The Three Legs of Healthcare Marketing
Sep 3, 2025
Tyler Zey
I've been building products for years, and I'm always drawn to hard problems that need solving. While building Ours Privacy, it's become clear that compliant marketing in healthcare—with all these state privacy laws and HIPAA regulations hitting at once—is one of the toughest challenges I've seen.
It's a problem I'm passionate about making simpler. Because unlocking marketing in healthcare and making it actually work for teams is brutally hard right now. Every week, my team at Ours Privacy works with agencies, health systems, and digital health startups that are trying to balance growth with compliance. I think about this constantly: How do we make analytics, ad attribution, and data warehousing easier and more compliant for them?
Here's what I've learned: marketing compliance is like a stool with three legs. If you're missing any of them, the whole thing tips over. Those three legs are:
Consent Management
Server‑Side Analytics & Ad Attribution
Web Scanning
Let me walk you through why each matters—and why, together, they're the foundation of trust‑first healthcare marketing.
Leg 1: Consent Management
Consent management is your compliance front door. It's that cookie banner you see pop up on websites asking if you want to accept cookies and tracking. But it's not just a popup—it's the system that actually honors every visitor's choices about cookies and tracking. With new state privacy laws in California, Colorado, and Virginia, operating without it may create compliance risks that organizations should evaluate with legal counsel.
Think of it this way: consent management shows patients you respect their choices and helps you comply with state laws from day one. It's generally considered a best practice—it's your first line of defense.
Here's how we aim to solve this at Ours Privacy:
We built our own multi-regional CMP that handles the complex consent requirements across different states and countries. And we also integrated tightly with the top CMPs on the market—OneTrust, Cookiebot, and others—so you get our specialized healthcare compliance features (like consent flows designed with HIPAA considerations in mind and tools to help identify potential PHI), plus seamless integration with your existing marketing stack. Consent decisions by users on your websites need to direct the flow of data into analytics, ad platforms, and data warehouse.
We quickly realized while building Ours Privacy that tight integration between consent platforms and data flow is core to any marketing team that wants to be both compliant and effective. You can't afford to lose data or break workflows—you need consent management that works with your tools, not against them.
Supporting reading:
Leg 2: Server‑Side Analytics & Ad Attribution
Server‑side analytics and ad attribution sounds technical, but here's what's happening:
A few years ago, HIPAA guidance and lawsuits highlighted the risks of loading scripts like Google Ads or Google Analytics directly in the browser. When you drop a third‑party pixel, it runs in the visitor's browser—meaning their device communicates directly with those third parties. This can expose details like IP addresses, page URLs, and more. Even with consent, you may be sharing data in ways that could create compliance concerns that should be evaluated.
Server‑side event sending fixes this. Instead of sending 30 pixels directly from a browser, you clean and filter data before sending it server‑to‑server. You still get the insights and campaign tracking you need, but without exposing identifiers or personal health information.
And when you pair this with consent management, you can make smart decisions: sending ads data but not analytics data, depending on what the patient actually agreed to.
Supporting reading:
Leg 3: Web Scanning
Web scanning is where you start—and it's usually where teams get their biggest wake-up call.
A scanner loads your site in a fresh browser and shows you exactly what cookies and third‑party resources are being triggered. The results are almost always shocking. Here's what I see constantly:
Example 1: YouTube videos are pixel bombs You embed a simple YouTube video on a patient education page. Seems harmless, right? Wrong. That video loads YouTube's tracking pixel, which then triggers Google Analytics, Google Ads, and DoubleClick pixels. Suddenly, one innocent video is sending patient data to four different third parties.
Example 2: DSP pixels create pixel chains You add a demand-side platform (DSP) pixel for ad targeting. But that DSP pixel doesn't just load itself—it triggers pixels from two or three additional third-party sites for "audience verification" and "fraud prevention." You thought you were adding one pixel, but you're actually adding four.
Why does this matter? Because HIPAA and state laws rest on a simple expectation: when a patient visits yoursite.com, they generally expect only your resources to load. Every unexpected third‑party call is a potential compliance concern that should be assessed.
A scanner reveals these blind spots. It gives you a clear map of risks so you can fix them, categorize resources in consent management, and safely route what's needed through server‑side channels.
Supporting reading:
Wheelhouse: Considerations & deployment options for server‑side tracking in healthcare
Wheelhouse Podcast: The evolution of healthcare data compliance
Why All Three Matter
Compliance isn't one tool or a checkbox—it's a feedback loop that actually works.
Consent management makes sure patients give clear, informed choice.
Server‑side analytics & ad attribution help ensure data is collected and shared in ways that align with HIPAA compliance goals.
Web scanning reveals the risks you don't even know are there.
Here's how they work together: your web scanner notifies you of new scripts, you categorize them in your CMP, and then either remove them entirely or route them through your CDP for compliant data collection. It's a continuous cycle of detection, categorization, and action.
Together, these three legs make compliance not just possible—but sustainable. And in healthcare marketing, sustainability is everything.
Your campaigns need to work today, tomorrow, and next year—while maintaining appropriate compliance practices.
And here's the reality: regulators have been looking back four, five, or even six years in some of these cases. That continued threat is why it's so important to get this right now—not out of fear, but out of responsibility.
At Ours Privacy, we've built our platform with exactly this model in mind. Because if your compliance stool is missing a leg, it's not a matter of if it tips over, but when.
Want to see how we make this easier for teams like yours? Visit oursprivacy.com.
