How a top healthcare system is unifying privacy and preferences across its digital ecosystem

To keep pace with growing regulatory pressure and digital complexity, this nationally recognized nonprofit healthcare system partnered with Transcend to modernize how it manages patient consent and communication preferences—laying a privacy foundation that empowers trust, personalization, and scale.

At a glance

• The customer: A nationally recognized, multi-entity healthcare system serving millions annually, this organization sits at the crossroads of clinical care, research, and education—with a complex tech stack that spans clinical, marketing, and administrative systems.
• The challenge: Consent and communication preferences were fragmented across marketing, clinical, and digital systems—creating operational inefficiencies and compliance risk, while throttling patient-first experiences, such as ensuring a patient’s communication, privacy, and treatment preferences are honored seamlessly across every interaction—whether booking an appointment online, receiving follow-up care, or engaging with digital health tools.
• Why they chose Transcend: Transcend delivered centralized privacy governance, advanced identity resolution, real-time consent enforcement, and seamless integrations with platforms like Adobe Experience Cloud and Google Cloud Platform. Every solution met the rigorous technical, legal, and risk standards required in healthcare.

The challenge: Disconnected consent systems slowed progress and increased risk

With evolving privacy laws like HIPAA and Washington’s My Health My Data Act and rising consumer expectations around digital engagement, this healthcare organization knew its current approach was unsustainable. Supporting millions of patients and caregivers across a large volume of web domains and mobile apps, the organization faced siloed consent and preference data across systems like AEP, GCP and multiple legacy and first party tools, making it difficult to deliver a compliant, personalized patient experience. They additionally had to navigate complex identities and relationships (e.g. patient, caregiver, households) and unique custom-purpose permissions (e.g. CanEmail, CanCallHome) critical to delivering thoughtful, patient-centric, communications.

This desire to unify consent data reflected a broader set of operational and strategic challenges:

• Decentralized permissions management: Opt-ins and communication permissions were scattered across disparate systems with no centralized system of record, creating inconsistencies, compliance risk, and patient confusion.
• Limited flexibility in digital communications: The existing system only supported basic opt-ins and opt-outs, with no way to capture more granular preferences—such as patient interests across the two dozen topics featured in their email marketing program. This lack of nuance limited both marketing precision and overall engagement effectiveness.
• Integration complexity: The organization’s complex enterprise architecture, layered on top of multiple cloud platforms and backend systems, created a sprawling technical environment. Integration gaps slowed innovation and introduced governance risks.
• Identity management gaps: Managing permissions across multiple roles (patients, caregivers, administrators) and account types (e.g., parent-child, duplicate profiles) required advanced identity resolution—something their legacy privacy management tool couldn’t support.
• Manual preference management: Without automation, teams were manually updating opt-in/out records across all their disparate systems, introducing risk, operational burden, and delayed responsiveness.

These issues weren’t just operational—they posed a direct threat to patient trust and regulatory readiness. Similar to other leading organizations going through large digital transformation efforts, teams across legal, marketing tech, enterprise IT, and privacy raised concerns that their current model would fail under pressure from growing data volumes and shifting regulation.

The need: Data permissioning infrastructure for a personalized, patient-first experience

For this healthcare leader, modernizing their consent program was critical to its mission of delivering personalized, compliant, patient-first experiences. The organization’s goal was to move from fragmented, error-prone privacy operations to a system built for adaptability, scale, and trust.

They sought a partner who could:

• Centralize consent and preference data across systems and brands into a single source of truth.
• Deliver seamless integrations with tools like Adobe Experience Platform, Google Cloud Platform, and Dynamics—without disrupting clinical or marketing workflows.
• Support dynamic policy management to enable tailored consent rules by state or data type (e.g., restricting collection in Texas, allowing in Kentucky).
• Empower patients and caregivers with user-friendly privacy centers to easily manage their own preferences across web and mobile and other digital touchpoints.
• Automate governance and compliance with real-time auditing, dynamic enforcement, and full coverage of HIPAA, CCPA, GDPR, and emerging state laws.

This was a cross-functional, strategically sensitive project—with stakeholders from legal, data governance, enterprise architecture, and information security all involved in evaluating potential vendors. The complexity of the technical landscape combined with the high stakes of healthcare data stewardship meant the selected solution had to meet a rigorous bar for security, interoperability, and long-term scalability.

Why Transcend: Platform for scale and trust, purpose built for healthcare

Following a formal and rigorous multi-vendor evaluation and proof-of-concept process, the organization selected Transcend as its consent and preference management partner. What set Transcend apart was not only its product depth, but its strategic fit with the institution’s privacy, compliance, and digital transformation priorities. Key decision drivers included:

• Centralized system of record: Transcend provided a unified source of truth for managing opt-ins, opt-outs, and nuanced preferences across patient, caregiver, and research audiences.
• Bi-directional integrations with critical platforms: Transcend’s out-of-the-box connectors supported seamless orchestration with AEP, GCP, and Dynamics. This addressed one of the organization’s most pressing challenges: interoperability.
• Dynamic policy and identity management: Transcend offered sophisticated controls for dynamic policy enforcement, plus proactive identity resolution across duplicate records and complex relationships (e.g., parent-child access).
• HIPAA-aligned zero-trust architecture: End-to-end encryption, robust data handling processes, and our unique security gateway, Sombra, passed the organization’s strict Third Party Risk Management (TPRM) review—including security certifications, risk assessments, and legal agreements. When self-hosted, Sombra ensures Transcend never has access to unencrypted data or your encryption keys, integrating with your key management systems (e.g., AWS KMS, HSMs) to maintain full control. This architecture accelerated internal security approvals and reinforced trust with compliance, legal, and security stakeholders.

Partner mindset and responsiveness: Transcend demonstrated deep alignment during the pre-sale phase—tailoring proposals, offering immediate access to technical resources, and collaborating transparently throughout the contracting, legal, and procurement process.

The path forward: A privacy-first foundation for engagement and growth

The organization is now standing up a centralized preference store across web and mobile, beginning with their cardiovascular research app and digital front door properties. Native preference UIs will empower patients and caregivers to self-manage communication choices, reducing support overhead and increasing user trust.

From here, Transcend will continue to help this organization mature their data governance program and mechanisms, including:

• Enabling automated, real-time enforcement of consent across patient touchpoints and data environments
• Providing real-time analytics and auditing to improve privacy decision-making and readiness
• Standing up a scalable foundation for advanced use cases like intelligent privacy signals and IP-based consent logic
• Expanding this governance structure across the system’s affiliated entities to support growing digital engagement efforts

By choosing Transcend, this leading healthcare system is setting a new standard—not just for compliance, but for how privacy can power deeper relationships, personalized care, and system-wide digital transformation.