A key challenge for all marketers today is finding digital audiences as media consumption continues to become increasingly fragmented. This is no different for healthcare marketers, who are frequently looking to reach highly specific individuals, who are interested in or have specific conditions; no matter how small or niche the population, and in a manner that is compliant with strict privacy standards.

There’s no doubt that the growth of programmatic is the ad industry’s biggest success story of the past 10 years and has exponentially advanced marketers’ ability to efficiently and effectively make connections with their consumers. But it’s only been in recent years that the programmatic industry has begun to address the needs of healthcare marketers, offering them new ways of programmatically buying digital inventory with confidence, safeguarding the growth of digital marketing healthcare dollars.

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The Programmatic Opportunity for Healthcare

In 2018, programmatic health technology advanced healthcare marketers’ ability to efficiently and effectively make connections with specific individuals, by understanding and actioning their real-world digital behaviors – to creatively and effectively target consumers during specific life events.

As healthcare marketers shifted budgets to automated digital media buys, efficient and effective ways to connect with both direct to consumer (DTC) and health care professional (HCP) audiences have been established. This also presents an open-field opportunity for digital publishers to capture new dollars entering into the market, with eCPMs 3x higher than other verticals.

Accurate targeting equates to spend efficiency. And when people have questions about their health, they look online for answers, spending more time engaging with health content than any other vertical.

How a “Programmatic” Approach Can Fix Our Healthcare System

By reinventing programmatic for health and addressing each issue from the ground up, programmatic health technology looks as its own animal, inspiring trust and opening possibilities. Like with Amazon’s recommendation engine, having this approach can help stewards of healthcare to extend their reach to the right people at the right time. Nowhere is this more important than the healthcare vertical, where getting a consumer the right information can be life changing.

The potential for programmatic to transform our healthcare system is tremendous. This approach and mindset force us to consolidate our data, learn from it, systematize it, and create transparency throughout the health demand and supply chains. The impact is incredibly important: providers can treat patients holistically, patients can act proactively and payors can manage demand and supply in a less wasteful way.

By harnessing the power of programmatic health technology and translating information into insights, we can connect with patients and providers in a way we never thought possible. Targeted advertising is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the power and impact this technology holds.

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