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HIPAA Compliance, APIs Continue to Fuel Phone.com Growth

April 22, 2019
By Rich Tehrani, Group Editor-in-Chief, TMC

“We recently announced more than 30 thousand small businesses across the U.S. and Canada and there are two major factors helping our company grow,” said Brent Barbara, SVP, Business Development, Phone.com (News - Alert) in an exclusive, live, in-person interview. “APIs and HIPAA compliance have helped us achieve 900 to one-thousand business associate agreements in the past year.”


“Most other companies charge or have stipulation on the # of users for HIPAA compliance,” he exclaimed. “We do it for free.”

In healthcare, VoIP is expected to be the fastest growing market in terms of adoption of SIP trunking services, says MarketsandMarkets. In addition to hospitals, clinics, physicians and other caregivers, businesses that support healthcare practitioners, such as billing, software, professional services, and management services – known as Business Associates (BA) - are also subject to audits for HIPAA-compliance. 

  Brent Barbara Phone.com 

Accordingly, the phone service provider they choose must also be compliant.

According to The Compliancy Group, essentially, if an organization is hired to handle, use, distribute, or access protected health information (PHI), they likely qualify as a BA under HIPAA regulation. Further, any business associate with whom you share PHI or ePHI with over the course of the work they’ve been hired to do needs to provide a Business Associate Agreement to ensure compliance.

“Customers want everything,” Brent exclaimed, “Talk, text, video and  fax, all embedded via APIs.”

He said they have lightweight APIs – some go through Zapier allowing users to quickly define business rules. For example, when a call comes in, you can initiate a call recording on Google (News - Alert) Drive or enter a record in a CRM system.

They are focusing on making things easy for small business – where other competitors are not focusing.

“Some of these solutions are plug and play,” he exclaimed. “You can create a Zap on Zapier in eight minutes.”

Brent said he made an SMS to Slack integration in exactly eight minutes.

“With other solutions, you need to be a C++ programmer,” he exclaimed. “APIs continue to be big part of story.”

He went on to say the channel is as well. They have 400-500 active partners representing the largest sector of their revenue stream.

Other benefits include seamless WebRTC support, great case studies, mobile apps, bilingual U.S.-based support, no long-term contracts and a self-service portal.




Edited by Maurice Nagle

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