Healthcare organizations have invested heavily in digital engagement over the past decade. Patient portals. CRM platforms. Campaign automation. Consumer data platforms. And yet, personalization in healthcare still feels stuck.
Outreach is often generic. Preventive care reminders go unopened. Screening campaigns underperform. Value based care programs struggle to engage the very patients they are designed to support.
I hear a version of the same frustration from health system and life sciences leaders. Their engagement stack keeps expanding, but their impact on the patient experience remains limited.
While many healthcare organizations have abundant data, most have an identity and context gap.
Personalization stalls when identity never moves beyond the EHR
A diagnosis tells you what care is needed, but it doesn’t tell you how to reach someone, when they are most receptive, or what barriers might prevent follow-through.
When identity stops at the electronic health record (EHR), engagement becomes a series of educated guesses about a real person’s needs, preferences, and circumstances.
Patients don’t live inside the EHR
Consider how most preventive outreach works today. A patient leaves the hospital with instructions and a recommended follow-up appointment, and the system triggers a standard sequence of reminders.
The intent is right. The execution is usually constrained by missing context.
- Will they see the message in the channel you chose?
- Is a caregiver involved in coordinating next steps?
- Is the barrier logistics, or clarity on what to do next?
These factors determine whether follow-up happens. They also determine whether “personalization” actually feels personal, or just automated.
In other industries, personalization advanced by connecting transactional data with behavioral and household context. In healthcare, those signals remain separate to protect patient data, often resulting in a disconnect between strong clinical insights and effective patient engagement.
Connecting the dots is the hard part
There’s a common narrative that healthcare needs more data to improve personalization. In practice, the bigger challenge is connecting what you already have in a way teams can trust. Identity, preference, household context, and engagement history often live in different systems, and they rarely resolve cleanly to a usable profile.
A privacy-safe identity foundation changes that. When organizations can link records across sources with strong match discipline, governance, and tokenization, they can turn fragmented data into more relevant decisions without exposing more than is necessary.
Watch our Q&A with Cristin Liberatore from IQVIA Digital on healthcare marketing
How we approach this at Experian
At Experian, this is the lens we use:
What privacy-safe identity makes possible in regulated patient engagement
In regulated categories, accuracy, governance, and privacy are non-negotiable. That’s why I push teams to think about identity as infrastructure, because people move, households change, and preferences shift.
At Experian, that infrastructure includes:
- Marketing Attributes and Enrichment: Adding context to first-party data so planning and decisioning reflect the person you’re trying to reach.
- Offline and Digital Graphs: Connect identity across touchpoints so experiences stay consistent as people move between channels.
- First-Party Onboarding and data marketplace: Activate consented consumer and patient data across digital environments in a privacy-safe way. Our data marketplace extends that strategy with third-party partner segments, improving your personalization efforts to encourage a more proactive approach to healthcare.
- Curated Deals: Support upper-funnel awareness by aligning audience insight with higher-quality inventory in environments that can improve visibility, context, and campaign efficiency.
Watch our healthcare marketing panel from CES 2026
Identity must come first in healthcare marketing
Healthcare personalization has plateaued because engagement strategies have stayed too narrow and disconnected from the realities that shape follow-through.
The next phase of healthcare engagement will be defined by organizations that treat identity and additional patient context as the foundation for decisioning, activation, and measurement. When identity connects to real-world context through privacy-safe, governed, and tokenized practices, outreach becomes more relevant, easier to receive, and easier to act on.
About the author
Kevin Dunn
Chief Revenue Officer, Experian
Kevin Dunn joins Experian Marketing Services with more than 20 years of leadership experience across marketing and advertising technology, most recently serving as Senior Vice President of Brands and Agencies at LiveRamp. In that role, he led growth across retail, CPG, travel, hospitality, financial services, and healthcare, overseeing new business, account expansion, and channel partnerships.
Kevin is known for building cohesive, accountable teams and leading with optimism, clarity, and a strong sense of shared purpose. His leadership philosophy centers on empowering people, driving positive outcomes for clients and fostering a culture where teams can grow, take smart risks, and succeed together.
