Maximizing Marketing Performance Under HIPAA: BU Dental’s Success Story with Freshpaint

Marketing teams at healthcare organizations are facing intense pressure. With shrinking budgets and rising expectations, they’re being asked to do more with less, all while navigating complex privacy regulations like HIPAA. 

For Boston University’s Henry M. Goldman School of Dental Medicine (BU Dental), this pressure reached a critical point when The University’s compliance team notified them that their analytics tracking tool was being shut off overnight—potentially crippling their marketing efforts.

BU Dental is not only a leading institution in dental education but also operates a 100-chair predoctoral educational clinic, six postdoctoral specialty clinics, and a multi-disciplinary group practice serving over 22,000 patients each year. Their marketing team is responsible for driving new patient leads through digital marketing, all while ensuring HIPAA compliance.

Rather than back down, BU Dental’s Assistant Director of Marketing, Julie Elias, embraced the challenge, determined to find a solution that would allow them to continue reaching their audience while maintaining strict privacy compliance.

Challenge: Balancing HIPAA regulations while maintaining effective marketing

New federal guidance on HIPAA regulations, compounded by lawsuits involving other healthcare providers, pushed the University’s compliance team to shut off BU Dental’s analytics tracking tools. 

This move severely restricted BU Dental's ability to track the patient journey and share conversion event data with Google Ads and Meta—tools essential for optimizing campaign performance. 

Without the ability to track conversions or optimize ads, BU Dental risked skyrocketing costs and a significant drop in effectiveness, all while needing to meet patient acquisition and accreditation goals on a limited nonprofit budget.

Journey: Searching for a compliant solution

BU Dental needed a solution that would allow them to keep using the tools they were familiar with, while staying compliant with strict HIPAA regulations. The first solution they came across would only have solved the Google Analytics compliance challenge and would not have helped with Google Ads, meaning their ad costs would still be out of control because they wouldn’t be able to share conversion data with Google Ads.

Elias explains, “We explored a potential solution to replace Google Analytics altogether. But it wouldn't have replaced Google Ads, and it would have required me to learn a whole new platform. Meaning we'd no longer use the industry standard and waste the training that I had gotten over the years on Google Analytics.”

"Freshpaint was built for this exact problem."

When Julie and her team came across Freshpaint, it was clear to her from the first meeting that Freshpaint was the right solution.

“Freshpaint was built for this exact problem,” Elias states. “They understand HIPAA as well as our own compliance team and could explain what data was safe to share with advertising platforms. That gave us a lot of confidence moving forward.”

That initial meeting made it obvious that Freshpaint knew healthcare and understood the problems BU Dental was dealing with, making choosing Freshpaint an easy decision.

Results: Efficient marketing with full compliance

With Freshpaint’s Healthcare Privacy Platform in place, BU Dental was able to restore their digital marketing efforts, seeing immediate and impactful results.

"Since implementing Freshpaint, we've seen a significant reduction in cost per conversion for both our implants and dentures campaigns. Pre-Freshpaint, we were paying about $13 per conversion for implants, but now it's down to around $9 with Freshpaint—a significant decrease."

And the positive results didn't end there. Freshpaint has also impacted:

• Lower Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): The CPA for key services like dental implants dropped from $13 to $9, a 30% reduction in costs. Freshpaint made it possible for BU Dental to continue sharing data with Google Ads in a HIPAA-compliant way to help drive this CPA reduction. Without Freshpaint, BU Dental would have been forced to stop sharing data, sending their CPA in the wrong direction, as Google Ads wouldn’t have had the data needed to optimize targeting.
• Increased Conversion Rates: Conversion rates for Google Ads campaigns improved, even with reduced ad spend, helping BU Dental meet its patient intake goals while working within a constrained nonprofit budget. Freshpaint ensured that BU Dental could continue using Google Ads in a HIPAA-compliant way. Without Freshpaint, the team would have been unable to share data with Google, leading to higher costs and reduced campaign effectiveness.
• Improved Meta Campaign Performance: Freshpaint’s ability to integrate with Meta’s Conversion API allowed BU Dental to create custom conversions, improving click-through rates and impressions for their Meta campaigns.
• HIPAA-compliant Google Analytics: With Freshpaint, BU Dental did not have to switch to a new analytics platform. They’re able to continue using tools they know and have invested in, like Google Analytics, while maintaining HIPAA compliance.

Freshpaint delivered exactly what BU Dental needed: a HIPAA-compliant solution that allowed them to continue using Google Analytics, Google Ads and Meta Ads, ensuring that only minimal, anonymized data was shared. This enabled the dental clinic to keep its advertising efforts on track while protecting patient privacy.

Maximizing performance while maintaining compliance

Freshpaint has been instrumental in positioning BU Dental for success in a challenging landscape. “Freshpaint has allowed us to build on the momentum that we had by making our successful campaigns more successful. We’re seeing our Cost Per Acquisition going down, seeing our conversion rates going up, but doing so in a way where we know we're maintaining compliance with HIPAA. And we're doing right by our patients,” Julie explains.

“Without Freshpaint, we wouldn't be able to run digital marketing.”

Thanks to Freshpaint, BU Dental has continued to thrive in an increasingly challenging landscape, delivering effective campaigns while ensuring both patient privacy and HIPAA compliance. As Julie notes, “Without Freshpaint, we wouldn't be able to run digital marketing.” 

Freshpaint’s Healthcare Privacy Platform has not only allowed BU Dental to maintain their marketing effectiveness but has also positioned them to grow stronger, with results that prove both compliance and performance can go hand in hand.