HIPAA-compliant marketing platform Ours Privacy lands $15M amid growing pixel concerns

Ours Privacy, a HIPAA-compliant marketing and data infrastructure platform, has secured $15 million in a highly successful series A funding round. This full-stack solution is specifically designed with healthcare privacy in mind, integrating with various data sources to clean and transmit protected health information (PHI) to third parties. The company's core offering, a customer data platform, can be paired with additional tools for consent management, A/B testing, and web analytics.

The $15 million funding round was led by Lightbank and Health Velocity Capital, with additional support from Rock Health, Lakehouse, TMV, Switch Ventures, Serena Ventures, GreyMatter, and more. Eric Ong, partner at Lightbank, stated that the company's comprehensive growth stack was a significant selling point for their investment.

The Office for Civil Rights has issued guidance regarding HIPAA compliance and tracking technologies like pixels. This applies to sharing PHI with third parties for marketing purposes. Pixels, which track user behavior, have raised concerns in the healthcare sector, as many organizations have faced penalties for violating privacy laws.

For instance, Hims & Hers recently faced a joint lawsuit from the FTC, California, and Utah for sharing consumers' health information with third parties, including Meta, Snap, and other entities.

Ours Privacy's co-founders encountered this challenge while running a telehealth company, where they struggled to find a secure way to conduct marketing and analytics. They recognized that many organizations face this risk, and not having a pixel-type system in place can significantly increase patient and customer acquisition costs. The Ours Privacy platform helps healthcare organizations optimize ad campaigns without sharing PHI, as it only sends basic data necessary for such optimization, referred to as "signals."

The platform is currently working with over 200 providers, payers, and digital health companies, including multi-billion-dollar organizations. It ensures that customers can retain their insights while honoring patient choices in data sharing. By providing a centralized platform, Ours Privacy saves companies from having to manually stitch together multiple data sources, offering a valuable alternative to pixels.

The risks of careless tracking include HIPAA breaches, potential fines, lawsuits, and hacking threats, as well as the deeper issue of violating patient trust.