Data Governance & Privacy
June 26, 2024
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.
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.
Tealium for Healthcare solves these challenges by providing:
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.
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?
Tealium for Healthcare enables you to avoid such scenarios and supercharge your analytics and operations in a compliant fashion.
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.
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:
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:
To learn more, go to the Tealium for Healthcare product page.
