Healthcare marketers have spent the last few years making uncomfortable tradeoffs. Track less on websites and apps to stay compliant. Accept fuzzier insights to avoid risk. The prevailing assumption has been that partial data is simply the price of doing business. That assumption is starting to break down.

Privacy, Precision, and the End of Healthcare Marketing Workarounds

Russell Reid, Chief Technology Officer at Alliance Innovations, makers of Nexus Analytics – a HIPAA-compliant web analytics solution, has spent years working at the intersection of healthcare privacy rules and marketing performance. In a recent conversation, he shared why many teams have hit a ceiling with workaround-driven analytics and why compliant, context-rich measurement is becoming the more realistic path forward.

Key Takeaways

1. Data stripping solved compliance, but created a visibility problem. Obfuscating data kept organizations out of regulatory trouble, but it also removed the context marketers rely on to understand what is actually working. Teams that are moving forward are rethinking the assumption that safety requires blindness.


2. Precision matters more than volume. City-level data may feel adequate, but it often hides decisions patients actually make. Zip-code-level precision can change which facility is promoted, which service line is emphasized, and whether a campaign helps or misdirects someone seeking care.


3. The patient journey is still being measured in fragments. Websites and portals are typically optimized in isolation. The bigger insight comes from understanding what happens between them, where intent is lost, delayed, or redirected.

Why Data Obfuscation Is Holding Healthcare Marketing Back

In December of 2022, the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued guidance that regulated entities cannot use tracking technologies in ways that result in impermissible disclosures of protected health information (typically to 3^rd parties for data analytics).

In response, many healthcare organizations dramatically reduced or abandoned tracking altogether. That approach reduced risk, but it also erased context that marketers depended on to optimize spend, evaluate performance, and explain results internally.

As campaigns became harder to tune and insights less actionable, frustration followed. Reid has seen this pattern repeat across organizations that invested heavily in server-side tagging and data stripping, only to realize the resulting picture was incomplete.

“I think that’s coming to an end because these organizations need deeper insights,” said Reid. ”you can’t have those deeper insights with obfuscating data.”

Rather than working around the problem, Reid points to compliant analytics platforms that are designed to preserve context without exposing data to non-compliant third parties.

City-Level Insights Aren’t Enough Anymore

Geography has always shaped healthcare demand, but broad location data flattens important distinctions. Reid pointed to zip code plus four as a simple example of how small differences can have real consequences.

“There are a lot of hospitals that want to market and target differently,” explained Reid. “If they only had zip code plus four, their campaign may have directed a patient to a different facility.”

Without that level of precision, marketing teams are often forced to generalize, increasing the odds that patients see messages that are technically accurate but not particularly helpful. The result is confusion, misrouting, or unnecessary friction at moments when clarity matters most.

Why Website and Portal Analytics Need to Talk to Each Other

Most healthcare organizations still analyze websites and patient portals as separate environments. That separation hides some of the most important moments in the patient journey.

Reid described efforts to track behavior from initial research through scheduling and into portal activity, creating visibility into where momentum stalls or drops off entirely.

“So now we can track from the time they hit the website to try to schedule appointment to when they leave the site to go to the MyChart side,” said Reid. “Imagine being able to see all their actions on that site too.”

Seeing that handoff reframes how teams interpret performance. What once looked like a successful campaign may reveal friction just a step later.

The True Impact of Compliant, Context-Rich Analytics

Reid believes healthcare marketers are beginning to move away from defensive measurement and toward clarity that respects both privacy and reality. When context returns, confidence often follows. Not because dashboards look better, but because the story behind the numbers finally makes sense again.

Learn more about Alliance Innovations at https://www.allianceinnovations.com/

Learn more about Nexus Analytics at https://analytics.nexus/

Alliance Innovations is a proud sponsor of Healthcare Scene.