ANALYTICS & MARKETING TRACKING IN A HIPAA-COMPLIANT ENVIRONMENT

In today’s digital landscape, privacy and data protection are of utmost importance. Covered entities under HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) need to ensure that they are taking the necessary steps to protect protected health information (PHI) while still gaining valuable insights from analytics.

What are these identifiable ePHIs that may be collected from your website that may be introduced by third-party tracking code and may implicate you of HIPAA violations, according to the new HIPAA guidelines?

Web analytics platforms collect a vast range of user data to provide insights into user behavior on your website or app. Web URLs and IP addresses, for instance, contain valuable information about an individual’s online activities, including their browsing history and potentially sensitive healthcare searches that may link individuals with past, current or future health conditions, now considered protected health information.

Server Side Tag Management for HIPAA Compliance

Own Your Data, Avoid Third-Party Control, Stay Compliant

Server Side Google Tag Management

We are strongly proponents of a server-side tag management setup to provide you with greater control over your healthcare data streams that originate from your website, while also allowing you to safely navigate the third-party cookie-free era that we are now entering.

Most importantly, server side tag management can help you balance data anonymization (which inevitably leads to data being made less usable for marketing purposes) with usefulness of data.

Specific solutions we provide include:

First-Party Data Collection & Data Control – Data collected by your server side setup allows for “first-party” data collection, making it more secure and efficient.
Data Transformations & Enrichments – A server side setup allows for encryption of personally identifiable information (PII) and health information – together they make up protected health information (PHI). Complete encryption or redacting of this data may be a solution but likely to make your analytics and marketing campaigns unattributable and useless. Our solution creates intelligent transformations and enrichment of web data to remove any PHI from reaching third-party vendors while keeping marketing attributions intact for campaigns to produce results.
Custom Activations – Once web data events are cleansed through transformations and enrichment, we then activate this data to reach third-party analytics and marketing platforms.

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Other Solutions for HIPAA Compliance

There are alternative HIPAA-compliant analytics solutions, such as those customizing GA4 to introduce some safeguards. Alternatively, there are also customer data protection (CDP) platforms that allow for secure data storage, custom audience insights, customer data exports and custom activations and other advanced integrations that are required to keep customer data useful for marketing while keeping ePHI safe from third-party (and presumably HIPAA non compliant) platforms. While most offer a freemium service, HIPAA compliance usually comes with a price tag.

The difference between these multiple solutions will depend on your risk tolerance and resulting comfort level with the tradeoff between anonymizing ePHI and usefulness of customer data for marketing purposes.

At Webtage, we look at your business needs, your current marketing & analytics techn stack, and your marketing campaigns into account to determine the best HIPAA-compliant MarkTech solutions for your organization.

GA4 Customization

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) collects a vast range of user data to provide insights into user behavior on your website or app. Web URLs and IP addresses, for instance, contain valuable information about an individual’s online activities, including their browsing history and potentially sensitive healthcare searches that may link individuals with past, current or future health conditions, now considered protected health information.

GA4 is not HIPAA compliant out-of-the-box. There are customizations that are needed to achieve some degree of compliance. While these customizations will allow for some safeguarding against HIPAA violations, these measures are not absolute and fool proof in protecting your against non-compliance.

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Third-Party SaaS Solutions

HIPAA-compliant analytics platforms and Customer data protection (CDP) platforms offer significant advantages for compliance puroses. CDPs, for instance, allow for secure data storage, custom audience insights, data exports and custom activations as well as other advanced integrations to keep customer data useful for marketing while keeping ePHI safe from third-party. While most offer a freemium service, HIPAA compliance usually comes with a price tag.

In general, price points will depend on number of applications or websites being managed, need for data warehousing, analysis & visualization capabilities, hosting provider, privacy & security needs, consent management needs and amount of hand holding.

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