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Connecting healthcare data to digital campaigns

Solving the attribution challenge

Launching a pharmaceutical marketing campaign takes months of planning, creative development, and media strategy—followed by rigorous research and refinement. When the campaign finally goes live, marketers need more than hope; they need confidence. Confidence that they’re reaching the right high-value audience across a fragmented landscape, that targeting and measurement are accurate, and proving that results reflect real-world impact. This confidence starts with one critical factor: the ability to link web activity and user behaviour data sources – both upfront  when creating audiences and on the backend during measurement.

The challenge: Linking real-world health data to digital campaigns

Healthcare marketers face a persistent challenge: connecting real-world health data to real-world patients in a HIPAA-compliant way. Many data providers claim to offer high-quality audiences, but what’s the value if those audiences cannot be linked to digital identifiers for campaign measurement? Without accurate linkage to digital identifiers, impressions cannot be tied to meaningful healthcare actions, and marketers are left guessing. 

Agencies invest heavily in tagging campaigns, but without secure connectivity between media exposure and patient actions – such as prescription fills or treatment starts - ROI remains unclear. Fragmented data ecosystems and strict privacy regulations make this even harder. Marketers need a solution that bridges these gaps seamlessly—ensuring privacy while enabling accurate attribution and actionable insights.

Why identity durability matters in a fragmented landscape

As the advertising ecosystem continues to evolve, signal loss, platform restrictions, and channel fragmentation are reshaping how healthcare marketers maintain addressability. Durable identity solutions – built on consistent, privacy-safe de-identification – help preserve the connection between audience planning, activation, and measurement even as identifiers fluctuate or disappear. 

For healthcare use cases, this is particularly critical: without stable identity linkage, cross-channel audiences lose fidelity, match rates drop, and outcome measurement becomes unreliable. Durable identity is now a foundational requirement for delivering scale responsibly in an increasingly complex environment.

From privacy to performance: Tokenisation’s role in high match rates

In healthcare marketing, HIPAA-compliant data de-identification isn’t just a regulatory requirement—it’s the cornerstone of trust. Tokenisation technology has become a critical enabler of secure data connectivity, allowing marketers to link offline healthcare data with online identifiers without compromising privacy.

High match rates are essential for accurate audience targeting and reliable campaign measurement. When evaluating tokenisation providers, marketers should ask:

  • What is the average match rate?
  • How is consistency maintained across multiple data partners?
  • Are insights delivered quickly enough to support optimisation?
  • Is the solution widely adopted and proven?

Consistency, timing, and broad interoperability ensure that data can be connected responsibly while supporting meaningful measurement at scale.

A high-value view of cross-channel activation

Today’s audiences engage across many channels – video, mobile, display, and increasingly privacy-centric environments. Effective healthcare marketing requires the ability to activate de-identified audiences where patients spend time, without losing fidelity or scale in the process.

When tokenisation and identity framework are aligned, marketers can extend audience reach across channels more effectively and measure exposure in a consistent way. While channels differ in signals and identifiers, unified and privacy-safe audience resolution helps ensure campaigns perform as expected while maintaining compliance. 

Scalable identity partnership built for interoperability

Symphony Health, an ICON plc company and LiveRamp – an industry leader in data connectivity and identity resolution - bring confidence to healthcare marketers by leveraging advanced tokenisation technology and identity resolution that enables high match rates across Symphony Health’s extensive healthcare data assets. All Symphony Health data is securely de-identified to meet HIPAA standards through Synoma® tokenisation, with LiveRamp implementing the same tokenisation framework to ensure consistency throughout the marketing process and removing any guesswork involved. By resolving data to LiveRamp’s RampID, we can provide advertisers with a secure, consistent identifier that maximises audience fidelity across channels and devices. 

This means no barriers to connecting healthcare claims data to patients for audience targeting and media measurement. Marketers can finally link campaign exposure to real-world outcomes with confidence.

The results speak for themselves: with LiveRamp, we are achieving match rates of ~70%, a level that confidently speaks to the campaign’s success. For marketers, this translates into:

  • Greater reach to the intended target audience.
  • Higher confidence in campaign measurement.
  • Improved ability to connect exposure data to meaningful healthcare actions.

Ultimately, this partnership and level of connectivity delivers unparalleled Audience Quality and Measurement, empowering pharmaceutical brands and agencies to make smarter, data-driven decisions.

symphony health graphic

In an era where precision and compliance are non-negotiable, Synoma® technology—backed by Symphony’s depth of healthcare data and LiveRamp’s identify resolution expertise—sets a new standard for healthcare marketing measurement. It is not just about running campaigns; it’s about running them with confidence.

For more about the partnership between Symphony Health’s data and LiveRamp’s identity resolution capabilities, connect with us today.

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