work and experiences with HIPAA.
Hoala Greevy, Founder & CEO, Paubox.
Tell the readers about your career in the healthcare industry
My journey in healthcare began in 2014, following a lunch meeting with Siana Austin Hunt, who was CEO of the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Hawaii at the time.
She explained a business problem to me and after some thought, I decided to do something about it. From there we built a seamless email encryption solution that became Paubox.
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What was your first position?
My first job out of college was working for an email company in San Francisco in 1999. I’ve been doing email ever since.
What is your current position?
I’m the Founder and CEO of Paubox.
What are the main challenges in your position?
Communicating the mission, vision, and future direction of Paubox to staff, investors, and customers. I’ve found in my role, there is no such thing as over-communicating.
Tell the readers about any significant event in your career.
During my first semester taking computer science courses at Portland State University, I noticed a “help wanted” sign on the job bulletin board in the CS building. The scope of work for the contract was nearly identical to the homework we had the prior week. Although I was certain someone had already beaten me to it, I called the number anyway.
As luck would have it, I was the only person to call; I specifically recall how motivated the guy was. There was a bug in his company’s payroll file and without it fixed, he couldn’t run payroll.
A few days later, I met him in a Safeway parking lot near campus, floppy disk in hand. He popped it into his laptop, ran the executable, and voilà—it worked. He then begrudgingly gave me a check, I think it was for $1,000. I split it with my buddy who had access to a C++ compiler, which I needed. All told, I made $500 for 30 minutes of work.
I immediately knew that was exactly what I wanted to do as a career: develop, market, and sell software.
Are you working on any interesting projects?
We recently launched Paubox Texting, which is our solution for HIPAA-compliant texting. In a nutshell, we took our approach to encrypted email and applied it to encrypted texting.
Paubox Texting does not require an app to be installed, nor does it use a portal. The patent-pending solution is seamless to the end user, which is often a patient.
We built this because our customers asked us to. Customer feedback is a big deal to us at Paubox. It drives our roadmap of what to build and when.
What products/services do you provide for the healthcare industry and what is unique about them?
Our mission is to become the market leader for HIPAA-compliant communication. To that end, we specialize in three areas: email, forms, and text.
- Paubox Email Suite is compatible with Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Microsoft Exchange. By default, it encrypts every email, for all users, and all devices.
- Paubox Email API is a HIPAA-compliant REST API for transactional email.
- Paubox Marketing is for digital marketers in healthcare. Paubox Marketing can be used to build personalized email campaigns that include protected health information (PHI). This is unique in that it’s common knowledge outside of healthcare that personalized email increases engagement and conversions. In healthcare however, personalization information can easily become PHI, which is protected by HIPAA. The ability to personalize with PHI and thereby increase patient engagement, is a new horizon in healthcare.
- Paubox Forms is included for free for all paid customers. We released it in January.
- Paubox Texting, our newest solution, is designed to further increase patient engagement.
- Paubox Email Suite, Paubox Email API, and Paubox Marketing are HITRUST CSF certified. The HITRUST certification is the gold standard for HIPAA compliance in U.S. healthcare.
When did you first get involved with HIPAA compliance?
I first dove into the world of HIPAA compliance in 2014. After writing more than 700 blog posts generally around HIPAA-compliant email, it remains a topic I’m still learning about.
What are your main challenges regarding HIPAA?
HIPAA can mean many things to people. Effectively communicating and understanding HIPAA compliance is a constant challenge.
What do you think needs to be improved in the HIPAA regulations?
The deprecation of the fax machine as a HIPAA-compliant form of communication.
Do you have any predictions for the future of HIPAA?
More HIPAA breaches. More HIPAA fines. More HIPAA regulations.
Do you have any predictions for the future of healthcare regulation?
I believe more privacy rights will be added to healthcare regulations. While the HIPAA Privacy Act is a good start, I think more privacy provisions will be added.
For example, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) gives consumers the right to know about the personal information a business collects about them and how it is used and shared. It also gives them the right to delete personal information collected.
I think it’s a natural step for the HIPAA Privacy Act to be extended to adopt guidance similar to this.
Do you have any predictions for the future of healthcare technology?
Until we vanquish the fax machine, it remains a mystery to me how effective Generative AI will be in healthcare.
Do you have any predictions for the future of the healthcare industry?
More problems. More opportunities.
Do you have anything else interesting to share with readers?
I hold the IGFA world record for the finescale triggerfish, which is perhaps the ugliest fish ever caught!
You can reach Hoala Greevy via LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/hoalagreevy/
