Healthcare advertising is the buying of ads for medicines, medical devices and health services, through platforms built to follow health-privacy laws. These platforms are used mainly in the United States, one of the few countries where drug makers may advertise prescription medicines directly to the public. Several of them are built partly by engineering teams in India.
A healthcare advertising platform is a kind of demand-side platform (DSP), the software that bids for ad space in automatic auctions. It reaches two audiences. The first is patients, or people who are likely to need a medicine. The second is health professionals, mainly doctors. Ads for doctors are usually about the evidence for a medicine: what it treats, how well it works and what side effects it has.
The difficulty is privacy. In the United States, a law called HIPAA protects the health information held by hospitals, clinics and insurers. A platform may not take a patient's records and aim ads at that patient by name. Instead, it uses de-identified data, which is data from which names and other identifiers have been removed. It bids for groups of people, never for named patients.
Consider a drug maker in the United States that sells a new medicine for type 2 diabetes. It gives the platform a budget of $500,000 for three months. For patients, the platform builds an audience of households that are likely to include someone with diabetes. It does this by matching de-identified prescription statistics with households in a data clean room, a sealed system in which two companies match their lists but neither sees the other's names. For doctors, it uses the National Provider Identifier, a public registry number that every US doctor has, which records the doctor's speciality. It bids for ad slots seen by diabetes specialists and general physicians. The bids go to an ad exchange, where the auctions run. Some ads reach doctors inside their prescription software, through point-of-care advertising.
After three months, the drug maker wants to know whether doctors who saw the ads wrote more prescriptions for the medicine. The platform compares de-identified prescription counts for those doctors with counts for similar doctors who did not see the ads.
India's rules are very different. In India, prescription medicines may not be advertised to the public, and drug makers may promote them only to doctors, under a code of marketing practice. So this kind of platform has a much smaller market in India, and the channel that reaches doctors matters most. Any personal data about patients in India, including health data, is covered by the DPDP Act, India's data protection law.