How Identity Solves the Healthcare Marketer’s Toughest Challenge

identityhealthcare

Sep 26

Every day consumers turn to Dr. Google for insight into their ailments and symptom relief. Meanwhile, healthcare marketers are keen to introduce their new remedies and therapies, often years in development, to the consumers who will benefit most from them.

Advertising plays a key role in bringing these two constituents together, but that begs the question: how can marketers target the right consumer with the right message in a fully privacy-compliant way?

The answer: an identity solution that focuses on healthcare.

The Role of Search in Healthcare Decisions

According to an Eligibility.com survey, 89% of consumers Google their symptoms before seeing a doctor. That online search weighs heavily in their decision to seek healthcare, try an OTC remedy, or just wait until their symptoms go away. For healthcare companies with appropriate remedies, reaching and engaging consumers as they research symptoms is a way to provide just-in-time information to improve their health and quality of life.

Pre-built modeled audience segments have been the go-to tool for healthcare companies. Large healthcare data companies compile this data as consumers go about their lives, and use that data to create proxies which they provide to marketers for their campaigns.

But activating these audience segments are highly problematic. Because they’re typically activated probabilistic data, they are notoriously inaccurate. Healthcare brands waste a lot of their media budgets targeting people who have little need for their remedies because their provider uses probabilistic methods of activation.

Additionally, the ever-looming cookie deprecation will require marketers to switch tactics. Many healthcare companies see consumer identity graphs (aka consumer ID graphs) as an ideal solution, and they certainly can be. Success, however, depends on selecting the right consumer identity graph provider. At the moment, there are a lot of companies offering consumer ID graphs, when in fact they’re services are nothing more than a marketing database that is built much like data segments of old.

To ensure you don’t make that same mistake, let’s start with a discussion of what consumer identity graphs are and the role they play in healthcare marketing.

High-Level Purpose of Consumer ID Graphs

The purpose of an identity graph is to accurately uncover an identity of a consumer and to confirm that identity using various individual data points.

Let’s say you want to know about the users who engage with your website or mobile app on a new generation of allergy treatments, only a true consumer ID graph will accurately deliver this kind of insight. For instance, Throtle’s consumer ID graph lets you securely match, manage, and using anonymization and tokenization to use audience information anonymously across the digital ecosystem. It also lets you drive more relevant audience messaging to drive engagement, as well as connect audiences across all channels. And most important of all, it operates within a privacy-safe and HIPAA-aware environment.

Consumer ID Graphs vs. Marketing Databases

Think of a consumer ID graph as an elaborate jigsaw puzzle, where each interconnecting piece contains an element of information that helps you accurately identify the consumers behind any screen or device. To succeed, the provider’s goal is to capture as many data signals as possible in order to resolve and validate the audience.

Marketing databases, on the other hand, provide a list of consumers to target (e.g.,allergy sufferers in the Northeast). This is very different from a consumer ID graph, and it solves a very different use case.

Here’s the key difference between the two: marketing databases tell you who to target, while consumer ID graphs allow you to recognize your audience as they switch from screen to screen and channel to channel, enabling you to deliver a seamless brand experience.

The Challenges of Building a Healthcare Consumer Identity Graph

It’s not easy to build a true ID graph. It takes years of maturity to build up a proper ID history. What’s more, to ensure accuracy, ID graphs require many partners to contribute data so that the ID graph provider can validate and confirm every piece of data that goes into the graph.

And given that the American population continuously starts new jobs, activates new devices and moves households, consumer ID graphs require constant update.

Finally, they require hundreds, if not thousands, of proprietary scripts to determine the accuracy and confirmation of data. A reputable ID graph provider, like Throtle, never assumes data is accurate. We test and test again against rigorous criteria.

(For more detailed on our verification process, see Consumer Identity Graphs are Not the Same as Marketing Databases.)

Throtle’s ID Graph Gets Your Message to the Right Patient

Throtle has a long history in the healthcare industry and has cultivated relationships with the right data providers in the space. This means by utilizing our Identity Graph, healthcare marketers have access to critical data to create predictive tailored audience segments for complete, accurate and extensive multi-channel consumer campaigns.

Build predictive audiences
Build custom consumer audiences
Target across channels
Distribute your audience to select platforms
Measurement

Throtle Focuses on Privacy

Healthcare data is one of the most protected classes of data in the U.S. In 1996, Congress passed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which created national standards to protect sensitive patient health information from being disclosed without the patient’s consent or knowledge.

By law, all health information is deemed “protected health information” and is subject to HIPPA’s Privacy Rule, which grants every consumer the right to understand and control how their health information is used and shared.

Throtle doesn’t track users as they go about their digital lives. Rather, we take your existing, privacy compliant user information, and tell you how to reach them in other channels and on additional devices.