The Day Healthcare Marketing Chose to Shape the Future of an Industry

There are moments in every industry when the air shifts. When everybody in the room realizes everything has changed and a path forward emerges. 

That was House Call Chicago. 

Forget the clichés about “another conference.” From the first moments in the The Grand Salon Ballroom at the Park Hyatt Chicago to last, House Call Chicago confronted the uncomfortable truths holding healthcare marketing back and delivered a simple, audacious message: privacy and performance aren’t enemies.  

If you missed out on House Call Chicago and feeling extreme FOMO right now, don't. While I can't distill the true essence of the event for you here, rest assured you'll know why 40+ marketing organizations walked away and left their heavy burdens behind. 

Call these takeaways. Call them lessons. Call them whatever you want. But ask anyone who attended House Call Chicago and they might call it a treatment plan for reclaiming healthcare marketing. 

Reframe Privacy to Improve Performance

Privacy is often portrayed as the enemy of healthcare marketing performance when in all actuality it’s a competitive advantage. The marketers who still treat HIPAA and state laws as shackles are already falling behind the ones who’ve learned to weaponize privacy-first design.

Kevin Williams of Planned Parenthood put it bluntly: “Privacy by design isn’t about stopping innovation. It’s about embedding privacy considerations into your process from the start.”

Think about that. Every industry is chasing more data. Healthcare doesn’t have that luxury. What it has instead is clarity. Privacy by design forces marketers to strip away the vanity metrics and obsess over the signals that actually drive growth. It turns the “department of no” into the discipline that keeps you from wasting millions on campaigns your operations team can’t deliver or your CFO won’t respect.

And here’s the kicker: when teams rebuilt their strategies around privacy-first foundations, they didn’t just survive—they crushed it.

• 92% improvement in conversions when compliant display campaigns were layered onto existing channels.
• 17–22% reduction in customer acquisition costs once “attended appointments” replaced bookings as the optimization metric.
• 200% lift in retargeting performance when privacy-safe sequential marketing was reintroduced.

That’s not a consolation prize. That’s performance at a level most healthcare marketers never thought possible.

Freshpaint CMO Ray Mina said it best: “Privacy is not a blocker, it’s not a way to slow you down—it’s a way to actually help you speed up.”

The takeaway is unmistakable. Privacy by design doesn’t strangle performance—it unlocks it. The marketers willing to embrace it aren’t just compliant. They’re outpacing the ones still stuck clinging to the old excuses.

Of course, proving privacy works is one thing. Proving it to a CFO who doesn’t care about clicks? That’s where the real fight begins.

Speak CFO to Prove Marketing ROI

If privacy was the morning’s spark, ROI was the afternoon’s fire.

Every marketer knows the pain: clicks and impressions don’t move a CFO. What does? Waste avoided. Dollars earned. Patients seen. 

Freshpaint’s Mara Pritchard, who moderated the ROI panel, reframed the problem brilliantly: “You all are thinking ROI, but operations thinks about waste. Translate it into their language, and suddenly everyone gets it.”

To drive this point home, Blair Primis, Chief Marketing & Experience Officer at OrthoCarolina, painted the problem in human terms. “Somebody called, I am in pain, can I walk in? No. Do you have openings? Yes. … We essentially just wasted the dollars for that lead.” 

On the surface, it’s a frustrating anecdote about a missed appointment. But the real issue was deeper: OrthoCarolina was paying good money to make the phone ring, and then operations was turning business away.

That’s where the breakthrough came. Using AI-powered call tracking, Blair’s team could finally categorize “reasons not booked” across locations. The data showed a pattern: front desks mishandled walk-ins, let phones ring unanswered, or weren’t equipped to convert inquiries into appointments. Once quantified, the waste was impossible to ignore.

And here’s the shift: marketing didn’t present this as “our ROI is suffering.” Instead, they reframed it in the language operations and finance understood—wasted dollars and wasted opportunities. By putting hard numbers to how much revenue was left on the table, Blair could align with the CFO’s worldview.

The next step was feeding cleaner data back into the ad platforms. Not just bookings, but attended appointments—the metric that actually drives revenue. That change alone delivered a 17–22% improvement in customer acquisition costs across organizations testing the approach. 

Suddenly, ROI wasn’t abstract. It was measurable, visible, and undeniable.

That’s the real lesson. Proving ROI in healthcare marketing isn’t about dazzling the room with click-through rates—it’s about showing leadership how much money is wasted when operations drop the ball, and how much more efficient acquisition becomes when you optimize for what truly matters: care delivered.

Unfortunately, even when the numbers add up, there’s another silent killer of growth: teams that refuse to trust each other. 

Dismantle Organizational Silos to Unlock Growth

During an all-star panel featuring the brightest minds in healthcare marketing, House Call Chicago attendees discovered the greatest challenge facing their teams today isn’t regulatory pressure—it’s dysfunction created by marketing, operations, compliance, and IT speaking different languages and pursuing misaligned incentives.

Just ask Julie Elias, Director of Marketing and Communications at Boston University’s School of Dental Medicine. For years, she thought she was on solid ground. “We considered ourselves very HIPAA-aware,” she explained. Marketing ran campaigns. Compliance stayed in its lane. The two didn’t need to talk much.

Then the email came. A week before the school’s winter break, compliance informed her they had shut off all website analytics—effective immediately. No discussion. No warning. Just gone.

For an academic dental clinic that needed patient volume not only to drive revenue but also to meet accreditation standards, it was an existential threat. “Me and my boss were like, what is happening? We need these patients or we lose accreditation.”

