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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Tapad's technology enhances Bidtellect clients frequency capping and audience extension capabilities cross device. NEW YORK, Feb. 28, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Tapad, part of Experian, is a global marketing technology company and leader in digital identity resolution solutions, today announced a new partnership with Bidtellect (now Simpli.fi), a leading native Demand-Side Platform (DSP). Bidtellect's paid content distribution platform will leverage The Tapad Graph™ as its first cross-device partner. The integration will offer Bidtellect's clients in the U.S. and Canada cross-device frequency capping and enhanced audience extension capabilities. The combination of Tapad's leading cross-device technology, with Bidtellect's unparalleled scale and optimization capabilities, will allow content marketers within brands and agencies to develop even more strategic, effective content marketing campaigns. The Tapad Graph™ will allow content marketers to gain greater reach and create more relevant, unified messaging with targeted delivery, when used in conjunction with Bidtellect's technology. Marketers can expect to benefit from amplified reach, and enhanced, privacy-safe engagement with desired audiences as a result of this partnership. "Partnering with Tapad, the leaders in cross-device data, provides Bidtellect with a complete solution that leverages both probabilistic and deterministic mapping strategies," said Mike Conway, Chief Technology Officer at Bidtellect. "The Tapad relationship expands our audience size by providing the opportunity to reach the same user across multiple devices and, when used in conjunction with our frequency capping functionality, ensures increased reach, reduced ad saturation, and elimination of wasted ad spend." As the partnership progresses, Tapad will also work with Bidtellect to provide advanced attribution for conversions and engagement metrics including connectivity and amplification. These advanced insights will help brands and agencies develop a more holistic approach to content marketing, so they can build audiences and influence bidding algorithms that directly impact their business. Contact us today
The Tapad Graph Now Offered in Adobe Audience Manager, part of Adobe Analytics Cloud New York, NY — August 7, 2018 — Tapad, now part of Experian, is advancing personalization for the modern marketer, announced today that its proprietary Tapad Graph is now integrated with Adobe Audience Manager, part of Adobe Analytics Cloud, helping marketers expand their view of consumers and boost results through Tapad’s probabilistic solution. Tapad has been working closely with the Adobe Audience Manager team on this integration. With the Tapad Graph integration, customers based in the U.S. and Canada can use the Tapad Device Graph to expand the reach of audiences defined and activated in Adobe Audience Manager to extend first- and third-party data and deliver personalization across paid, earned and owned channels, publisher sites, programmatic, and more. Tapad worked closely with Adobe to develop the integration, allowing marketers to enable first-party data that has been previously tied to cookies and mobile. This offering has been beta-tested by leading organizations across retail, financial services, telecom providers, and more. Tapad has repeatedly proven its ability to provide marketers with a unified view of the customer across channels and screens. With the Tapad Graph, a global identity graph that currently supports more than 100 enterprise customers and 200 integration partners, marketers can extend their reach and customize messages based on user and household-level data. Contact us today
Marketers Can Now Harness The Tapad Graph In Concert With Twine’s Vetted, Verified TrueData™ Identity Graph. Los Angeles and New York – August 2, 2018 – Tapad, now part of Experian, is reinventing personalization for the modern marketer, today announced that it is partnering with mobile data leader Twine Data (now TrueData) to bring Twine’s hundreds of millions of deterministic mobile identity connections to The Tapad Graph. Together, the two companies will create one of the largest portable identity graph & CRM onboarding services in the U.S., through the integration of Tapad’s best in class cross-device capability and Twine’s deterministic identity graph. At the core of one-to-one marketing and true personalization is identity resolution. For marketers, the ability to accurately and safely connect customer activity across desktop/laptop, mobile, CTV, tablets, as well as CRM and offline touchpoints is ultimately what enables informed and personalized future conversations with each customer. Tapad is known for the precision, accuracy, and scale of their cross device connections, setting them up as an ideal partner for Twine’s TrueData deterministic identity graph. “We believe that by combining Tapad’s renowned cross-device connectivity and our deterministic identity graph, marketers will finally be able to seamlessly segment users based on digital and offline behaviors as well as easily distribute those audiences to both DMP and DSP environments for personalized messaging,” said Elliott Easterling, CEO of Twine Data. With this partnership, Tapad will build a client's cross-device graph off of identities onboarded by Twine from a client's offline CRM. The resulting identity graph can either be delivered directly to brands looking to host their own identity graph, or can be leveraged in a managed fashion for marketers looking for simple connectivity of their offline CRM audiences to their DSPs. To date, Twine & Tapad have seen full connectivity rates* for CRM segments from advertisers at between 259 percent and 322 percent at major DSPs. *Full Connectivity Rate is defined as {total unique desktop, laptop, and mobile devices active at DSP} / {unique CRM users in original audience post cleansing}. It represents the final match rate of the clean audience in CRM format to onboarded audience at a client’s DSP instance. This metric encompasses Twine’s onboarding & linkage validation and Tapad’s cross-device amplification. About TapadTapad, Inc. is the marketing technology company reinventing personalization for the modern marketer through its identity-driven solutions. The company's signature Tapad Graph connects millions of consumers across billions of devices. The world's largest brands and most effective marketers entrust Tapad to provide an accurate, privacy-conscious and unified approach to connecting with consumers across screens. In 2018, Tapad introduced its Tapad Customer Data Platform (CDP), purpose-built to offer marketers a highly personalized and privacy-safe platform to convert first-, second- and third-party data into actionable, results-driven campaigns. Tapad is based in New York and has offices in Chicago, London, Oslo, Singapore and Tokyo. Tapad's numerous awards include: Forbes' Most Promising Companies, Deloitte's Technology Fast 500, Crain's Fast 50, TMCnet Tech Culture Award and Global Startup Award's "Startup Founder of the Year." Tapad was acquired by the Telenor Group in 2016. Telenor Group is one of the world's largest mobile operators across Scandinavia and Asia. About TwineTwine is a mobile data platform that believes true, honest, accurate data is the fuel that helps our partners grow their businesses efficiently and effectively; Twine’s TrueData is used by brands, agencies, and ad tech partners across the country and across the globe. Twine’s app publisher partners generate revenue while maintaining control over their data; their marketer partners get comprehensive, high quality mobile targeting and intelligence. To learn more about Twine, visit their website. Contact us today