Vital Stats
Relevant Product Characteristics
- This product is designed specifically with mental/behavioral health professionals in mind.
- The leadership or management behind this product includes at least one mental/behavioral health professional. In addition, at least one technical leader or manager has an extensive background serving the health care industry.
What Is This Product?
Regroup Therapy provides a cloud-based videoconferencing platform for mental health clinicians to perform telemental health services.
At the time of review, their services for clinicians were very basic and to-the-point: provide that videoconferencing connection to clients.
They also appear to connect companies with therapists. So it would seem that working with Regroup could potentially be a source of referrals for those looking for new telemental health clients. You’ll have to ask them about the details there — we just look at the security stuff in these here reviews!
Our Impressions
Very positive. Our technical and compliance-related questions were addressed quickly, thoroughly, and personally by their Chief Technical Officer, Moon Lee. They also supplied us with technical documents to help us understand how they approach and maintain compliance as a HIPAA Business Associate.
Based on the information gathered in our review, we have no hesitations in recommending Regroup Therapy as appropriate for your risk management needs. Do read the notes, though. There are always gotchas with every product!
Caveats
Caveats are criticsms of the company or product that we feel are relevant to your risk management or other important considerations.
None
Notes
Notes cover points where the product can’t ensure compliance or ethical action for you. These help you know what your part of the compliance puzzle looks like when using this product. A high note count usually correlates with a feature-rich product, and not necessarily with a product that has problems.
1) Be sure you request your Business Associate Agreement
Regroup does not appear to execute one automatically with all customers. Be sure to reach out when you register to make sure you do so with them.
2) Consider *not* allowing the service to invite clients to session by email. Use this workaround instead.
By default, Regroup sends your client(s) an unsecured email to invite them into video sessions with you. The client needs the information in this email in order to join the call with you. Regroup’s CTO kindly sent us a copy of what the email looks like, and it announces very clearly to all that can see it that the recipient of the email is being invited to a mental health therapy session.
It’s possible, on a client-by-client basis, to make determinations with the client as to whether or not it’s safe, legal, and ethical to let Regroup send these emails to them. So there may be clients with whom the emails are fine and you can let this be. That’s not an assumption you should make initially, however. And you’ll need a plan for working around the email issue with clients who need you to do that.
While the software doesn’t let you turn off the email feature, Regroup’s CTO gave us this suggestion for a workaround that prevents you from sending the unsecured email to clients:
He suggests that when you make your invite for the session, give the software your own email address instead of the client’s. That way, the invite email gets sent to you instead of to the client. The PIN code that the client needs to join the session will be in the email. You then send the PIN code to the client by your own secure means — e.g. secure text message, secure email, or whatever you’ve worked out for secure communication with your client.
Read our article on unsecured communications here for some guidance to help you decide what you need to do to around unsecured to stay legal and ethical in your practice. It is also covered in our Level I training in detail.