From Panic to Privacy: Baptist Health's Journey to HIPAA-Compliant Digital Marketing

Lauren Anderson, Baptist Health’s senior digital content strategist and copywriter, had long relied on Google Analytics as a core part of the organization’s marketing measurement strategy. It was the team’s source of truth for understanding campaign performance, content engagement, and digital marketing efficacy. 

Then, at the end of 2022, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released new guidance on online tracking technologies. Lauren was returning from maternity leave when her boss texted to say they needed to shut down Google Analytics.

Lauren described it as “getting hit by a wrecking ball.”

For many healthcare marketers, the HHS guidance created an immediate compliance crisis. For Lauren, it became an opportunity to rethink how Baptist Health, a six-hospital health system in Northeast Florida, measured marketing performance, managed patient data, and connected campaigns to patient acquisition.

Instead of rushing to replace Google Analytics, she stepped back and mapped out Baptist Health’s next moves on what she called a “chessboard,” visualizing every possible step before making a final decision.

One need that became evident to winning on her chessboard was a platform that enabled HIPAA-compliant analytics and advertising, while setting a strong privacy-first measurement foundation for the future. Baptist Health selected Freshpaint — and has since gained control of trackers and data sent to third-party platforms, stronger attribution to appointments, faster reporting, and greater confidence in marketing performance.

As Lauren explained, “What’s validated Freshpaint as the vendor for us is that we’re in control of our data. We can see everything, and we know exactly where it’s going.”

The Challenge: A Problem Much Bigger Than Google Analytics

As Lauren put it, “It was much bigger than Google Analytics, because even if we had switched analytics platforms, how were we going to run our Google Ads and how were we going to run Facebook Ads?”

The HHS guidance also exposed a broader problem: healthcare organizations often lack a complete picture of what data is being collected, where it is being sent, or how it is being used across the marketing stack.

At the same time, it revealed another challenge that had existed long before the guidance. Like many healthcare organizations, Baptist Health could measure pieces of the patient journey, but not the entire experience. Form fills, phone calls, and scheduling activity existed in separate systems, making it difficult to connect marketing campaigns to actual patient appointments  — especially once patients moved into Epic’s MyChart, open scheduling, or offline workflows.

The result was a familiar problem: plenty of activity metrics, but limited visibility into which campaigns were actually driving appointment intent, booked appointments, and attended appointments.

Simply replacing Google Analytics with a HIPAA-compliant analytics platform would not solve those measurement gaps. Baptist Health needed a privacy-first measurement foundation that would allow the team to continue using critical analytics and advertising platforms while gaining greater control over how data was collected, governed and activated.

Objectives: Building A Privacy-First Measurement Foundation

To put privacy at the center of everything and solve the compliance and measurement challenges, Baptist Health established five objectives:

1. Comply with HIPAA across analytics and advertising.
2. Gain visibility into all data collection technologies, not just Google Analytics.
3. Create a foundation for end-to-end patient acquisition measurement.
4. Future-proof marketing against evolving privacy regulations.
5. Improve confidence in attribution and performance reporting.
   

These objectives represented more than a technology implementation. They reflected a shift in how Baptist Health approached measurement — building a framework that would give the organization greater control over its data while supporting future optimization and growth.

After carefully examining all the moves on her chessboard, Lauren chose Freshpaint.“My recommendation to our leadership was, let's go ahead and flip the switch with Freshpaint,” shared Lauren.

Approach: Rebuilding Measurement Across Teams And Systems

Once Baptist Health decided to implement Freshpaint, the work shifted to rethinking how measurement data flowed across the organization. Lauren and her team now had a way to preserve critical analytics and advertising capabilities while putting more controls around how patient data was collected, governed, and shared. 

Early on, it was clear this wasn’t a marketing-only initiative. Building a privacy-first measurement foundation required marketing, legal, compliance, information technology (IT), and security to work together because each team owned a different piece of the challenge. 