That was the breaking point. Marketing could no longer treat compliance as a distant enforcer, and compliance could no longer treat marketing as a liability. The only path forward was partnership. Julie and her team brought compliance into vendor meetings, educated them on marketing’s goals, and in turn, learned compliance’s language. Trust replaced tension. Instead of being the team that pulled the plug, compliance became a partner in finding workable, privacy-safe solutions.

The lesson was unmistakable: growth doesn’t happen when functions defend their turf. Growth happens when silos collapse and cross-functional teams share accountability. That means marketing can’t just drive leads, compliance can’t just say no, and operations can’t just guard the front desk. Everyone owns the outcome.

Call them “growth teams” if you want, but the truth is simpler: healthcare organizations can’t afford the luxury of mistrust anymore.

And once those walls start to crumble, something surprising happens: strategies once considered “impossible” suddenly look inevitable.

Unlock Retail Strategies to Reclaim Healthcare Marketing

For years, healthcare marketers have dismissed retail’s playbook as something they couldn’t touch. Loyalty programs? Too risky. Sequential marketing? Too creepy. Predictive personalization? Forget it—compliance would never allow it. The assumption was always the same: regulations make retail tactics impossible.

House Call Chicago dismantled that myth.

Aaron Horowitz, VP of Growth at Rise, set the stage by pointing out that retail has fundamentally reset consumer expectations. “Everything is becoming hyper-personalized, seamless in our experience journeys, and most importantly, it resonates with us emotionally based on our needs at that moment in time. Patients are increasingly behaving like empowered consumers,” he said.

The message landed hard: patients aren’t just patients. They’re shoppers, members, consumers—people who expect healthcare experiences to match the level of relevance they get from Amazon, Nike, or Apple.

Jennifer Hickman, Head of Strategy for Quad’s health vertical, drove the point home: “The first-party data we have is a gem. We can use that to mine segmentation and build audiences the same way retailers do. Customers expect a certain level of experience, and the tools now exist to deliver it.”

Jeff Teitelbaum, VP Client Partner at Rise, called out the real problem: lazy marketing. “We have the data to know that someone already bought the shoes, but we keep serving them shoe ads anyway. That’s shame on us. In healthcare, it’s the same thing—we talk to ortho patients like they’re cardiology patients. An audience-first approach means using the data to prove we actually know them.”

And then came the breakthrough moments:

• Sequential Marketing Returns. “In healthcare, retargeting and sequential marketing are table stakes everywhere else, but most of our customers can’t do it at all,” said Freshpaint’s Ray Mina. When privacy-compliant retargeting was reintroduced, the results were dramatic—performance gains of 75–200% from simply re-engaging website visitors who didn’t convert the first time.
• Unlocking “Impossible” Channels. Kate Malham Pardes of StackAdapt revealed that compliant CTV campaigns were not only possible but delivering: “One client secured additional budget once they could tie back conversions to CTV exposure. We saw substantial conversion rates where historically, you never saw any.” In some cases, CTV drove 20–40% uplift when paired with display.
• Behavioral Segmentation Without PHI. The most mind-bending shift came when speakers explained how to build sophisticated audiences without using protected health information. As one put it: “Instead of knowing John Smith has diabetes, you know User X visited five diabetes-related pages. That’s enough to run compliant retargeting, lookalikes, and sequential messaging.”

The takeaway here was clear as day: retail-inspired strategies aren’t forbidden fruit anymore. Privacy-first design has turned them into compliant, high-performing tools.

The deeper lesson? Healthcare’s fear of retail was always misplaced. Regulations didn’t kill personalization—our own timidity did. House Call showed that with the right privacy guardrails, healthcare marketers can finally stop hiding behind excuses and start playing the same game retail mastered years ago.

Patients expect it. The tools exist. The results—75-200% performance lifts, 20-40% channel uplifts, double-digit CAC reductions—speak for themselves.

Healthcare marketing has no reason left to sit on the sidelines.

From Jurassic Park to Navy Pier

House Call Chicago crescendoed with an unscripted moment. An attendee stood up and invoked a line from Jurassic Park: “We were so busy figuring out if we could do the thing, we weren’t stopping to think if we should.”

The room went quiet. Because that was the tension everyone had felt: the rush to collect and optimize data without always asking whether it served patients responsibly.

House Call Chicago offered a path out of that trap. 

• Privacy wasn’t a muzzle—it was a compass. 
• ROI wasn’t clicks—it was care delivered. 
• Silos weren’t permanent—they could be dismantled. 
• And the retail playbook? It’s no longer forbidden fruit—it’s ripe for the taking.

As the yacht pulled away from Navy Pier that evening (yes, Freshpaint CMO Ray Mina somehow approved a yacht for the closing reception), the mood wasn’t relief. It was resolve. 

Healthcare marketing’s future had been reframed. 

The only question left: who will seize it?

Let’s Bridge the Privacy-Performance Gap Together in 2026

House Call Chicago wasn’t just a moment—it was a marker. It proved that healthcare marketing doesn’t have to keep recycling excuses about compliance, silos, or “healthcare is different.” It showed that when we get in a room together—marketers, operators, compliance leaders—we don’t just trade war stories. We write the next chapter of the industry.

That’s what House Call is about. Not keynotes. Not panels. A collective of people who are done waiting for someone else to figure it out. People willing to wrestle with the hard stuff—privacy, ROI, measurement, growth—and leave with frameworks that actually work in the real world.

In 2026, we’re doing it again. Freshpaint will announce the first House Call event of the year soon. And if Chicago was any indication, it’s not the kind of thing you want to hear about secondhand.

If you want to be the first to know when and where the next House Call happens, subscribe to Freshpaint 5—our newsletter that distills the five most important insights in privacy-first performance marketing every month. It’s where we’ll drop the announcement first, and where we’ll keep building this community of marketers who refuse to settle.

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