Ensuring Healthcare Marketing Compliance under HIPAA

Table of Contents

Healthcare marketing compliance isn’t like other industries. HIPAA compliance is at the top of the agenda, and it’s come a long way in the last year or so.

Today, healthcare marketers must balance what’s necessary to build strong patient connections with the high standards of privacy that come with data handling.

Healthcare digital marketing needs to involve HIPAA compliance in all online platforms that are used to promote your medical practice. Here are the tips that promise to ensure compliance with healthcare rules and regulations to help healthcare marketers effectively execute their goals.

How to Ensure Healthcare Marketing Compliance?

There is no one-size-fits-all answer that ensures these tips will protect your practice from undergoing any healthcare liability. But one thing that you shall never use is a marketing tool that needs to be HIPAA-compliant. Target patients with digital marketing tools, but once they’ve become your patients, remove their data to keep healthcare marketing compliance intact.

Secure Website Tools

Websites are still the first point of patient connection and the basis of patient acquisition. Use your website to continue your research for patients and let them book appointments. Providers can use their websites to communicate directly with prospective patients, such as chatbots and live chat.

But now more than ever, healthcare marketers must ultimately ensure healthcare marketing compliance in the toolkit they are using for their website.

Website Content Management System

Whether patients are completing forms, participating in live calls, or simply viewing condition webpages, there is always a way to transfer the patient’s data.

That’s why, regardless of the CMS you use, it must ensure healthcare marketing compliance or provide integrations and plugins to meet HIPAA security and privacy standards.

Ensure that all data (via a form) uploaded to the website is via a HIPAA-compliant plugin.
Keep electronic PHI separate from WordPress and encrypt data during transiting.
Educate all site visitors on privacy and security policies.
Enforce two-factor authentication (2FA) for all site administrators and users.

Email Marketing Automation

The goal is to have long-term, ongoing relationships among patients and practices. The best way to build lasting patient connections is through email marketing tools for automation. These solutions can inform patients about new services, promote healthcare marketing compliance, and help patients make appointments.

HIPAA-Compliant CRMs

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems act as a repository for patient actions and decisions, providing you with the data you need to enhance patient outcomes and enhance patient satisfaction.

Advanced-Data Trackers

As digital marketing continues to grow, so does sophisticated online analytics. The challenge with most of these tracking technologies is that they are third-party (meaning they’re outside of your organization), meaning the data you capture is being sent to a third party. When you send that data to a third-party tool, the healthcare marketing compliance immediately undergoes HIPAA violation.

First-Party Data Capturing

The first step for any healthcare organization is determining if its technology vendor meets the criteria for being considered a business associate. The best way to confirm this is by using a HIPAA-compliant first-party data capture solution (FDP) owned and controlled by the organization directly in the HIPAA-protected environment.

This is the only way to fully comply with healthcare marketing compliance without inadvertently collecting sensitive information through hidden tags or back-end IP collection.

Conclusion

HIPAA compliance is essential for healthcare providers to ensure patient privacy and comply with ever-evolving legislation. Doing so can help build trust with patients and protect the integrity of a healthcare system while avoiding financial penalties and damaging an organization’s reputation.

The most effective way to implement healthcare marketing compliance is to follow this rule: never share your patient data with software that does not comply with HIPAA. Instead, analyze your data in-house and use your insights to define your audience in your online marketing campaigns.