Is unconsented patient data blocking your marketing strategy?

Transcend gives CIOs, CMOs, and CPOs in healthcare and pharma the infrastructure they need to unify consent and preferences across complex data ecosystems—enabling safe personalization, stronger compliance, and faster digital transformation.

Enterprise healthcare companies are under growing pressure to deliver connected, personalized, and trusted experiences. But one blocker often goes overlooked: fragmented consent and preference data.

Patient health information lives in one system. Marketing data lives in another. Compliance records are held somewhere else entirely. Facing this fragmented architecture, even the most sophisticated healthcare organizations are struggling to answer a simple question: Can we actually use this data?

Without a clear yes, marketing slows down, personalization falls flat, and compliance risk rises. Worse than that, innovative AI, automation, and digital engagement initiatives stall before they start—blocked by uncertainty and lack of visibility.

This isn’t just a technical bottleneck. It’s a growth barrier.

Integrated consent and preference management addresses these issues by synchronizing patient consent and preferences choices across your ecosystem—from EHRs to CRMs to marketing platforms—giving every team a single source of truth. With the right foundation in place, healthcare organizations can unlock compliant data activation, drive smarter engagement, and innovate with confidence.

The health data duality

Every healthcare organization, pharmaceutical company, or enterprise collecting health data must manage two fundamentally different types of user data—each governed by distinct systems, teams, and regulations.

• Sensitive patient or member data: This includes medical histories, treatment plans, and insurance information. It’s governed by strict regulatory frameworks like HIPAA and typically lives in platforms like Salesforce Health Cloud, EHRs, or systems like Veeva.
• Marketing and prospect data: This includes behavioral signals, campaign engagement, and lead profiles. Used for outreach, education, and brand-building, it’s usually housed in CRMs, marketing clouds, and data warehouses.

The challenge healthcare marketing, security, and privacy leaders face is that these two data ecosystems rarely communicate. Consent and preference signals (how, when, and why a consumer wants to be contacted) are often stored in fragmented systems, if they’re captured at all.

As a result, there’s no unified source of truth for consent data. One team might interpret a patient’s opt-in as a green light for outreach, while another sees ambiguity and risk. That disconnect leads to broken digital experiences, delayed campaigns, and increased exposure to regulatory action.

Plus, without a synchronized view of consent, there’s no safe or scalable path to personalization. And for healthcare enterprises looking to responsibly adopt AI and automation, that fragmentation is more than an inconvenience—it’s a fundamental blocker of business growth.

What’s at risk for health and pharma enterprises

When consent and preference data is fragmented, even the most well-resourced healthcare organizations encounter critical breakdowns across compliance, personalization, and patient trust:

• Compliance gaps: Without a unified system of record, there’s no way to guarantee that consent choices travel upstream with the data. This leads to scenarios where sensitive patient or member information is mistakenly activated in marketing systems—without the proper permissions or legal basis. These aren’t just operational slip-ups, they’re serious liabilities that can trigger audits, fines, and brand damage.
• Broken personalization: Teams want to tailor experiences across patient journeys, but without reliable consent signals, they can’t confidently segment, target, or message users. Marketing slows down, outreach becomes generic, and attempts at personalization start to feel invasive rather than helpful.
• Fractured trust: When people receive duplicate messages, irrelevant offers, or conflicting communications across channels, they lose faith in your brand. Worse, some may not receive essential health updates or plan information at all—eroding confidence and increasing churn risk.

This isn’t just a theoretical concern. These issues are playing out today inside some of the world’s most advanced healthcare organizations. As systems grow more complex and AI-powered engagement becomes the norm, the risks of getting consent wrong only multiply.

