The Death of the Health Care Marketing Workaround
What happens when the workaround stops working?
// By Russell Reid //
For more than a decade, digital marketing in health care has existed in a strange state of contradiction. On one hand, the industry has been under some of the most stringent privacy regulations in the world. On the other, marketers have been pushed to adopt the same measurement tools, ad platforms, and optimization tactics as consumer brands, platforms often built without health care’s unique compliance needs in mind.
Caught between regulatory reality and marketing necessity, health care organizations have turned to a familiar strategy: the workaround.
These workarounds come in many forms. Some are as simple as stripping identifiers from URLs before sending them to analytics platforms. Others are complex, multilayered configurations involving server-side tagging, JavaScript injection, or custom middleware to anonymize data before it is handed off to third-party tools.
In every case, the intent is the same: keep using the tools marketing teams know while putting just enough guardrails in place to reduce risk.
For years, it worked. Or at least, it worked well enough.
But the era of the workaround is ending, and health care marketers need to be ready for what comes next. Read on to learn how workarounds can drive up cost, why 2025 is a turning point, and how to future-proof your tracking and analytics capabilities while maintaining compliance.