The Ultimate Guide to Healthcare CMPs: Compliance & Performance

This guide was created for marketing, IT, and compliance leaders navigating the complex reality of privacy-first marketing in healthcare. We examine CMPs through a dual lens:

Privacy & Compliance Utility – the extent to which the tool enforces consent, supports HIPAA compliance, and provides auditability.

Performance Utility – how well the tool supports marketing operations through data orchestration, personalization, and patient engagement enablement.

We also include a 2×2 matrix that maps the most prominent CMPs by their relative strengths in each dimension. You’ll see where the vendors cluster, which tools offer composability, and what tradeoffs are involved.

What Is a CMP?

A Consent Management Platform (CMP) is a purpose-built privacy tool designed to help organizations collect, manage, and enforce user consent across digital properties, including websites, mobile apps, and patient portals. In healthcare, CMPs serve as the front line of privacy enforcement, ensuring that user preferences are captured and respected in accordance with HIPAA, CPRA, and other evolving privacy laws.

Wheelhouse Insight

Most CMPs are deployed as compliance checkboxes. But without enforcement, synchronization, and system integration, they create a false sense of security and can mask significant liability.

A healthcare-grade CMP does much more than display a banner, it:

• Blocks tracking scripts until proper consent is received
• Logs consent preferences and responses in an auditable format
• Synchronizes user preferences across platforms like CDPs, CRMs, analytics tools, and EHRs
• Supports multi-channel consent across web, app, SMS, and email environments

In a healthcare context, CMPs help operationalize consent as infrastructure, ensuring that no system collects or shares PHI without explicit, traceable permission.

Why CMPs Matter in Healthcare

Healthcare organizations operate under some of the strictest privacy regulations in the world. Federal rules like HIPAA, enforcement guidance from the FTC, and state laws such as CPRA and even Washington State’s My Health My Data Act, have converged to form a regulatory environment where any unauthorized disclosure of patient data can trigger significant penalties. Recent enforcement actions, including a $1.55M CCPA fine against Healthline, underscore the risk of relying on CMPs that do not enforce consent, particularly when sensitive information (such as article titles suggesting medical conditions) is shared without proper controls.

The stakes are especially high in healthcare because of the nature of the data involved. When patient interactions occur through digital touchpoints, such as appointment scheduling tools, symptom checkers, or content engagement on condition-specific articles, even minor tracking misconfigurations can result in impermissible disclosures of data.

CMPs matter because they address:

• Regulatory Exposure: Without proper consent enforcement, healthcare organizations face significant financial penalties, as demonstrated by the $1.55M Healthline settlement
• Operational Risk: Manual or superficial compliance approaches create audit vulnerabilities and leave organizations unable to demonstrate due diligence during investigations
• Patient Trust: In healthcare, consent violations don’t just trigger fines—they erode the fundamental trust patients place in organizations with their most sensitive information
• Competitive Advantage: Organizations with robust consent infrastructure can leverage first-party data for marketing while competitors remain constrained by compliance uncertainties

The healthcare industry faces a critical compliance gap. Industry assessments reveal that while most healthcare websites display consent banners, many fail to implement actual tracking prevention. This creates a dangerous illusion, as organizations believe they’re compliant while remaining exposed to the same regulatory risks that cost Healthline $1.55M. Following increased regulatory scrutiny from OCR and state AGs, this superficial approach has become a liability that boards and C-suites can no longer ignore.

Role in the Healthcare Stack

CMPs function as the first gatekeeper of lawful data collection in healthcare MarTech environments. Positioned at the top of the stack, before analytics, personalization, and campaign execution tools, they govern whether and how data is allowed to flow.

Privacy Layer Positioning

CMPs sit in the privacy enforcement layer, working alongside tag managers, firewalls, and access controls. Their primary responsibility is upstream: determining if a user’s consent permits downstream activity.

