When we first published this article, many healthcare organizations were still interpreting recently issued guidance from the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) regarding the use of tracking technologies. Over the past year, those interpretations have moved into practice. Legal teams, compliance leaders, and marketers alike are now navigating an environment where expectations are clearer, enforcement risk is better understood, and “doing nothing” is no longer a sustainable option.
While the fundamentals of HIPAA-compliant marketing remain the same, the conversation has shifted from whether changes are needed to how healthcare organizations can operationalize privacy-first tracking without sacrificing performance. This updated perspective reflects what we’re seeing across the market today.
Key takeaways:
- HIPAA enforcement has moved from guidance to reality. Healthcare marketers now operate in a clearer, more enforceable environment where traditional client-side tracking introduces compliance risk.
- Privacy-first tracking doesn’t require sacrificing performance. The challenge is no longer whether to change, but how to operationalize compliant data collection while preserving measurement, optimization, and personalization.
- First-party data control is the path forward. Solutions like server-side tracking and CDPs allow healthcare organizations to restrict private health information (PHI) sharing, regain data ownership, and build compliant marketing systems designed to scale.
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As technology and digital marketing continue to evolve at a rapid pace, so too must the guidelines that protect user privacy. Perhaps no industry needs to protect this right to privacy more so than healthcare. While GDPR and CCPA may be old news, HHS guidance now being actively enforced around what type of ad tracking constitutes a HIPAA compliance violation is more likely to be causing sleepless nights across healthcare organizations today.
These guidelines have introduced new challenges that require some effort on our part as marketers, but Amsive is here to help navigate these challenges while also providing the additional benefits that come along with a proper solution to make it an advantage as opposed to a burden. Here’s how to tackle it.
How “Old School” Tracking Works
As sophisticated as it is, traditional tracking from ad platforms and analytics platforms like Google Analytics have worked the same way for a while now. You probably hear the term “pixels” pretty often, but what is a pixel really? The short answer is that it’s usually a small snippet of JavaScript code that goes on your website that’s used for a multitude of uses and applications.
This type of tracking is referred to as client-side tracking because the information collected is sent from the user’s device (AKA the client) to third-party platforms such as Facebook or Google.
Challenges with Traditional Client-Side Tracking
It’s clear the method of pixel-based tracking has been around for so long because of its effectiveness, though its suitability for healthcare has increasingly come into question as companies like Apple have introduced privacy-focused measures to reduce how and what can be tracked on their platforms such as iOS. Since the data is captured by the third-party script and sent directly to the third-party server, this method of tracking poses a number of challenges, especially under current HIPAA guidelines:
Transparency
You are responsible for the data collected, but it is typically difficult or impossible to see everything that is ingested by these platforms.
Control
Even if you attempt to reduce what’s collected, once the script is loaded on the site, you lose a lot of control.
Ownership
Users are visiting your website through ads you paid for, and the ad platforms are collecting the data. Data is more valuable than oil, and that’s only increased as AI-driven optimization and measurement have become standard, making first-party data even more critical.
HIPAA
There is a massive difference between general privacy and HIPAA compliance. At a 30,000-foot level, digital ad tracking can lead to a HIPAA violation when tracking technology captures protected health information (PHI) and improperly shares it with non-compliant platforms.
OCR guidance from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has materially reshaped enforcement expectations by broadly interpreting the circumstances in which tracking data will be considered PHI.
Under OCR’s current interpretation, the tracking data generated by a user reading a condition-specific article on a public-facing website is generally considered PHI, including identifiers like IP address. Since Meta, Google, and similar vendors have not signed business associate agreements (BAAs) in connection with their ad platforms, transferring such identifiers may be non-compliant.
HIPAA Compliant Solutions for Healthcare Advertising
While a knee-jerk reaction by compliance teams may be to remove all forms of tracking from your website—you can hardly call this a fix a step many organizations initially took—this approach quickly proves unsustainable. It renders marketing efforts ineffective, limits optimization, and eliminates meaningful measurement.
Similarly, organizations may attempt to work only with platforms willing to sign a BAA. While there are a few HIPAA-compliant analytics alternatives, this is typically a partial solution at best.
Healthcare organizations do not need to stop collecting beneficial data to ensure compliance—they need to restrict what they share. By intercepting data in a HIPAA-compliant, first-party environment and sharing only non-PHI data downstream, marketers regain transparency, control, and ownership.
One option to achieve this is server-side tracking. In this setup, data is routed through a first-party container hosted on a HIPAA-compliant server, then selectively shared via APIs. Effective? Yes. Complicated? Also yes.
What Does this Mean for Marketers?
Our preferred approach is the implementation of a customer data platform (CDP). CDPs were not originally designed for this specific challenge, but they have since become a foundational component of compliant healthcare marketing architectures.
CDPs provide a HIPAA-compliant environment (BAA included) that acts as a middle layer between data collection and activation. They allow healthcare organizations to accumulate first-party data, map patient journeys, personalize experiences, and leverage analytics—while maintaining governance over what data is shared and where.
Just as important, CDPs provide auditing capabilities, helping organizations document compliance and demonstrate control over data access.
Auditing access to data is a main component of HIPAA compliance. A CDP will also serve as a way to review what data was shared and with whom.
Other Noteworthy Considerations
- Process is important. Proper CDP implementation and documentation are critical to maintaining compliance over time. For example, governing who at your organization has permission to add new destinations is important to ensure that a violation doesn’t occur in the future.
- Not all CDPs are created equal. The feature set, the integrity of the infrastructure, and UX are all things to consider. We have vetted the top-tier CDPs and partnered with one that rose above the rest to ensure the best implementation experience for our clients.
- Centralized tracking will improve performance. Traditional tracking requires adding a separate pixel for every ad platform you want to connect to. When a user visits your site, every single one of those scripts is going to load, inevitably slowing down the website considerably. In the case of a CDP, only one tag for the CDP needs to be added to the website and all the other connections happen “behind the scenes” and with no impact to the user or the website. This is not the same as a platform like Google Tag Manager, which centralizes the management of the pixels but injects them all into the website and still requires them to be loaded individually.
- We’re marketers, not attorneys. Every case is different, and we are not providing legal advice here. Instead, we work hand-in-hand with our client’s legal counsel and compliance departments to identify their unique requirements and architect solutions to achieve them.
Take the Next Step
Maintaining appropriate privacy measures should no longer be viewed as an important initiative for every healthcare company in 2025 a one-time initiative, but rather a core operating standard for healthcare organizations moving forward. With the right architecture in place, healthcare marketers can deliver relevant, personalized experiences without sacrificing patient trust or regulatory compliance.
If you’re navigating today’s ad tracking restrictions and need clarity on how to move forward, we welcome the opportunity to speak with you.
Looking for a deeper dive on compliance fuels performance in healthcare marketing? Dig into the recording and key takeaways of our webinar with Freshpaint and Priority Health.
