Challenge:
Cambia Health needed to collect and analyze data across their family of brands in a secure manner to better understand their consumers and their digital engagement experience.
Solution:
With Tealium EventStreamTM, data hosted in a Tealium Private Cloud environment keeps Cambia’s online and offline data clean, correlated, and secure.
Results:
Cambia Health can stitch together customer data across digital properties to provide better customer experiences while ensuring data is secure and meets government healthcare regulations.
Gaining a Holistic Customer View and Maintaining Data Security Proves Tough
Cambia Health Solutions, a total health solutions company with a family of over 20 brands, is committed to changing the industry and the way people experience healthcare. However, delivering remarkable experiences in a highly regulated industry requires a data strategy with security and privacy at its core.
Keeping security top-of-mind, Cambia also knew that to provide better experiences to their customers, they needed to have a holistic view of who each customer was — and what his or her digital experience was across all Cambia’s online properties. However, trying to tie these journeys together, often without a single unifying thread, was difficult and required complicated, time-consuming data manipulation.
“Countless hours of analysts’ time were spent trying to identify who was who as they moved across our properties. And by the time those projects were done, we weren’t too much further along than when we started because so much time had elapsed.” –Bob Harris, Director, Market and Consumer Insights, Cambia Health Solutions
To be able to meet the goal of understanding their customers and their digital engagement experience across their family of brands, Cambia needed to control which tags they used so they could differentiate between customers who were interacting with them across multiple properties and those who were coming only to a single site. Several analytics tools on the market could help achieve this goal, but Cambia couldn’t find a solution that would also meet the regulatory requirements of HIPAA, a US law designed to protect consumers’ medical records and other health information.
“As we went out in the market, evaluating solutions for web analytics, we found that no provider out there was willing to sign a business associate agreement [BAA],” says Harris.
For companies like Cambia that are required to comply with HIPAA, a BAA is an agreement that allows the company to share data with a third-party vendor, but it also means that the vendor must be in compliance with HIPAA and take additional responsibility to keep the data secure.
“We had to have a solution that would allow Cambia to strip PHI [protected health information] data out before sending it to our analytics solutions providers, and it wasn’t enough that the data would land in their service and they would take it out; it couldn’t go there at all,” says Harris.
Without a solution that would allow Cambia to strip out Protected Health Information(PHI) before it was sent to a third-party vendor, Cambia couldn’t use any of the vendors’ out-of-the-box solutions to look at their data and analyze it. They were at a loss as to how to proceed.
Tealium Delivers Data Insights and Security
When Cambia discovered Tealium, they knew they had found a solution that could meet their requirements. Tealium not only provided Cambia with the ability to identify and link customers across all its sites so that they could understand how their customers were moving within their ecosystem, but Tealium also allowed Cambia the critical ability to control where they send their data.
“EventStream has really been the crux of our solution,” says Harris. “It allows us to take and flow that anonymized data over to our web analytics solution provider, and it allows us at the same time to keep that entire click stream and move it back into our data warehouses so that we can analyze that data.”
An essential component of being able to keep its data secure and private was that Tealium EventStream offered Cambia the ability to manage their data in a private cloud environment. This secure environment allowed Cambia and Tealium to sign a BAA, with both parties knowing they could meet HIPAA compliance.
Additionally, Tealium went beyond being just another solution provider to being a partner. “In Tealium, I had a partner come alongside me and help me get through those rough patches in my journey,” says Harris. “Tealium offered up solutions time and time again. ‘We could look at it this way, we could implement this.’ So, at the end, we got to a solution that was going to work.”
Their confidence in Tealium was further bolstered shortly after Cambia implemented Tealium, when they discovered that there were instances of PHI in their data flow that were going to their web analytics solution provider. They immediately needed to stop that data from flowing out.
In the past, this would have meant shutting everything down and then having a developer go in and remove the code before Cambia could begin flowing data back to their web analytics provider. Cambia’s web analytics team was able to use the Tealium solution to stop the flow of just the variables with the issue, without interrupting the flow of the rest of the click stream data or relying on developer resources.
Greater Data Insights and Greater Data Security
Getting to the finish line of a major data initiative, especially in a highly regulated industry, is no small feat. However, through a strong partnership with Tealium, where both sides were engaged in finding solutions that would work, Cambia Health was able to cross the finish line successfully.
Through their partnership with Tealium, Cambia was able to:
- Stitch together customer data across digital properties
- Build a corporationwide data foundation across all their properties
- Prevent PHI data from flowing to third-party vendors
- Ensure their customer data was secure and protected in a HIPAA-compliant environment
“Our data exists in a HIPAA environment and fully in compliance with HIPAA laws. And finally, we control the flow of our data, not through our development resources but through our web analytics team,” says Harris.
But this is just the beginning. Cambia is already starting to think about how they can use Tealium solutions to drive other customer experience initiatives within their organization. For instance, Cambia is now implementing cross-domain tracking with third-party partners so that they can get even deeper insights into how their customers interact with their brands.
“We are leveraging our insights that we’re getting and continue to look for more ways that we can build those out to add value to customers to drive innovation into our healthcare space,” says Harris.
