How Healthcare Proved Out Adobe Customer Journey Analytics
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Healthcare marketing teams experienced some choppy waters in 2023 for those who rely on web analytics for decision-making. In December 2022 the Federal Trade Commission issued letters to 130 healthcare organizations, warning that their current web analytics platforms may violate HIPAA compliance requirements (including Google Analytics). As a result, many organizations began removing analytics tracking code altogether, which completely shut off the lights for the marketers and product teams who relied on this data.
Many of our clients who were struggling to navigate in the darkness during this time found a new lighthouse in Adobe Customer Journey Analytics (CJA). In this article we’ll explore at a high-level the privacy challenges healthcare organizations continue to face, explain how many of our clients have found Adobe CJA to be a uniquely powerful solution for overcoming these challenges, and the unexpected benefits they discovered along this journey.
Let’s dive in.
A Quick Recap Of Analytics And Privacy In Healthcare
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) came into existence in the mid-1990s with the aim of protecting how medical information about patients is shared among parties in order to protect the privacy of patients. Data platforms and solutions dealing in protected health information (PHI) can obtain HIPAA certification based on privacy features they may have available to protect or blind that information in a manner that meets the 'Minimum Necessary Standard' of HIPAA so that only essential information be shared.
When the Federal Trade Commission issued letters in December 2022, it didn’t go as far as mandating a course of action. As a result, internal policy makers within many organizations were quick to issue their own policies mandating that Google tags be removed immediately from website and online applications–affecting online analytics and advertising measurement.
In a matter of months, we observed many healthcare organizations navigating blindly–not only in terms of measuring online website activity but also now being unable to measure conversions and performance of online marketing programs.
The Semi-Accidental New Healthcare Analytics Solution
A number of HIPAA compliant analytics solutions were already operating in this space as of 2022, Piwik Pro and FreshPaint as examples, and were now in consideration as alternatives. Many organizations opted to continue business as usual with their current Analytics platform in a wait-and-see mode. A subset of those organizations modified their current analytics tagging so that they did not need to be fully replaced (such as removing tracking code from key pages, and hashing sensitive data points). While the latter approach limited immediate disruption, it also introduced new resource requirements to tightly monitor and maintain these customizations ongoingly, not to mention negotiate with internal policy makers as to whether they were now compliant.
Enter one of Adobe’s more recent solution offerings, Customer Journey Analytics (CJA), which is HIPAA ready by way of its Privacy Shield for Healthcare add-on and then made HIPAA compliant with a business associate agreement (BAA) put in place between Adobe and the healthcare organization. In 2023, we observed a surge of migrations to CJA–mostly from Google Analytics (UA and GA4) but also from Adobe Analytics. While CJA was effective at re-enabling website analytics for these organizations, what was more interesting was how it began to unlock a new willingness to integrate non-web data sources into CJA while opening new paths to understanding patient and healthcare provider audience insights, experience journeys, and cross-channel marketing performance.
This yielded two important results:
Willingness to Connect Data - Walls between internal silos were beginning to break down in terms of data integration across channels, platforms, and departments, and
CJA Can Stand Alone - Customer Journey Analytics was now being recognized in its ability to not only stand on its own as a web analytics tool but to quickly expand its value beyond that of just web analytics by providing integrated insights leveraging other customer channels and data sources, in a compliant manner.
Within the Adobe suite, we’ve since observed clients further expansion into the other HIPAA compliant Adobe solutions that sit atop its Experience Platform (AEP), namely Real-time Customer Data Platform and Journey Optimizer. We also see greater integration with specialized patient information systems–notably Epic through its robust API capabilities.
Building Confidence within Adobe
Healthcare’s adoption of CJA has become a great case study for Adobe in that CJA is often miscategorized as a visualization tool when it’s really a data and insights exploration sandbox for those looking for organic insights across channels and without having to rely on separate business intelligence teams needing to code complex SQL queries in order to explore audience insights and experience journeys or performance cross-channel analysis.
We do expect to see Adobe Analytics become deprecated in favor of a more capable Customer Journey Analytics solution over time, but that’s likely many years away. What is interesting is that Healthcare may have helped accelerate this timeline by making 2023 a coming of age event for Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics.
Final Thoughts
Privacy will continue to be an ongoing concern for Healthcare affecting customer insights, marketing performance analysis, and patient/HCP experience optimization. Adobe has a strong lead in the space as a turnkey solution however there are many other solutions that will continue to advance capabilities as alternative paths. Composable solutions are another option for those healthcare teams willing to take on the additional role of product management, dedicate resources, and are confident in their ability to remain compliant.
What we see as the exciting byproduct of CJA’s adoption with the industry is the new connections these organizations are finding they can make across what traditionally has been siloed data sources in order to provide a better customer experience for patients and HCPs and regain visibility into marketing performance across their channels.
In a time when many in our field debate whether web analytics in of itself has a future as a stand alone practice, healthcare could very well be the accidental juggernaut making the shift to a broader omnichannel data & insights discipline as a result of privacy oversight.
