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This week’s Making Rounds spotlights Ray Mina, head of marketing at Freshpaint, a company that helps healthcare marketers collect patient data while staying HIPAA compliant. Mina talked about how recent federal guidelines around the HIPAA privacy rule and data privacy have changed healthcare marketing, and how Freshpaint helps health startups and health systems navigate those changes.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in healthcare?
I help marketers at leading healthcare providers navigate the recent HIPAA changes that have derailed many of their digital marketing strategies overnight.
Back in December 2022, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) made a clarification around the tracking technologies that power the ad ecosystem—that includes Google Analytics for measurement, Facebook ads, Google ads, you name it. HHS basically said that those tracking technologies are actually capturing patient information that violates HIPAA. When that guidance came down, healthcare legal and compliance teams went to marketing teams and told them to simply remove all of those tracking pixels overnight. We heard from people who said that they spent seven years building a culture of data to drive engagement with consumers, and that went away overnight.
We help small health tech startups all the way to very large hospital systems in the US promote access to healthcare and promote their services while also keeping privacy in mind.
How exactly does Freshpaint help healthcare companies navigate these data privacy changes?
Most marketers that are doing business-to-consumer marketing, like healthcare, leverage a lot of first-party behavioral data (meaning what we’re doing as users on their website). But in healthcare, marketers need to be concerned with HIPAA. They need a platform that helps them collect the behavioral data, and makes sure it’s governed in such a way that it doesn’t send the wrong data that might get them in trouble with regulators. That’s what Freshpaint does.
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What’s the best change you’ve made or seen at a place you’ve worked?
Before December 2022, we were focused on helping digital health startups create better experiences for their patients by leveraging first-party data in a HIPAA-compliant way. But in December, when HHS updated HIPAA guidelines around ad platform tracking technologies, traditional healthcare providers contacted us for help. It’s been one of the most rewarding moments in my career—helping other marketers go from not knowing the path forward to discovering a way to protect patient privacy, while also achieving their goal of improving access to healthcare through the search and ad platforms where they’ve grown accustomed to reaching their audience.
What healthcare trend are you least optimistic about and why?
While protecting patient privacy is critical as we move forward in a more complex world, we must balance it with our desire to create awareness of new treatments, medicines, and preventative healthcare. Like it or not, patients don’t read the New England Journal of Medicine. They rely on a Google search or Facebook and other social media sites. We can’t turn away from those platforms. Instead, we need to find a way to leverage them while keeping patient data safe.