We are very excited to announce Tealium for Healthcare!

Tealium for Healthcare is the culmination of more than a year of intense research and collaboration with our customers to understand their regulatory compliance and customer engagement challenges. 

So, why did we build Tealium for Healthcare? To understand this, let’s first take a look at what challenges healthcare organizations are currently facing.

Challenges Facing the Healthcare Industry

If you are a healthcare marketer or compliance professional, you are aware that regulations around patient privacy are constantly changing everywhere. 

For example, in the US, a bulletin released by the Office for Civil Rights (the body that enforces The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act or HIPAA) in December 2022 provided a broad interpretation of Protected Health Information (PHI). IP Addresses, URLs, and search terms containing sensitive medical terms, email addresses, etc. are now considered PHI. 

This sent shockwaves across the US healthcare industry and led to a major overhaul in how HIPAA-regulated entities performed online visitor tracking and analytics. Despite pushback from the American Hospital Association, the OCR doubled down on its broad interpretation of PHI in the revised guidance issued in March 2024.

In addition, local consumer privacy laws such as the Washington My Health My Data Act (MHMDA) have been going into effect. 

The healthcare industry is also facing other challenges:

1. Consumer opt-outs are at an all-time high, leading to increased pressure on healthcare organizations to maintain consumer trust.
2. New threats to data due to an increasingly digital customer engagement ecosystem with new devices and technologies capturing sensitive medical data.
3. Despite an increased emphasis on privacy, consumers still expect a personalized healthcare experience that takes their pain points and needs into account.
4. Outside competitors are disrupting the healthcare industry by offering consumers a digital-friendly healthcare experience that they have come to expect.

What Is The Best Solution to Solve These Challenges?

Tealium for Healthcare

Tealium for Healthcare solves these challenges by providing:

1. A robust data foundation that is flexible enough to allow healthcare organizations to adapt to a constantly changing regulatory landscape and new definitions of PHI.
2. Data unification and orchestration capabilities so that healthcare organizations can create personalized consumer experiences. By providing a privacy-centric, digital-friendly consumer experience, organizations are well-equipped to respond to outside competition and improve patient health outcomes

Tealium for Healthcare is a specialized solution that combines strategic use cases built on a secure, robust data foundation. It is also a real-time activation engine that unifies customer journeys across physical and digital channels to enable seamless personalization and drive results.

Tealium’s Robust Data Foundation and Regulatory Compliance

What is this secure, robust data foundation? You can think of it as consisting of these components:

Consent Capture and Enforcement – Consent is critical for consumer data collection in order to create trust and transparency. Tealium for Healthcare enables you to capture and enforce consumer consent so that the consumer’s privacy is respected and helps you achieve and maintain compliance.

Secure, Real-time Data Collection – Tealium offers you the ability to identify, flag, and handle sensitive data securely during collection. You can also prevent unauthorized vendors from collecting data from your digital properties. This speaks directly to the concerns that prompted the OCR to issue the 2022 bulletin. Moreover, the data is collected in real-time to power your tech ecosystem.

Ability to Encrypt and Mask Sensitive Data – Tealium offers the ability to protect data in transit using encryption algorithms you and vendor partners prefer. In addition, you can use the platform’s data masking/obfuscation capabilities to anonymize the data you collect, making it safe to share with non-compliant vendors. In case you are wondering if this is okay, don’t worry! The revised guidance from OCR in March 2024 explicitly says that if a tracking technology vendor won’t enter into a BAA, the regulated entity may enter into a BAA with a vendor capable of de-identifying online tracking information containing PHI before sharing it with non-compliant vendors. Tealium is such a vendor.

Access Control – Tealium allows you to control who within your organization can access the sensitive consumer data you collect. The in-built safeguards help you prevent unauthorized access and sharing of this data.

Ability To Send the Right Data to Compliant and Non-Compliant Vendors – If you are a HIPAA-covered entity, you can’t share PHI with just anybody. Only vendors that are willing to sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) should receive the PHI collected and generated from the digital properties you own. Other vendors should only receive anonymized health data for you to be HIPAA compliant. Tealium allows you to securely map anonymized health data with non-compliant vendors without losing your ability to share consented PHI with trusted vendors.

Without such a data foundation, the impact on your compliance and marketing efforts could be severe. What may this look like?

