If you’re anything like me, you have familiarized yourself with TransUnion over your obsession with checking your credit report, but now it looks like the credit reporting company is taking its talents in a new direction, healthcare marketing.
TransUnion recently announced a partnership with Datavant, the industry’s most trusted health data connectivity solution. Datavant’s irreversible, encrypted “tokens” will help TransUnion match de-identified patient demographic data with healthcare clients’ first-party and licensed third-party data.
We spoke with Michael Schoen, EVP of Marketing Solutions, TransUnion, about what the health ecosystem can expect and how this collaboration will affect healthcare publishers.
Yakira Young: Can you go into more detail about TransUnion’s new partnership with Datavant? 
Michael Schoen: In partnering with Datavant, TransUnion can now enable healthcare, pharma, and other brands to evaluate and optimize the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. The partnership will also allow Datavant’s ecosystem of partners to connect to demographic data available in TruAudience®, TransUnion’s comprehensive suite of solutions. For example, we see companies leveraging this partnership to measure the impact of marketing on prescription volumes in a HIPAA-compliant way and adjust their campaigns’ targeting and media channel mix to improve results.
YY: How does Datavant help organizations securely connect health data?
MS: Datavant works to reduce the friction of data sharing across the healthcare industry with technology that protects patients’ privacy while supporting the linkage of patient health records across datasets.
As mentioned, the company’s industry-leading software generates irreversible, encrypted tokens to enable TransUnion to match de-identified patient demographic data with healthcare clients’ first-party and licensed third-party data. This enables organizations to understand better, reach, and measure the effectiveness of campaigns to specific audiences.
The top 30 pharma brands use Datavant’s privacy-first data connectivity solutions, more than 2,000 hospitals and 15,000 clinics.
YY: What are de-identified patient insights and measurement solutions, and how are they useful for healthcare brands?
MS: TransUnion connects its demographic and lifestyle data to healthcare data, while Datavant software enables de-identification tools, which do not leverage personally identifiable information, to help customers protect patient privacy.
This integration will allow healthcare and pharmaceutical companies to improve outcomes across the full lifecycle of patient engagement, especially measurement of outreach effectiveness.
YY: How will TransUnion’s TruAudience marketing solutions benefit healthcare brands in this partnership?
MS: The U.S. healthcare and pharma industries are expected to spend nearly $18 billion dollars on digital advertising in 2023 alone. We’re enabling them to spend these dollars in the most effective way possible.
We can connect the dots between those consumers and physicians who may be exposed to campaign activity and those who are then writing prescriptions. It unlocks a much more granular view of marketing effectiveness in a privacy-safe way.
Beyond offering a measure of the ROI of outreach, the tool also allows for optimization.
Marketers can use it to fine-tune the channels used and personalize creative across audiences. TransUnion can leverage more granular-level data sets to fine-tune the optimization of marketing campaigns.
YY: Will patient privacy be protected while accessing health data?
MS: By working with Datavant and leveraging their tokenization technology, we can connect TransUnion’s consumer data in a de-identified and HIPAA-compliant way.
YY: How will this partnership impact health publishers such as Everyday Health and WebMD?
MS: TransUnion can now bring real-world data and its end-to-end marketing solutions to publishers. With TransUnion’s measurement solutions, healthcare and pharma companies will also gain more insight into which health publishers impact their campaigns most.
YY: Will health publishers have access to the de-identified patient insights and measurement solutions?
MS: Yes, Datavant’s healthcare data tokenization software can be utilized to implement TransUnion’s TruAudience marketing solutions across companies in the healthcare ecosystem.
YY: How can health publishers use this partnership to improve their content and services?
MS: Health publishers can now leverage this partnership to combine real-world data with TransUnion’s consumer insights, allowing publishers to tailor content and services around the most up-to-date demands and interests of consumers.
YY: What are the potential benefits for patients in this partnership?
MS: This partnership enables patient data to be used responsibly, as the tokens used are encrypted and irreversible, thus minimizing the risk of re-identification. In addition, this data will be used to improve aggregate patient outcomes.