Bringing Privacy-safe Marketing Data to Life Sciences

Since Crossix was founded in 2005, the healthcare analytics industry has undergone dramatic changes. Technological advances have empowered pharmaceutical companies to bring huge volumes of data into their own warehouses and data lakes, allowing teams of data scientists to run advanced, in-house analytics. These advances can help brands in many ways, such as uncovering insights into patient behavior, creating audience profiles, and developing predictive analytics.

With the advent of large marketing datasets, such as the consumer-level digital data housed in enterprise data management platforms (DMPs), new industry-specific challenges emerge for life sciences companies. The technical ability to link person-level and impression-level marketing data to patient-level health data now exists, but it is not without privacy risks.

Privacy First
Combining person-level media data with patient-level health data is highly risky from a privacy perspective. The media data can be easily used to link the health data to a specific person. That’s a violation of the NAI (Network Advertising Initiative) Code, both as it relates to targeting (“Tailored Advertising”) and to measurement (“ADR”). Re-identification of patients is both technically possible, and also likely, when considering other data available to marketing teams, such as IP addresses and user registration. This in turn raises critical HIPAA and patient privacy issues, as it may violate the trust that patients and healthcare professionals have in life sciences companies.

There is a need for a balanced solution. A solution that provides the most granular data possible to support various uses cases, but a solution that definitely puts patient privacy first. So granular to be actionable, but not too granular to violate patient privacy.

The Crossix Data Platform was designed to solve this challenge—get the value while protecting privacy. Fifteen years ago, Crossix created a distributed solution to make accurate linkage and measurement but without ever linking patients’ health data with all their media data.

All Crossix analytics including Crossix DIFA, the industry leading marketing measurement and optimization platform, leverage the Crossix Data Platform and therefore put privacy first.

DIFA Data Stream
As a market leader, Crossix is developing new tools to support life sciences companies’ need to bring more data into their data warehouses and data lakes. But our approach is fundamentally different. This morning, we announced the launch of DIFA Data Stream, the latest enhancement to the Crossix DIFA marketing and optimization platform.

DIFA Data Stream was designed to help customers extract even more value from their marketing data. It provides access to all raw marketing analytics data in DIFA on a micro-cohort level, so there is no way to tie individuals to their own health data. By providing analytics only on an aggregated level—not a person-level—our approach is also compliant with the NAI Code for media measurement.

How Can Marketers Use DIFA Data Stream?
Our customers can use the granular data from DIFA Data Stream and combine it with other commercial data. For example, a life sciences company can overlay geo-level formulary access data with geo-level data from DIFA to better understand the interplay of marketing and formulary in a specific region. The information provided by DIFA Data Stream is granular enough to make detailed marketing decisions but not granular enough to risk the identification of personal health data.

Crossix is rolling out DIFA Data Stream for each product in the DIFA platform and, in the future, we will add additional cuts of granularity to enable clients to perform even deeper analyses. As we gather feedback from clients to improve DIFA and all of its components, including DIFA Data Stream, we will continue to build and invest in tools to support marketing measurement optimization and ultimately empower pharma companies to make better, data-driven business decisions while putting privacy first.

Contact me to learn more about how the shifting landscape is impacting pharmaceutical marketing.