By Harry Mackin

To say the past few years have been volatile for the healthcare industry would be an understatement. The COVID-19 pandemic virtually transformed how medical care is administered overnight, in ways that have proven more lasting than anyone could have anticipated. 

As the healthcare industry continues to undergo seismic changes, healthcare marketing trends naturally follow suit. 

Between lingering impacts of COVID-19, the rise of AI, data challenges, controversial interpretations of HIPAA compliance laws, and aggressive mergers and acquisitions by major companies, healthcare marketing’s evolution in 2024 will continue apace.

Keeping up with how these trends are shaping the industry and practice will be the difference between adapting or being left behind. Here are key healthcare marketing trends we’ve been monitoring and helping clients navigate.

HIPAA compliance crackdowns necessitate alternatives to third-party tracking

In December 2022, the Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights (HHS OCR) made the controversial policy decision to treat use of third-party tracking tools by hospitals and other HIPAA-covered entities as a violation of the privacy law.

In a March 2024 update, HHS confirmed that “regulated entities are not permitted to use tracking technologies in a manner that would result in impermissible disclosures of PHI [Protected Healthcare Information] to tracking technology vendors or any other violations of the HIPAA rules.”

This policy has huge implications for digital marketing because it means that many of the most common tracking technologies marketers use could be considered HIPAA violations. For example, healthcare websites using Google Analytics make themselves vulnerable to civil lawsuits. For the same reasons, retargeting pixel codes such as Meta Pixels or Google Ad codes are also now considered non-HIPAA compliant.

In the wake of this policy, healthcare marketers need to either remove all tracking from their sites or find new ways to render their ad tracking HIPAA-compliant. There are a few ways to do this:

1. Manually ensure that your current martech stack isn’t sending PHI back to third parties 
2. Start working exclusively with martech providers who will sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with your organization
3. Implement a Customer Data Platform you can sign a BAA with that can provide a “middleman” for data to pass to, allowing your team to ensure that PHI isn’t getting out to the third parties

While the long-term consequences of this policy on healthcare marketing are still unclear, what is evident now is that brands in this space are under heavier pressure to develop new, cookie-agnostic techniques for tracking and targeting. 

AI makes marketing personalization at scale possible

Personalizing your campaigns to your target audiences or even specific individuals and accounts has become the go-to digital marketing strategy post-pandemic. According to Gartner research, account-based marketing (ABM) …read more

Source:: Top Rank Blog

Author: Aaron