Twilio Segment’s Data Graph, Linked Audiences, and Linked Events are now HIPAA Eligible services. This means that healthcare organizations can now unlock rich patient personalization by integrating the health data stored in their data warehouse with the real-time data stored in the Segment CDP.
Please note that this post merely provides an overview of possible uses of Twilio Segment and is not considered legal advice or methods of compliance with HIPAA. It should not be taken or used as legal advice about the security, protection and use of data for Marketing or Advertising in healthcare or in compliance with HIPAA. You should consult your legal and/or security experts as needed before implementing solutions for any use cases.
Digital-forward healthcare organizations have used HIPAA-compliant warehouses to store and run analysis on collected health data for years. But most still haven’t been able to leverage this wealth of information for on-demand and contextual communication needs.
That’s why we’re excited to announce Twilio Segment’s Data Graph, Linked Audiences and Linked Events are now HIPAA Eligible Services!
With these new releases, healthcare organizations can now unlock rich patient or member personalization by seamlessly integrating health data stored in the warehouse with the real-time data stored in Segment Customer Data Platform (CDP). Because these features are built on zero-copy architecture, the underlying source data is never copied into Segment, only the results of your query.
Whether you’re starting your data activation journey with Segment, or prefer to leverage your existing warehouse, like Snowflake and Databricks, healthcare organizations now have the flexibility to embrace a more secure and efficient approach to empower marketers and data teams alike.
What does this look like in practice? Let’s take a Healthcare Provider (HCP) using a traditional martech platform—the information available to target patients would be limited to information collected from their website or mobile app.
Using Segment’s zero-copy architecture, the HCP could link together relational information stored in the warehouse like “appointment”, “medical history”, “treatment plans”, “prescriptions”, “surveys”, or “payer benefits” back to a real-time patient profile in Segment.
For data teams, this means they can build a multidimensional data graph linking profiles in Segment (which is a collection of specific data you gathered about your patients) with any related data set in the warehouse, for self-service access across business teams.
For business teams, they can leverage Segment’s easy to use, no-code builder to create complex audience segments that support more personalized care, foster stronger patient connections, and optimize communications ROI.
A Data Graph defines and abstracts complex relationships between your rich data set stored in warehouses with real-time user profiles in Segment Unify once, minimizing the need to instrument Segment events that may redundantly store the same data within the Segment ecosystem. Data Graph empowers you with:
Enhanced data security: By leveraging a zero-copy approach, all computations are executed directly within the warehouse. The warehouse remains the single source of truth for all data, allowing for a more robust governance and controlled access.
Accelerated team efficiency and campaign ROI: Data teams only need to define relationships between complex datasets once and enable marketers and business stakeholders with easy, instant access to the data in the warehouse. This helps accelerate their effort for personalized communications and eliminates the need to wait for data teams and engineers to extract fresh data each time.
Critical context for enhanced personalization: Preserve the rich context of how each entity relates to a profile and enable a more precise personalization through deeper audience targeting. Unlike traditional communication or marketing tools that struggle with complex data structures, our approach handles these intricacies to unlock advanced targeting capabilities.
With the Data Graph in place, business teams can then leverage the no-code builder to create advanced hyper-segmented audiences with these relationships. Linked Audiences enables you to understand not just who is in the Audience, but also why (the context), making it easier to personalize targeting in your downstream tools.
For example, by leveraging patient IDs stored in Segment with additional context stored in the warehouse, like a patient’s last annual check-up and preferred PCP, you can create a Linked Audience to trigger a communication campaign that:
Reminds patients to book an appointment for their annual wellness visit
With their preferred PCP
If their last annual exam was 365 days ago
The beauty of Linked Audiences is that your marketers can easily build new campaigns leveraging the same Data Graph, defined once by your data teams. In this example, they could quickly spin up a campaign that:
Nudges members in a specified care plan
That are turning or recently have turned 55
To discuss the need and benefits of a Colorectal Screening test with their PCP
Using Linked Events, you can also enrich real-time event streams to downstream applications with additional context from your warehouse.
For example, when a patient completes a visit, you can enrich the event with additional payer or provider details to personalize a post-appointment survey, for more meaningful and detailed feedback.
At Twilio Segment, we’re enabling a world where healthcare is smarter, more intuitive, and patient-centered. One where patients receive timely updates about expiring benefits covered by their insurer, or prescription refill reminders, annual wellness visits, preventive care journeys, and more.
By combining warehouse data with Segment’s HIPAA-eligible CDP, healthcare organizations can achieve unprecedented potential across several use cases, including customer acquisition, personalization, and retention.
If you’re interested in learning more about Segment’s Data Graph, Linked Events, or Linked Audiences—check out our documentation, or request a demo to see how you can get started today!
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