• An unauthorized vendor could collect PHI from your website.
• You may end up collecting data from a website visitor without their consent.
• A non-HIPAA compliant vendor may know the identity of a patient or member.
• An unauthorized employee may access sensitive medical data.
• You may lose the ability to perform website analytics.
• You may not be able to measure conversions from paid media campaigns due to privacy concerns.
• You may end up sharing data about members/patients with third parties that they didn’t consent to.

Tealium for Healthcare enables you to avoid such scenarios and supercharge your analytics and operations in a compliant fashion.

Why Personalization Is Important for Healthcare

A 2022 study from a leading management consulting firm concluded that healthcare organizations have the data and the skills to tailor consumer experience at scale and transform medical outcomes and business performance.

And yet, a majority of healthcare organizations are reluctant to create personalized experiences for their consumers because of compliance and privacy-related concerns. While these concerns are valid, healthcare organizations now can engage consumers while remaining compliant. Before we address these concerns, let’s try and understand why personalization is important.

Whether you are engaging patients, members, or physicians, they all expect personalization. This expectation of customer-centricity is a product of the ‘shopping around’ mindset made possible by an increasingly digital world and all the convenience that comes with it.

Be aware that these consumers all have unique preferences and concerns. Several surveys have indicated that patients place a lot of value in trust and transparency in their treatment journey. If they are not satisfied with their experience, they are likely to switch providers. Additionally, there is competition from technology and e-commerce organizations looking to disrupt the healthcare space by providing consumers with a digital-friendly or even a hybrid digital-physical treatment experience.

When it comes to physician engagement (whether it is for patient referrals or physician recruitment), they too have certain preferences. Physicians have their own criteria for patient referrals such as reputation of the hospital, responsiveness, support, etc. There is no one size that fits all. Practices want their patients to receive the best care possible when referring them.

This means any campaigns and engagement around patient referral programs or physician recruitment must speak to their concerns, priorities, and channel preferences.

Personalization That is Privacy-Centric

Now that we understand the importance of personalization and that organizations are hesitant to engage consumers in a personalized fashion due to regulatory concerns, how do we address this?

What is needed is a data orchestration and activation engine, such as a Customer Data Platform (CDP), that allows you to collect and unify data from various touch points that consumers interact with. The result is a 360-degree view of the consumer that is continuously updated and enriched. Equipped with such a view, you can activate consumer insights across physical and digital channels that are part of your customer engagement ecosystem to create a seamless experience.

‘But that only addresses the technical gap, and not the regulatory complications’, you may say to yourself. True. A CDP only provides you with the data orchestration capabilities needed for personalization. For the CDP to do this in a compliant manner, you need the following:

1. Consent Capture and Enforcement
2. Secure Real-time Collection of Data
3. Ability to Anonymize and Securely Transmit the Data

Does that look familiar? It should, because this is exactly what the data foundation that we reviewed in the previous sections helps you achieve.

Tealium for Healthcare provides both a robust data foundation for compliance, as well as a data orchestration engine, i.e., a CDP, that can sit on top of the data foundation.

Using Tealium for Healthcare, you can:

• Implement a privacy-first data collection and activation strategy
• Personalize experiences for high-priority audiences with intelligent engagement
• Automate seamless journeys across offline and online channels
• Optimize budget and resources while driving customer loyalty

What Makes Tealium for Healthcare Unique?

• Tealium has a long track record with regulatory compliance.
• While HIPAA has become an even hotter topic since the 2022 OCR Bulletin, Tealium has been helping customers in their HIPAA compliance journey since 2015.
• Tealium for Healthcare gives you end-to-end control of patient data, from collection all the way to transfer.
• Tealium for Healthcare is the only proven platform that can help you with both regulatory compliance AND personalized customer engagement.
• Tealium is already being used by several leading Healthcare and Life Sciences organizations all around the world.
• Tealium will sign a BAA and other Data Processing Agreements to put your mind at ease.
• Tealium for Healthcare comes with turnkey integrations with several technology vendors that also sign a BAA. Whether you are looking for A/B Testing, Call Center Analytics, Website Analytics, Data Integrity Monitoring, etc. Tealium and our technology partners will have your back.
• Tealium’s marketplace includes 1300+ turnkey integrations. Odds are we already have proven integrations with vendors you work with.

To learn more, go to the Tealium for Healthcare product page.