• Marketing needed to preserve visibility into campaign performance and patient acquisition. 
• Legal and compliance needed confidence that data collection and activation aligned with privacy expectations and regulations. 
• IT and security needed to understand how trackers were deployed, where data was flowing, and how different systems connected.

Rather than treating privacy as a one-time compliance review, these teams continue to meet regularly to evaluate tradeoffs, review new technologies, and align on measurement requirements. That cross-functional operating model has become a critical part of Baptist Health’s long-term strategy.

With that foundation in place, the team began building a more connected measurement ecosystem. They standardized UTMs, improved how campaign traffic and source data were captured, and strengthened connections across Epic, Salesforce, and Snowflake. They also expanded visibility into phone calls and open scheduling activity through Invoca, allowing those interactions to be tied more closely to appointment outcomes instead of remaining in separate reporting systems. 

Freshpaint became the privacy-first layer that helped Baptist Health govern data more intentionally while supporting a broader measurement ecosystem — one that could connect web engagement, call activity, scheduling behavior, and downstream appointment data more effectively over time.

Ultimately, Lauren wasn’t looking to recreate what Google Analytics had provided. She wanted to create a more durable measurement foundation that could support Baptist Health’s future marketing, reporting, and attribution needs.

Results: Seamless Compliance, Stronger Attribution And Greater Control

The outcome was much bigger than a compliant analytics replacement. By building its measurement foundation around privacy and governance, Baptist gained better control over third-party trackers and a clearer view into where data was going across its digital ecosystem. 

That additional visibility paid off immediately. The team aligned its analytics and advertising technologies with privacy requirements while maintaining continuity in reporting and measurement during the switch from unregulated Google Analytics to Google Analytics powered by Freshpaint. 

As Lauren explained, “There was no gap in our data at all because Freshpaint was able to come in and flip their code on. It was just a seamless process. Nothing was lost. I have a full year of data and it's HIPAA compliant. It’s awesome.”

Freshpaint also gave Baptist Health greater visibility into the technologies running across its website. Using Freshpaint’s Web Tracker Manager, Lauren and her team can identify unauthorized third-party trackers as soon as they’re installed and take action before they collect protected health information.

More importantly, Baptist Health created a stronger connection between marketing activity and patient appointments. Instead of relying on surface-level proxy metrics such as clicks, form fills, or phone calls, the team moved closer to understanding which campaigns are actually driving appointment intent, booked, and attended appointments. That intel has given Lauren and her team a more meaningful view of overall performance and greater confidence to make budget decisions based on downstream outcomes and growth implications, rather than top-of-funnel activity.

With cleaner data flowing across Epic, Salesforce, Snowflake, open scheduling, Invoca, and a more connected measurement foundation, Lauren can answer leadership questions faster and spend less time reconciling spreadsheets and snapshots from disconnected reporting tools.

That combination of stronger governance, better attribution, and faster reporting has validated Baptist Health's decision to build its privacy-first measurement foundation with Freshpaint. “Freshpaint has helped us future-proof, so that no matter what campaign we stand up or what changes happen in technology, they're already on it,” Lauren shared. By prioritizing privacy with Freshpaint, Baptist Health has future-proofed its marketing measurement strategy, giving the team confidence that it can adapt as privacy expectations, technology, and healthcare regulations continue to evolve.

A Privacy-First Foundation For The Future Of Healthcare Marketing

For Baptist Health, the HHS guidance was initially a disruption. But it became a forcing function for something more valuable: a stronger, more resilient measurement foundation.

Freshpaint has changed how a digital marketer like Lauren spends her time. Instead of devoting so much energy to reconciling fragmented data and manually recreating performance reports, she focuses on higher-value, strategic work such as SEO, AI readiness, and  digital marketing strategies that positively influence patient acquisition.

With Freshpaint, Baptist Health has gained better control over trackers, preserved analytics continuity, improved attribution to appointments, supported better budget decisions, and made executive reporting faster and more reliable. Just as importantly, it has given marketing greater credibility with leadership by making it easier to prove how campaigns influence downstream outcomes.

Hear the full story from Baptist Health’s Lauren Anderson:

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