Web Tracker Monitoring: Introducing the Newest Tool for Privacy-First Healthcare Marketers

Healthcare marketers have to understand HIPAA compliance. End of discussion. If you want to be an effective healthcare marketer, understanding HIPAA compliance is table stakes at this point in time. But it requires a rethinking of how healthcare marketers have traditionally approached marketing in the industry.

This rethinking requires putting privacy first. Prioritize the privacy of the audience you’re trying to get in front of. To be a privacy-first healthcare marketer, you have to have a complete understanding of the technologies – specifically the web trackers – that power your marketing. It’s those tools that often violate privacy regulations. Privacy-first marketers need to know which technologies are collecting Protected Health Information (PHI) and which ones aren’t. 

That is, unfortunately, easier said than done. 

Until today.

Freshpaint is proud to announce a new feature built into our Healthcare Privacy Platform: Web Tracker Monitoring. 

What is Web Tracker Monitoring? 

Web Tracker Monitoring is an automated tool that continuously monitors your website to find and alert you about all web trackers. 

It automates steps 1 and 5 in the Privacy-First Framework: Audit and Monitor.

With this information at your fingertips, you can take action. You can easily remove the web tracker from the pages where it’s found, or you can put a governance tool in place to stop PHI from getting to unauthorized destinations in the first place.

Web trackers are risky

Remember The Markup’s investigation from June 2022? That investigation found a web tracker, specifically the Facebook Pixel, was collecting PHI from consumers who visited the websites of many of the top hospitals in the country. 

Ever since that point, lawsuits have been filed against healthcare systems, the HHS released updated guidance condemning the use of web trackers, and the FTC stepped in to warn healthcare organizations about the risks of web trackers.

Non-compliance means facing fines, lawsuits, and a loss of consumer trust. Compliance is the only path forward.

To put your organization under compliance, you have to get a handle on those web trackers. It’s clear that web trackers are problematic. Consumers don’t like them, and they often don’t comply with HIPAA.

It’s not just Google and Facebook

Web trackers from Google and Facebook get all the press. They’re the most well-known for causing HIPAA violations and leading to lawsuits. But those aren’t the only two web trackers that healthcare marketers need to worry about. Hundreds of other web trackers operate in the exact same way as the web trackers from those two companies.

Andrew Laker, Web Applications Developer at Columbus Regional Health, put it this way, “If a tool like Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel is not compliant, then you've got to look at every single other tool that you're using on your website that is potentially doing the same thing that HHS guidelines might not even consider.”

As Andrew points out, you have to look at all the web trackers on your website. That’s no small task. There could be hundreds of trackers on your website that you might not know about. 

They might have been installed by a former employee who forgot to tell anyone. Or they might’ve been installed by someone who didn’t realize the privacy risks of the tool and neglected to tell anyone. Or you might’ve hired an agency to develop a few web pages and they use web trackers as a standard operating procedure and didn’t think to mention it. Even worse, some trackers load other trackers! 

It’s endless. And nearly impossible to find them all without manual daily monitoring. That’s almost a full-time job.

Enter: Web Tracker Monitoring

Managing web trackers manually can be challenging, but it becomes much simpler with an automated tool designed specifically for healthcare. 

Web Tracker Monitoring is built into Freshpaint’s Healthcare Privacy Platform, which allows you to see all the web trackers that could be collecting and sharing PHI without having to open another tool. It’s your new single source of truth for web trackers.

With just a click, Web Tracker Monitoring gives users an up-to-date list of the web trackers on their websites, and includes important context such as its risk level and the specific pages it is found on.

The context provided about each web tracker allows you to make informed decisions about what to do with each web tracker. 

You can also export the list of trackers to share with other stakeholders in your organization to help with the management and removal of risky web trackers.

Web Tracker Monitoring is an industry-first tool. It’s the only monitoring tool built specifically for HIPAA compliance. While it will provide a list of all web trackers on your website, it will flag the ones that have the highest risk of sharing PHI. 

Setting itself apart from other monitoring tools that conduct limited page-specific scans, Web Tracker Monitoring gives you a complete picture of web trackers on your website by visiting every page, waiting for them to load, and then intercepting outgoing requests to trackers.

With this focus on HIPAA, and the trackers that are sharing PHI, healthcare marketers now have another line of defense against the unauthorized sharing of PHI.

Built for healthcare marketers

Freshpaint’s Healthcare Privacy Platform is designed to help healthcare marketers get control over their data through auditing, verifying, managing, and monitoring the web trackers they use. We can’t achieve that goal if we aren’t attacking the problem at the source. Web Tracker Monitoring is the foundation for that future.

Ready to find all the web trackers on your website? Request a demo here, or click here for more information.