Critical Integration Points

To function effectively, CMPs must integrate with:

• Data Collection & Tag Management Systems (TMS): to enable or disable scripts in real-time
• Customer Data Platforms (CDPs): to pass or withhold identifiers based on consent
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems: to synchronize consent status
• Electronic Health Record (EHR) portals: to prevent unconsented data propagation across clinical and marketing boundaries

Deployment Architecture

Because tracking begins the moment a page loads, CMPs must be deployed early in the client-side render cycle. Delayed or asynchronous loading introduces risk, as third-party scripts may execute before consent logic is applied. A properly implemented CMP also ensures:

• Full device and browser compatibility
• Mobile SDK availability for app tracking
• The ability for consent signals to propagate to server-side systems if required

In sum, CMPs serve as the consent “traffic controller” in your stack. When deployed correctly, they ensure that every downstream platform respects user choices, not just visually, but technically and legally.

Core Capabilities

A healthcare-grade CMP should deliver far more than basic cookie banners. It must support robust consent orchestration across systems and channels while meeting legal, ethical, and operational requirements. The following capabilities define what “good” looks like in a healthcare setting:

Compliance Requirements

Healthcare CMPs must deliver more than surface-level privacy configurations, encompassing the full spectrum of technical, contractual, and audit-ready requirements imposed by HIPAA, CPRA, and FTC enforcement guidance. The following capabilities are essential:

Business Associate Agreement (BAA)

Any CMP that stores, processes, or routes data potentially linked to Protected Health Information (PHI) must be willing to sign a BAA. Without this, the platform is legally unsuitable for HIPAA-regulated environments. Vendors that refuse a BAA should be disqualified from consideration.

Audit Logging and Retention

Auditability is a legal and operational necessity. A compliant CMP should:

• Generate timestamped logs of every user consent action
• Maintain records for the full retention period required under HIPAA
• Offer dashboards and export options for compliance reviews and incident response

HIPAA-Specific Configuration Controls

Beyond general privacy settings, CMPs used in healthcare must support:

• Ability to configure jurisdiction-specific consent flows (e.g., CPRA vs. HIPAA logic)
• Secure data storage and encryption practices

A healthcare CMP must serve as enforceable privacy infrastructure, not just a visual signal of compliance. If a platform cannot enforce consent before PHI flows, it is not HIPAA-ready.

CMP Market Landscape

The Consent Management Platform market continues to mature, with a growing range of solutions targeting different segments, from enterprise compliance needs to agile developer-first use cases. In the healthcare space, key differentiators include HIPAA-readiness, willingness to enter into a BAA, and composability with broader MarTech ecosystems.

Entreprise CMPs

• OneTrust and TrustArc remain dominant players for large organizations. They offer broad regulatory support, customizable enforcement workflows, and comprehensive audit logging. These tools are strong on compliance but may lack the nimbleness or marketing enablement features preferred by digital teams.

Developer-First/API CMPs

• Ketch and Securiti cater to organizations that want to embed consent orchestration directly into their platforms. They emphasize API access, composability, and programmatic enforcement of consent across environments. These CMPs tend to score well on both compliance and marketing utility, especially in complex tech stacks.

Mid-Market Solutions

• Didomi and Osano offer balanced platforms suitable for healthcare organizations that need solid compliance capabilities with some marketing flexibility. Didomi, in particular, offers strong UI customization, mobile SDKs, and robust consent logging.

Lightweight Tools

• CookiePro (by OneTrust) and Quantcast Choice provide fast-deploy banners and simple enforcement logic. These tools are often limited to web use cases and may lack support for cross-channel orchestration or HIPAA-specific configurations.

Emerging Vendors to Watch

• Ours Privacy has recently launched its own CMP. Early indications suggest a privacy-forward, healthcare-sensitive design. While it’s still maturing, Ours Privacy shows promise as a newcomer with potential to offer both enforcement strength and marketing enablement.

