Patient Privacy and Pharma Marketing: Four Questions to Ask Your Vendor

From the latest wave of privacy laws from Texas, Florida, and Oregon taking effect on July 1, to Google’s recent reversal on cookie depreciation, patient and consumer data usage continues to make headlines – and raise questions for pharma marketers.  

Given pharma’s (often warranted) conservative, risk-adverse approach to interpreting state and federal regulations, it’s critical that brand teams stay vigilant to avoid negative commercial impact. But for pharma brands to find the right balance of privacy vs. precision, they must critically assess where they stand today – and bring an informed perspective to their conversations with legal and regulatory groups. As a company committed to the ethical, transparent, and compliant use of patient health and consumer data, we’ve put together this quick guide to the key questions to ask about your current audience profiling and marketing targeting practices. 

Question 1: How Is Patient / Consumer Data Being De-Identified? 

In today’s fragmented landscape, it’s worth taking a deeper dive into not only your vendor’s data sources , but also how they process and use data for targeting purposes. While “de-identified” is table stakes for marketing vendors, that may not be enough these days – especially when medical claims and other consumer data are linked together or used to make inferences about patient health. Be sure to query the exact processes used by your vendor, when they are being applied, and how data sets are being linked, so your team can truly understand the level of risk involved. Also, ask your vendor how frequently they validate their practices via outside expert determination validation. 

Question 2: Is a Lack of Audience Knowledge Limiting Your Precision? 

More cautious marketers may look to solutions that use no patient health information at all – making targeting decisions based purely on observed campaign performance. And while technology can make this process faster, what’s lost is the ability to sync pharma brand information to the patient journey and physicians’ needs. That critical synchronization helps support better treatment choices and drives demonstrated commercial impact. What’s more, because these methods could be considered to make inferences about patient health, they may still run into compliance challenges – especially when that data is then being used to direct ad targeting. It’s worth exploring the tradeoffs of “no knowledge” approaches, rather than making assumptions about what is or isn’t possible. 

Question 3: Are cookies, lookalikes, or other similar tools being used to target programs? 

While Google’s hesitancy on phasing out cookies may have not been unexpected, the fact is that more and more consumers are opting out of cookies. And when it comes to lookalike audiences, the results can be underwhelming, especially for brands seeking a highly specific, time-sensitive, or rare clinical profile. Although these approaches are generally falling out of favor, they still do feature in many marketing vendors’ strategies. Each brand team must determine if – and to what extent – they want to rely on these targeting tools, as well as how much their campaign strategy relies on them. 

Question 4: How can we avoid limiting brand marketing in high-population states? 

Brand managers may take a conservative approach by restricting reach in certain states. Doing so in less populous states like Washington may not overly hurt commercial performance, however, losing reach in larger states like California, Texas, and Florida threatens marketing impact.  

The patchwork of regulations is a lot for non-legal experts to wade through, but marketers can equip themselves by pushing their vendors to explain (in clear terms) how they interpret state laws and how their solutions can minimize compliance risk. The goal should be to get to a place where your brand team feels comfortable advocating to internal legal and/or compliance groups, so there is a genuine discussion of relative risk, instead of a blanket ban on state-level marketing. 

Have more questions about the potential impact of state and federal privacy regulations of pharma marketing execution and results? Talk with our experts.