How to Strategically and Compliantly Use First Party Data for Regulated Industries

In healthcare marketing, particularly under strict regulations like HIPAA, the use of first-party data (1PD) demands a nuanced, strategic approach. Leveraging 1PD responsibly and effectively can unlock significant value while maintaining compliance. Healthcare marketing must prioritize privacy at every turn, with specific measures to protect individual rights:

• Explicit Consent: Always secure explicit consent for using any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in marketing communications. This is especially vital in highly regulated industries like healthcare, where patient trust is paramount.
• Data Anonymization: Anonymizing or tokenizing PHI (Protected Health Information) before utilizing it for any marketing purpose is crucial. This ensures that even in data-driven decision-making, no individual’s privacy is compromised.

So where do you start?

Here’s how Coegi recommends maximizing your use of 1PD to strike:

1. Non-PHI Data Utilization

The foundation of responsible 1PD usage lies in focusing on non-PHI data, ensuring patient privacy is never compromised:

• Social Followers and Demographics: Voluntary, non-sensitive data such as social media engagement and publicly available demographic insights can serve as a starting point for audience segmentation. This data can be analyzed to create preliminary target personas, ensuring that marketing is tailored to audience interests without venturing into sensitive areas.

2. Lookalike Modeling with Tokenization

To unlock deeper insights from first-party data without compromising privacy, tokenization must be applied before any modeling begins:

• Tokenization First: Before conducting any analysis, customer data is tokenized, ensuring personal identities are anonymized. This enables the organization to securely harness insights without exposing PHI.
• Modeling High-Value Clients: Post-tokenization, focus on identifying high-value clients based on their Lifetime Value (LTV) and other non-PII metrics. By refining marketing strategies using these models, businesses can allocate resources more effectively toward customers likely to drive higher returns.
• Cohort Targeting: A cleanroom environment provides a secure way to apply cohort-based targeting while maintaining compliance. This enables marketing teams to group customers with similar characteristics and behavior patterns for more personalized messaging.

3. Index-Based Matching for Lookalike Audiences

Lookalike modeling is essential for audience expansion, and index-based matching offers a compliant, privacy-conscious method:

• Interest and Propensity Data: By using index-based matching, organizations can match interests and customer propensities without direct data matching. This allows for effective targeting while protecting personal data.
• Building Lookalike Audiences: Insights from tokenized data, combined with index-based matching, enable the creation of lookalike audiences, allowing businesses to broaden their reach to potential new customers with similar characteristics to high-value clients—all while adhering to strict privacy regulations.

4. Aggregated Campaign Optimization and Analytics

Optimizing marketing campaigns through data analytics is key, but it’s critical to ensure compliance throughout the process:

• Automated Targeting: Machine learning can help automate and continually refine targeting strategies by analyzing past campaign performance. By doing so, organizations can keep their messaging relevant and impactful, based on real-time insights from previous campaigns.
• Conversion Rate Analytics: Aggregated, anonymized data should be used to assess and optimize conversion rates, keeping campaigns both effective and compliant.

Conclusion

By strategically using first-party data in compliance with privacy regulations, healthcare organizations can maximize the impact of their marketing efforts. The approach of focusing on non-PHI data, using tokenization, and applying lookalike modeling ensures the organization maintains patient trust and regulatory adherence, while driving more targeted and effective marketing campaigns.

Want to learn more about how to maximize your first party data? Contact us to schedule a discovery call.