Healthcare Ad Targeting: Precision, Power, and Privacy

Never Compromise on Reach or your Patient Relationship

Healthcare ad targeting has grown into a huge business, both on television and online. Whether the advertiser is in pharmaceuticals, medical devices, or healthcare insurance, the principles of effective marketing apply: reach your qualified audience while limiting waste.

The special challenge in healthcare advertising is that reach and accuracy must work in concert with the appropriate safeguards to protect individual privacy.

To maintain privacy for consumers and patients, HIPAA-compliant data classifications must be used to cluster patient data and eliminate individual targeting. In the digital world, some agencies and advertisers have suggested that naturally-speculative cookie targeting is insufficiently de-personalized. In addition, cookie-based targeting is going to have limited coverage — an onboarding effort is going to match only 25-to-35 percent, and over half of browsers and mobile devices block cookies on top of that.

Semcasting created a HIPAA-compliant consumer segmentation system that improves the accuracy, reach, and privacy of healthcare ad targeting using a patented process based on genetic algorithms.

A suite of HIPAA-compliant data models link anonymous clusters of consumers with their medical resource providers. Based on a Uniform System of classification — a therapeutic cross-reference and classification system — the top 100 drugs, the top 100 diagnoses, and the top specialists are linked by location and medical expertise. In addition, the U.S. population is scored and summarized under Medicare guidelines to link over 1.4 million U.S. care providers with their professional specialties and the location of their medical organization.

Consumers can be linked to medical organizations which can best serve their needs, healthcare providers can reach patients who would benefit from their services, and pharmaceutical companies can reach consumers to provide information or find consumers who meet clinical trial requirements.

Semcasting data modeling strives to exceed the rules and standards supporting HIPAA, specifically adhering to the Medicare guidelines for target cohorts. In addition, HITRUST has established a Common Security Framework (CSF), a certifiable framework for all organizations that create, access, store, or exchange personal health and financial information. Semcasting supports the goals of HITRUST and the framework.

Find out how Semcasting can improve your digital healthcare campaigns.