Fragmented consent and preference data is an industry-wide problem

The challenge of fragmented consent and preference data isn’t isolated. It cuts across the entire healthcare landscape, impacting any company that collects and handles health data. For example:

• Pharmaceutical companies must engage multiple audiences—from patients navigating conditions to healthcare professionals evaluating treatments. But consent often lives in entirely separate systems for each group, creating inconsistent experiences and increasing compliance risk.
• Hospital and health systems need to strike a delicate balance: safeguarding PHI under HIPAA while still delivering relevant, timely messaging to both new and returning patients. Fragmented consent makes it difficult to ensure the right communications are delivered at the right time, without overstepping privacy boundaries.
• Insurance companies rely on personalized member communications to drive wellness engagement, open enrollment participation, and plan education. But siloed consent data makes it difficult to coordinate outreach across web, mobile, and in-person channels.
• Medical device companies must manage vastly different consent expectations between healthcare providers and end users. Healthcare providers expect educational and promotional content tailored to their practice, while consumers need usage support, recall information, and safety alerts.
• Integrated healthcare giants like CVS Health and Kaiser Permanente operate across a complex mix of care delivery, pharmacy, insurance, and retail. With consent and preference data fractured across lines of business and systems of record, they lack a cohesive way to orchestrate communication—losing critical opportunities to unify and personalize the consumer experience.

Across healthcare and pharma, fragmented consent and preference data has become a structural barrier to progress. Whether it’s a global pharma company, a regional health system, or a vertically integrated insurer, the inability to unify consent across audiences, platforms, and regulations is holding the entire industry back.

Consent is the foundation for personalization and growth

Too often, consent is treated as a checkbox—something captured once, stored somewhere, and forgotten until there’s an issue. But that perspective misses the real opportunity: consent isn’t a just form, it’s critical infrastructure for business success.

When implemented properly, consent becomes the connective tissue between privacy, personalization, and performance. It’s allows organizations that handle health data to activate it responsibly, scale engagement, and move faster with confidence.

A unified, systems-level consent and preference layer unlocks:

• Safe personalization: With a clear, up-to-date understanding of each person’s preferences and permissions, you know exactly what data you can use and how. That means fewer manual reviews, fewer delays, and more tailored, trust-based experiences.
• Real-time orchestration: Consent signals flow automatically across your ecosystem, from Salesforce Health Cloud and SFMC to Adobe Experience Platform, Snowflake, and beyond. No more silos. No more guessing. Just clean, compliant activation across tools and teams.
• Smarter outreach: Confidently segment audiences, suppress users where required, and personalize messages based on real preferences. You build trust in every interaction, because you’re communicating on the consumer’s terms—not just your own.
• AI readiness: As healthcare teams explore AI-powered engagement and predictive modeling, consent becomes even more critical. A centralized layer helps you understand what datasets are cleared for training, which require additional permissions, and how to stay within evolving regulatory boundaries.

When consent is automated and enforced at the systems layer, you eliminate the ambiguity that slows teams down—opening the door to faster, more trusted growth.

How Transcend can help

Transcend is the privacy infrastructure for growth. We help healthcare leaders unify, automate, and operationalize consent and preference management across every part of the tech stack—so you can deliver personalized, compliant experiences at scale.

With Transcend, you can:

• Orchestrate consent across all systems and teams: Sync preferences seamlessly across patient platforms like Salesforce Health Cloud and EHRs, as well as marketing, data, and analytics tools like Adobe, Snowflake, Braze, and more.
• Centralize user preferences in real time: Give every system access to the same source of truth. Whether a user updates preferences on a website, call center, or portal, Transcend propagates those updates across your stack instantly.
• Automate compliance enforcement: From HIPAA to GDPR to emerging state privacy laws, Transcend helps you stay ahead of regulations—enforcing policy at the data layer, without slowing teams down.
• Support modern use cases like AI consent ops, zero data retention, and opt-down experiences: Whether you're refining personalization, building AI workflows, or redesigning your preference center, Transcend gives you the infrastructure you need to execute quickly.

Whether you're onboarding new members, launching a multichannel campaign, or modernizing your privacy stack, Transcend gives you the confidence to move fast and the foundation to grow responsibly.