MailerLite is not HIPAA compliant for HIPAA Covered Entities or Business Associates because it does not offer a Business Associate Agreement and its service is not presented as supporting HIPAA Privacy Rule and HIPAA Security Rule requirements for creating, receiving, maintaining, or transmitting electronic protected health information.
HIPAA requires a written contract, commonly a Business Associate Agreement, when a vendor handles protected health information on behalf of a Covered Entity or another Business Associate. Email marketing services routinely process subscriber lists, message content, suppression lists, deliverability data, engagement metrics, and tracking information. When any element of that data set contains protected health information, the vendor relationship falls within HIPAA business associate contracting expectations and the Covered Entity remains accountable for vendor compliance controls.
Using MailerLite for patient communications can introduce protected health information through list fields, tags, custom properties, segmentation rules, message content, attachments, landing pages, embedded forms, and link tracking. Patient identifiers combined with healthcare context can also create protected health information even when clinical details are not included. Marketing content has additional HIPAA Privacy Rule constraints when a communication meets the definition of marketing and the message uses or discloses protected health information without a permitted purpose or without a valid authorization.
MailerLite can be used by healthcare organizations only for communications and data sets that do not involve protected health information and do not connect an identifiable person to healthcare services, payment, or care status. That scope control needs to cover list imports, form collection, automated workflows, templates, integrations, tracking parameters, and internal user access to the platform.
When the intended use involves protected health information, select an email service provider that will execute a Business Associate Agreement and can support administrative, physical, and technical safeguards aligned to the HIPAA Security Rule, including access controls, audit controls, transmission security, and incident response handling for regulated data.