Healthcare

Healthcare communication is a sensitive category where accuracy and privacy matter more than reach, and the constraints are not negotiable. HIPAA requires written authorization for most marketing uses of protected health information, and a patient's identity or condition disclosed in promotional material is PHI. That means a patient testimonial or creator content featuring identifiable patient information requires a valid, signed authorization before it can be used, and if the covered entity is paid by a third party, the authorization must say so. We build healthcare work to that requirement, not around it.

The tracking-technology question has been unusually turbulent. OCR guidance had treated online tracking tools that process PHI as impermissible without a business associate agreement or authorization, but in 2024 a federal court vacated the part of that guidance covering IP addresses combined with visits to unauthenticated health pages, and HHS withdrew its appeal. The rest of the guidance stands. We treat this as a live area, use conservative data practices around any tool that could touch PHI, and note plainly where the law is unsettled rather than asserting certainty that does not exist.

• Clinical and regulatory review before publication, every time.
• Patient and contributor consent is informed and revocable.
• No health data is inferred or used for targeting.
• Content points to qualified advice rather than replacing it.

The forward view is that healthcare marketing will be judged on restraint. Accuracy, fair presentation and privacy are the reputation of a healthcare organization, and reach bought at the cost of any of them is a bad trade. We build careful, accurate, privacy-respecting communication, with every claim substantiated and every use of patient information properly authorized, because in this category the harm from getting it wrong is real.