Healthcare Marketing
Compliance & Privacy Approach
Our commitment to compliant, responsible healthcare marketing.
This isn't a checkbox. It's how we protect our clients.
Regulatory consequences in healthcare can include College discipline, Health Canada enforcement action, and significant financial penalties under Canada's privacy and anti-spam legislation.
We've invested in understanding these rules because our clients' reputations depend on the work we produce. Every piece of content we create for a healthcare client goes through a compliance review before it reaches the client for approval.
The regulatory landscape for Canadian healthcare marketing.
Advertising standards set by provincial Colleges
These standards prohibit patient testimonials, outcome guarantees, inducements such as discounts or contests, and misleading claims about credentials or outcomes. They require that physicians review and approve all advertising done on their behalf, including work done by a marketing agency.
We treat these standards as a primary constraint on every campaign for a regulated provider. Before writing a line of copy, we review the applicable College standards for the province the client operates in. Before anything goes live, the client reviews and approves it in writing.
Health Canada advertising regulations
The most significant rule for consumer-facing marketing: direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs that names a product and describes a therapeutic use is not permitted in Canada. This is a hard prohibition with no exceptions for creative framing or platform.
What is permitted is narrower: reminder advertising (brand name only), disease-awareness advertising (no product named), and advertising to healthcare professionals with full product claims. Natural health products and over-the-counter drugs may be advertised to consumers within approved indications. Medical devices may be advertised within authorized uses.
We build these distinctions into every pharma and device campaign from the outset. We do not produce consumer-facing prescription drug advertising that names a product alongside its therapeutic use.
Privacy legislation: PIPEDA, Alberta PIPA, and the Health Information Act
PIPEDA (the federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act) governs the cross-provincial flow of personal information. It requires meaningful consent before health information is used for marketing, and mandates breach notification when personal information is compromised.
Alberta PIPA (the Personal Information Protection Act) applies to our intra-provincial activities. Like PIPEDA, it requires express consent for the use of sensitive personal information including health data, and gives the OIPC binding order-making power.
Alberta's Health Information Act (HIA) is the most demanding framework. Any agency working under contract with an HIA custodian, a physician, pharmacist, hospital, or other designated health professional, is classified as an affiliate under the Act and is directly subject to its requirements. Where health information is involved, we require an Information Manager Agreement before any data is shared with us. The HIA makes it a specific offence to use individually identifiable health information for commercial marketing without the patient's explicit consent. The maximum penalty is $1,000,000.
We do not accept health data from custodian clients without a signed Information Manager Agreement in place.
CASL — Canada Anti-Spam Legislation
That means documented consent (express or implied, with tracked expiry dates), clear sender identification in every message, and a functional unsubscribe mechanism processed within 10 business days.
Healthcare is not exempt from CASL. Appointment reminders are generally exempt, but any message that promotes services, introduces new offerings, or encourages a commercial response is a commercial electronic message subject to full compliance requirements.
We manage consent tracking for all email campaigns we operate, and we require clients to provide documented consent records before deploying any campaign to an existing list.
Our operational commitments
We don't just know the rules, we've built our internal operations around them.
Every client engagement involving health data begins with the appropriate data handling agreement before any information is shared. Our campaign workflows include a mandatory compliance review at the creative stage before launch. Staff involved in healthcare accounts receive training on applicable privacy and advertising regulations.
For clients we work with as a full agency of record, we build ongoing compliance monitoring into the relationship, reviewing new campaigns as regulations evolve, flagging changes in College standards that may affect existing content, and maintaining documentation for the full term of the engagement.
What we ask of our clients
Compliance is a shared responsibility. We do our part and we ask our clients to do theirs.
Before a healthcare engagement begins, we ask clients to provide accurate information about their regulatory environment: which College governs them, what their practice permits cover, what consent documentation exists for any patient contact lists, and whether any advertising involves prescription drugs or regulated devices.
During the engagement, we ask physician and clinic clients to review all advertising before publication and to maintain that review as a matter of their own College obligations. We make that process as straightforward as possible, but it is a step we will not skip.
