If you filed a fertility claim in the past two months and your insurance covers IVF, there’s a decent chance an IVF clinic is trying to reach you right now. And if you’ve been browsing plastic surgery options abroad, same deal: A medical tourism practice wants you in their target audience.
These are the types of sensitive segments that health care data platform Salubrum says it can build from a data lake of more than 300 million patient identities. Health care marketers operate under some of the strictest privacy rules in advertising, and they’re working with data that consumers, not to mention regulators, consider highly sensitive.
There’s a lot of health care data out there, according to Osama Usmani, Salubrum’s CEO and co-founder. The challenge, he said, particularly for smaller practices and independent providers, is that it’s difficult for them to “access it, interpret it or turn it into campaigns.”
Let’s take this show on the road
Salubrum partners with several health care data aggregators – though Usmani declined to say which ones – to help its clients obtain data they couldn’t otherwise access, like recent medical claims. But the company doesn’t receive any client-specific data, Usmani emphasized, such as individual medical records.
Rather, Salubrum sits on top of existing health care data infrastructure that contains aggregated, licensed and deidentified data and analyzes broader client patterns to determine the best audiences to target, Usmani said. The data is accessible through commercial licensing deals that are built on a health care platform’s own compliance framework, he added, and Salubrum looks at past campaigns and aggregate data to see which patient “cohorts” are likely to respond best to specific messaging.
Because, in addition to privacy concerns, health care providers face another targeting challenge, which is that they’re often selling a niche service “the majority of people are not going to be interested in,” said Alex Campbell, one of Salubrum’s clients and a partner and plastic surgeon at Premium Care Plastic Surgery.
Premium Care Plastic Surgery knows that challenge firsthand. It’s a medical tourism practice, meaning that most of its clients come from overseas to get treatment. The practice is based in Colombia and primarily targets Canadians and Americans who are seeking plastic surgery and are “sophisticated and proactive enough to look for options abroad,” Campbell said.
Plastic surgery can be very difficult to obtain in the US, not to mention expensive, he added. In Colombia, people can access the same services of “equal or better quality” but at a lower cost, he said. Premium Care Plastic Surgery emphasizes accessibility and low prices in its messaging, as well as the beauty of the practice’s location, tantalizing prospective clients with taglines like “recover in paradise.”
Still, people looking to travel internationally for private surgery make up a “very narrow” audience, Campbell said. “It’s challenging for us to advertise in general,” he added.
Seeing what sticks
Over the years, Campbell has worked with a number of marketing firms, some in the US and some in Colombia, that would help the practice develop and launch campaigns. But “even the most diligent ones” didn’t seem to affect the bottom line, he said. “We’ve always just kind of thrown money at it.”
Premium Care Plastic Surgery has been working with Salubrum for under a year, and the campaigns have only been live for a couple of months. It’s still too early to see results, said Campbell. “I don’t know whether it’s going to work or not.”
But he’s optimistic because of Salubrum’s emphasis on being data-driven and reaching specific customer profiles, including finding and targeting people who have already indicated interest in medical tourism.
For instance, one of its main audiences is mothers looking to lose weight post-pregnancy. (Premium Care Plastic Surgery calls this procedure a “mommy makeover.” AdExchanger, in the words of Bartleby the Scrivener, would prefer not to.)
Salubrum can surface the relevant data needed to build an audience of mothers who have recently looked up plastic surgery options.
To finish building out a campaign, Premium Care Plastic Surgery provides Salubrum with first-party data, including the age, sex, location and profession of previous patients, as well as which procedures they selected. It also provides Salubrum with the key messaging it wants to get across, like (the ageist, if comical) “don’t let the old guy in” for anti-aging procedures, or “get your body back” for the aforementioned “mommy makeovers.”
Most of Campbell’s marketing has been on Instagram, as well as “a little bit of TikTok and Google keywords,” he said, but he’s looking for other options. The platforms are “quite restrictive” around medical and pharmaceutical ads, he said, preventing Premium Care Plastic Surgery from advertising as widely as it wants to.
But he hopes that targeting people early in the discovery phase will drive more clients to Premium Care Plastic Surgery.
Rather than casting an overly wide net to generate new prospects, Campbell said, the goal is to just make it easier “to have them find us.”
