TransUnion Expands Partnership With Datavant As It Moves More Deeply Into Healthcare Marketing

TransUnion, a company best known for its credit reports, is expanding its partnership with health data company Datavant to deepen its focus on healthcare marketing.

As part of the partnership announced this week, Datavant will provide irrevocable cryptographic tokens to allow TransUnion to match anonymized patient demographic data with licensed third-party healthcare customer data.

One goal is to help the pharmaceutical industry and other advertisers alike see how their marketing efforts are impacting prescriptions for HIPAA compliance, said Michael Schoen, executive vice president and general manager of TransUnion Marketing Solutions.

"By working with Datavant and using their tokenization technology, which does not use personally identifiable information, we will be able to connect TransUnion consumer data in an authenticated way," said Schoen. "We can combine TransUnion's data with any first-hand information HCP may have to provide new consumer insights that weren't previously available."

Historically, TransUnion's largest business has been the consumer credit bureau. Through previous acquisitions such as Tru Optik and Signal, it has invested more heavily in identity and consumer insights for marketing, which has been largely confined to the media and entertainment verticals.

The company's $3 billion acquisition of Neustar in 2021 expands its reach in the marketing space to include healthcare among its many other verticals.

"Neustar has experience in healthcare, particularly providing marketing solutions for some of the largest hospital groups," recalls Schoen, who was part of Neustar's legacy team prior to joining TransUnion.

The partnership with Datavant allows TransUnion to leverage the Neustar acquisition to expand its healthcare offering. Datavant counts among its customers 30 of the largest pharmaceutical brands and more than 2,000 hospitals and 15,000 clinics.

Datavant Partners will be able to connect to demographic data available in TransUnion's suite of tools called TruAudience. In February, TransUnion rebranded its B2B tools under the "Tru" umbrella to make it easier for customers across a variety of industries to navigate its product portfolio.

The existing concepts fall into two areas.

First, by combining TransUnion's consumer demographic and psychographic information with healthcare organization data to understand how consumers interact with the brand, Schoen said.

The second area is based on leaving TransUnion, as it integrates with the media ecosystem to see which channels this audience segment is exposed to.

TransUnion is a market leader in multi-layered attribution, with partnerships across major media players, from addressable TV to social media, said Schoen.

When pharmaceutical companies partner with third-party healthcare providers who have prescription or claims information, that data is accessed through Datavant to ensure it is anonymized and then overlaps with TransUnion consumer data.

"We can connect consumers who may be affected by campaign activity and doctors, then write prescriptions," said Schoen. "So it opens up a much more detailed view of marketing effectiveness while respecting privacy."

As well as providing a benchmark ROI for publications, this tool also enables optimization. Marketers will be able to use it to fine-tune the channels used and personalize creatives for viewers, he added.

"We can now use more accurate data sets to fine-tune marketing campaign optimization," said Schoen. "I am excited about the increased effectiveness marketing campaigns can bring to this industry."