Understanding how routine digital features can unintentionally shape privacy risk in healthcare
Two Indiana healthcare providers, Goshen Health System and Hancock Regional Hospital, recently reached settlements tied to the use of website tracking technologies, including Meta Pixel. Neither organization admitted to any deliberate misconduct, emphasizing that the settlement is done to avoid the cost and disruption of continued litigation.
This incident is just one of the many cases demonstrating the broader truth in healthcare today: risk emerges not from a security failure, but from tools meant to support the patient experience.
This is a shared industry challenge, and one that more providers are beginning to recognize.
How routine tracking tools became a point of scrutiny
Between 2020 and 2023, patients accessed the Goshen and Hancock patient portals while various tracking technologies were active on those sites.
The lawsuits claimed that these tools may have sent identifiable or health-related information to external platforms such as Meta, not through malicious intent but as part of standard tracking practices for marketing and analytics.
The outcomes are consistent with many pixel-related cases nationwide, reflecting how the definition of “data exposure” continues to evolve.
A shift in how privacy risk is being defined
Healthcare security has traditionally focused on breaches caused by attackers. But regulators and courts are increasingly examining whether data leaves an organization in ways patients never agreed to — even if the intent behind the technology was benign.
That scrutiny now includes:
- analytics tags,
- user-experience tools,
- social media pixels,
- embedded schedulers,
- and chat plug-ins.
Many of these tools were never built with HIPAA-level protections in mind. Yet they’ve become standard features in modern patient portals and digital care pathways.
The message is clear: improving digital experience must be paired with deeper visibility into how those tools behave.
Why these situations keep emerging
Healthcare has made tremendous strides in digital access. Patients can schedule appointments, message clinicians, access test results, and manage care plans with unprecedented convenience.
But every improvement introduces additional client-side activity — the part of the digital experience that runs inside a user’s browser and interacts with dozens of third-party scripts.
Here’s where challenges arise:
- These tools evolve automatically over time.
- Behavior can change with updates, new features, or vendor-side modifications.
- Data sharing isn’t always obvious to IT or compliance teams.
- Manual reviews often miss what happens in real-time during patient interactions.
Oftentimes, the cause is not negligence, but the growing complexity of digital healthcare. This is exactly why healthcare providers everywhere are reassessing how they monitor the client-side.
Where healthcare providers benefit from sharper visibility
The Goshen and Hancock cases show how quickly routine digital tools can become part of a legal or regulatory conversation. But they also reveal opportunities for providers to strengthen oversight before risks emerge.
Key areas include:
1. Understanding data flow before deployment
Reviewing how pixels, tags, and scripts behave, not just what they are labeled to do.
2. Coordinating across departments
Marketing, IT, and compliance often each see only part of the story; shared visibility aligns the full picture.
3. Watching for changes over time
Client-side environments shift daily as tools update themselves. Periodic audits can’t keep up.
4. Validating configurations regularly
Ensuring tools don’t transmit identifiers or PHI as campaign strategies and site layouts change.
5. Maintaining a clear record of historical configurations
Past decisions can resurface years later — exactly as seen in these settlements.
Where AI helps close the gaps
The scale and speed of client-side changes make manual monitoring nearly impossible. That’s where continuous AI-driven monitoring becomes invaluable.
AI can:
- detect new or unexpected data flows as they appear,
- flag when a tool begins sending data to an unfamiliar domain,
- identify behavioral shifts after updates,
- and learn the normal patterns of a site to surface true anomalies.
In practice, AI gives teams a real-time window into the browser environment, a place where traditional security tools often fall short.
Practical ways healthcare providers can build digital trust
1. Create a complete map of third-party tools
Know every script running on your patient-facing sites, including inherited or legacy code.
2. Validate each tool’s data behavior, not just its purpose
What a script says it does is not always what it actually does.
3. Embed privacy checks into marketing workflows
Pixels and tags are no longer “just marketing tools.” They are now part of the bigger privacy picture.
4. Automate client-side scanning where possible
Modern sites change constantly; automation minimizes human errors and speeds up the process.
5. Communicate clearly with patients
Transparency builds trust, especially when digital tools play a larger role in patient care.
A pivotal period for healthcare
The Goshen and Hancock cases aren’t isolated; they’re part of a nationwide, if not global trend. As healthcare becomes increasingly digital, organizations are discovering that some of today’s most important privacy risks don’t look like traditional security issues at all.
They come from everyday tools, familiar platforms, and interfaces designed to make healthcare more accessible. This doesn’t make these tools bad. It makes the environment more dynamic, in turn, making full visibility more essential.
Modern healthcare depends on digital trust. And trust grows strongest when organizations can see exactly what happens on the client side, where patient data intersects with the tools that shape their experience.
