From a regulatory perspective, the past few years have been challenging for healthcare marketers. As government entities prioritize patient privacy, new compliance mandates from the HHS and OCR restrict how and where companies can engage with their target audiences. With some companies choosing to completely eliminate third-party trackers, healthcare marketers are left wondering if there's anywhere else left to turn.
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The regulatory landscape is confusing, but there are solutions to help marketing-focused healthcare companies. While many have took risk-averse approaches by stopping their use of ad platforms like Google Ads, Meta, Facebook, and others, there's a way to make them HIPAA-compliant with with some help from data storage platforms like Snowflake.
Ensuring protected healthcare information (PHI) is safeguarded from non-compliant web trackers while maintaining conversion data
Storing user identifiers, PHI, and conversions in a compliant data platform like Snowflake
HIPAA compliant marketing campaigns, measurable performance, and OCR compliance
Marketers use tracking scripts to run ad campaigns that send conversion data from their websites to platforms like Google Ads, Meta, and Facebook. Unfortunately, this conversion data contains a combination of user identifiers and PHI, constituting a HIPAA violation.
It's technically possible to remove the tracking script altogether. However, removal introduces more issues. Without access to the conversion data, marketers can't track the attribution metrics that help them measure ad performance, campaign effectiveness, patient acquisition cost, and other necessary metrics.
As a result, the problem is not just a technical one. Without a means to measure campaign performance, marketers can's prove the ROI of their hard-fought marketing budgets.
To make web trackers HIPAA-compliant, healthcare companies need:
In this use case, Snowflake is the compliant data platform, or 'intermediary,' between regulated entities and non-compliant web trackers. Snowflake is a connected data platform that HIPAA-regulated entities like healthcare clinics, insurance companies, and their business associates use to compliantly store structured and unstructured data.
=So, why does Snowflake work so well for the HIPAA-compliant web tracking use case?
As part of the compliant workflow, Snowflake ensures that conversion data is retained – and redaction ensures that no identifiable health information is shared with third-party services that won't sign BAAs. As a result, regulated entities can use popular ad platforms compliantly while effectively measuring campaign performance.
When paired with workflows built in Google Tag Manager to redact PHI, the overall solution looks something like this.
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