Earning Trust in Healthcare Marketing: The Power of First-Party Data Collection

A quick note before you read: On June 20, 2024, a federal judge vacated a narrow part of the OCR web tracker guidance that an individual’s IP address combined with a visit to a public healthcare website triggered a HIPAA violation. However, the rest of OCR’s web tracking tech guidance remains intact. To keep track of the latest updates, head over to the Freshpaint healthcare privacy hub.

If there's any industry that hinges on trust, it’s healthcare—and that extends far beyond the walls of a hospital. It extends to phones, laptops, tablets, and anywhere else healthcare providers use the internet to connect with their audience.

The concept of “trust in marketing” might seem like an oxymoron at a time when people are leery about being tracked online. However, things get even more delicate when it comes to trust healthcare marketing.

Consumers may not mind if a sneaker company suggests a new pair of shoes based on their browser activity. But if a healthcare provider sends that same consumer a targeted ad for orthopedic surgeons because they know you busted your knee, it can feel invasive and downright creepy.

Herein lies the priceless question: How can healthcare marketers let consumers know they’re understood without feeling like they’re data is being misused or their privacy is being violated?

In this article, we break down why consumer trust has to be the north star for healthcare marketers—and how ethical data use helps you earn it.

Marketing’s Big Opportunity to Build Trust in Healthcare

Every day, doctors and providers work tirelessly to earn their patients’ trust. If those patients also trust their providers’ marketing efforts, it reinforces the relationship, creating a virtuous cycle. But if that trust is broken with invasive or unethical marketing, it can quickly erode the goodwill that’s been fostered. 

In healthcare, we can think of trust as a “daisy chain,” where each link represents a relationship built on trust: If consumers trust the marketing, they’re more likely to trust the other interactions they have within the healthcare ecosystem.

Any breach of trust can undermine confidence and erode patient-provider relationships. However, when trust is earned, it elevates the patient experience, strengthens provider-patient relationships, and contributes to the success of the organization. If healthcare marketers want to get there, they have to make ethical data use the cornerstone of their efforts.

👉 Learn how Vybe Urgent Care is prioritizing patient trust to improve marketing outcomes 👈

Handle with Care: The Importance of Ethical Data Use 

Just like you should trust your friends not to share your group chat with random strangers, consumers should trust healthcare providers not to hand over their sensitive data to unauthorized third parties like Facebook and Google.

So, what counts as “sensitive data?” Great question. Two factors must be met for something to be classified as Protected Health Information (PHI):

• At least one of the 18 HIPAA identifiers has to exist, such as someone’s name, email address, or phone number
• There is some health information, such as visiting a condition-specific web page or scheduling an appointment

If you share PHI with a non-compliant party, like Google Ads or Facebook Ads, that’s a HIPAA violation—whether it’s intentional or not.

In the wake of multi-million dollar lawsuits against healthcare providers, including BetterHelp, Northwestern University, and GoodRx, people are waking up to the risks of their sensitive health information being used in advertising and marketing. The media loves to fixate on these companies losing large sums of cash because of their negligence. But lost amidst that discussion is how those companies lost something far more important: their audience’s trust. 

As tech giants like Facebook and Google enhance their data-collection capabilities, you need to enhance your data-handling practices to protect your website visitors. Overlooking just one tracking tool could result in penalties and damage to your reputation.

When you’re a healthcare organization, it’s much easier to earn back millions of dollars than it is to earn back millions of people’s trust.

How First-Party Data Facilitates Trust

There are all sorts of steps you can take, but the best way to keep consumer confidence high is to prioritize first-party data collection.

First-party data is the information you collect directly from consumers, such as medical history, demographics, and interactions with healthcare providers. These data are typically collected via patient portals, online forms, surveys, or electronic health records. Regardless, first-party data helps healthcare marketers glean insights into customers’ needs and preferences to enable more personalized marketing.

By contrast, third-party data is scraped from external sources like Google and Facebook, which are trying to figure out who landed on your site and what they’re up to. Even when you embed Google or Facebook tracking tools on your website, the data collected by these trackers is owned by Google or Facebook, not by you. Although these platforms may provide you with some access to the data, they don't share all of it with you. This means that despite being collected on your website, the information is not considered first-party data because you do not have full control over it. That’s fine in most industries, but in healthcare, it can turn into a HIPAA violation—and a violation of your audience’s trust. 

Accordingly, focusing on first-party data collection offers big advantages when it comes to earning and maintaining consumer confidence. For starters, first-party data collection typically involves getting explicit consent from patients or consumers, giving them control over how their information is used.

Additionally, first-party data is stored in your organization's systems—not a third-party’s system—giving you more control over security measures and data protection protocols. Healthcare companies are held to strict standards, so by prioritizing data security, marketers can reassure consumers that their sensitive information is in safe hands.

Healthcare marketers understand that they’re ethically and legally obliged to protect consumer data. But it’s not always clear how to protect it. That’s where Freshpaint’s Privacy-First Famework comes in: a five-step approach to audit your website’s tracking technology and ensure you don’t accidentally share PHI with any unauthorized third parties.

As Bridget O’Connor, COO at Fortalice Solutions pointed out in our Privacy-First webinar, some teams have a knee-jerk reaction to simply “turn everything off” on their website to eliminate any HIPAA violation risks. But she notes there’s an alternate camp of people who are open to researching alternative solutions.

“A privacy-first approach isn’t about turning everything off on your website or abandoning tools,” noted Ray Mina, Freshpaint’s Head of Marketing. “It's making sure that there’s a process to understand what these tools are for and what data might be shared…It's a people problem.”

Freshpaint: The Foundation of Trust in Healthcare Marketing

Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose in any industry. But the stakes are especially high in healthcare marketing. Every second of every day, people share sensitive information with their providers—and they’re trusting you to keep that information secure.

“The last thing we want to do is breach that trust as an industry,” says Edward Rafalski, Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer, BayCare Health System. “We have an accountability to maintain that level of integrity.”

Healthcare marketers have to bridge the gap between patient privacy and digital marketing—that’s where Freshpaint comes in to keep you compliant 24/7. If you’re ready to build high-performing, HIPAA-compliant campaigns using first-party data, book a demo today.

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