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Advertisers continue to increase their spending across addressable TV, connected TV (CTV), and digital. According to IAB's "2021 Video Ad Spend and 2022 Outlook" report, digital video ad spending is expected to increase by 26% to $49.2 billion in 2022. Understanding who consumers are and how to best reach them in their preferred channel is becoming more complex. Damian Amitin and Colleen Dawe discuss how a seamless identity strategy can address the complexity of the emerging TV space. The evolution of identity resolution Around ten years ago, the idea of digital “identity resolution” or “Device Graphs” was born. This idea connected cookies and MAIDs to understand when many IDs were the same person or household. In more recent years, our industry began to connect that initial understanding to the CTV ecosystem. But, a large part of the TV ecosystem existed in silos, like first and third-party audience data, and the growing advanced TV market. The goal of identity resolution has always been to understand the consumer better. To achieve more accurate targeting and measurement in the CTV ecosystem, we must incorporate the following: What we know about the household and consumer from an ID perspective Who the consumer is as it relates to audience data, as well as the wealth of first-party data in the advanced TV space We know the cookie is a flawed way to collect data. While Google delayed the deprecation of third-party cookies, there are other challenges that we face right now. Such as the glaring gap in Safari traffic and the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) turning to “opt-in." Understanding consumer behavior across devices and platforms continues to challenge marketers and publishers. These challenges are creating the need to find more stable identifiers. Though the cookie remains valuable, it has an uncertain future. This has led advertisers to place bigger bets on the combination of addressable and CTV. The overlap in addressable and CTV data leads to fragmentation Personally identifiable information (PII) makes up the majority of addressable TV households' data. Part of the attraction to CTV is that their IDs remain universal, persistent, and stable. Analysts project that CTV ad spending will hit $23B in 2023. Consumers now have an average of 4.7 streaming subscriptions per household. It’s no surprise then, that Disney+, HBO, and Netflix released or announced ad-supported tiers. Addressable TV and CTV are often thought of as distinct markets across the industry. But, in the context of identity, we should look at them through the same lens. Millions of households still consume TV and video content via a set-top box or through apps on CTVs. This is in addition to what they consume on their laptops, tablets, and phones. Of the top 11 cable and satellite providers, 65 million U.S. households still have a box in their homes. On the other hand, approximately 96 million U.S. households have at least one or more Smart TVs and streaming services. With about 126 million total U.S. TV households, that’s a lot of overlap. There are still significant numbers of both addressable and CTV homes. How can we address fragmented TV consumption? Through a holistic and comprehensive approach to identity. An approach that captures addressable TV, CTV, and digital identifiers. An approach that captures all audience attributes inside of a single identity graph. This is the ideal approach for publishers, AdTech vendors, and brands. Discover how to unlock holistic identity How can we achieve a holistic identity? Through a three-pillared approach: First-party data onboarding Digital identifiers Consumer data First-party data onboarding Bringing offline data from a brand’s consumers is very valuable due to the quality of the data. Because the data is being collected right from the source, you know it’s accurate. 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To achieve the three-pillared approach today, you need to use many vendors and fragmented data sources. Often with conflicting data. As we look forward, the tools to do this are becoming more advanced and unified. The players in our ecosystem should adopt a seamless identity strategy. One that provides a privacy-safe yet full-picture solution. That means capturing and unifying all devices within a household. While also understanding the consumer behaviors and profiles behind those devices. Keep up with your customers and their data Once we create an informed identity strategy, we can begin to understand the makeup of each household and the individuals within. In this new world, personalizing the experience for an audience is key. Where do they prefer to spend their time? What type of content are they most engaged in? Only then can we as an industry provide an optimal experience for each consumer. All while driving greater ROI for advertisers and publishers. Are you ready to know more about your customers than ever before? Let's get to work together to achieve your marketing goals. Contact us to learn how we can connect the complex dots of identity resolution. About our experts Damian Amitin, VP of Enterprise Partnerships, Experian Marketing Services Damian Amitin is the VP of Enterprise Partnerships and joined Experian during the Tapad acquisition in November 2020. Damian is a senior sales and partnerships executive, specializing in the identity resolution and marketing data ecosystem. Damian helps brands, publishers, and technology vendors enable enhanced ID resolution through The Experian/Tapad platform to attain a 360 view of the customer across targeting analytics, attribution, and personalization. Colleen Dawe, Senior Account Executive, Experian Marketing Services Colleen Dawe is a Senior Account Executive on the Advanced TV Team within Experian Marketing Services. With 15 years of experience working within the television ecosystem, Colleen works with clients to bring the value and expertise of Experian to support their objectives in the areas of data, identity, activation, and measurement. Get in touch
Brands can leverage non-clinical factors, like the social determinants of health, to gain a holistic view of their patients and increase access to care.