Freshpaint Featured in Politico: How The Health Industry is Responding to Privacy Crackdowns

Since the HHS guidance related to website tracking technologies dropped in December 2022, we've been inundated with questions from healthcare providers about how they can use Freshpaint to stay HIPAA-compliant.

After more than 100 conversations, we've learned that this abrupt change has made it incredibly difficult for healthcare marketing teams to execute their strategy around promoting services and access to healthcare. That tension between staying HIPAA-compliant and protecting patient privacy while making those same consumers aware of beneficial health services makes the decision about the right path forward so tricky.

Ruth Reader from Politico covered this in her recent story about how the health industry is responding to privacy crackdowns.

Ruth quoted me in this piece where I shared that related to Google Analytics and major ad platforms, "Legal and compliance teams … are telling the marketing team that these tools are dead men walking, you need to shut it off immediately."

Turning off the tracking technology that powers the major ad and analytics platforms makes sense when making a binary decision about privacy. But what do you do about your first-order mandate as a marketing leader at a healthcare company to promote that provider's services? Especially when the consumers you're trying to reach are most active on the platforms that HHS is raising concerns about.

The reality is that consumers of healthcare learn about new services and treatments from social media platforms like Facebook or through a Google search. Cutting off healthcare providers' ability to share their offerings on those platforms hurts the consumers we're trying to protect.

One executive at a healthcare organization quoted in the article said that protecting patient privacy was critical but that he was concerned with how it might interfere with the ability to reach consumers.

When asked about the impact of not being able to execute effective advertising campaigns on major ad platforms, he said, "That would suddenly create real challenges for companies to market their services, which if their company is doing something good in the world, you want their services marketed. So how do you balance?"

Clearly, a lot more debate and conversation needs to be had around this tension between privacy and promotion. I'm just glad it has begun.