Evaluation Framework

Selecting the right CMP for a healthcare organization means evaluating not just feature sets, but enforceability, configurability, and alignment with HIPAA and patient trust principles. To enable this, we’ve developed a healthcare-specific evaluation framework with five weighted categories:

Download Our Vendor Scorecard

Dual Utility Compliance vs. Performance

Consent Management Platforms (CMPs) in healthcare are often assessed through a single lens: compliance. That’s understandable, given their role in preventing unauthorized tracking, generating audit trails, and enforcing HIPAA and CPRA requirements. But this singular focus overlooks a critical dimension: performance utility. A properly implemented CMP doesn’t just reduce risk, it can also unlock marketing value.

When thoughtfully deployed, a CMP doesn’t just reduce risk—it also unlocks marketing value through privacy-safe first-party data collection, audience segmentation by consent status, banner UX optimization to improve opt-in rates, and compliant personalization and marketing enablement.

Wheelhouse Insight

CMPs are not just defensive privacy tools, they’re composable infrastructure that, when configured correctly, can fuel data-driven marketing in a compliant way.

Navigating the Compliance-Performance Tradeoff

The tension between privacy and performance is real. Stricter consent enforcement can depress data availability. Looser implementations may introduce legal risk. The most effective CMP strategies aim to harmonize both goals:

• Use clear, accessible language in banners to build trust
• A/B test banner design without misleading users
• Ensure real-time integration with downstream tools (CDPs, CRMs, analytics)

To help illustrate where vendors fall across this dual utility spectrum, we’ve developed a 2×2 matrix that maps CMPs based on:

• Compliance Utility: How well does the CMP enforce consent and support HIPAA?
• Performance Utility: How well does it support compliant marketing activation, such as personalization or segmentation?

The matrix reveals four quadrants:

• Top-right (High Compliance, High Performance): Tools that support privacy enforcement and marketing flexibility
• Bottom-right (High Compliance, Low Performance): Strong privacy tools that don’t directly contribute marketing utility
• Top-left (Low Compliance, High Performance): Tools that are exclusively focused on marketing performance, and that require high levels of support or configuration to be compliant.
• Bottom-left (Low Compliance, Low Performance): Should be avoided entirely in HIPAA-regulated settings

CMP Vendors: Privacy vs. Performance

The goal is not to pick the tool with the most features, but the one that aligns with your organization’s compliance posture, technical maturity, and marketing needs. Some healthcare orgs may prioritize risk avoidance, while others seek a performance-balanced model.

Wheelhouse POV

A low performance score doesn’t mean a CMP is broken. It means the platform was engineered for control, not campaign execution. In healthcare, that’s often a feature, not a flaw.

Use the matrix as a strategic tool for selecting the right CMP, not just to check the compliance box, but to enable secure, compliant marketing operations at scale.

Implementation Guidance

Implementing a CMP in healthcare requires both technical precision and cross-functional coordination. Success depends not just on the platform itself, but on how it is rolled out, governed, and integrated into the broader MarTech and compliance environment.

Crawl-Walk-Run Deployment Model

Phase 1: Crawl – Deploy a Compliant Banner

• Configure jurisdiction-aware banners and disclosures.
• Ensure ADA/508 accessibility and mobile responsiveness.
• Establish default behaviors (opt-in vs. opt-out) based on legal strategy.

Phase 2: Walk – Enforce and Audit

• Enable pre-consent tag blocking across all scripts and containers.
• Set up audit logging and retention policies.
• Confirm consent is synchronized across platforms and survives session changes.

Phase 3: Run – Integrate and Optimize

• Push consent states into CDPs, CRMs, and analytics tools.
• Deploy preference centers for self-service management.
• A/B test banner UX and optimize for opt-in rates without misleading users.

Wheelhouse Advice

Avoid Hardcoding CMP Outside of Tag Manager: CMPs must be deployed through your tag manager, not outside it. “One of the biggest implementation gaps we see is the CMP being hardcoded outside the tag manager. That’s when you start getting race conditions where tags load before the CMP can stop them.”

Use QA Environments to Test Consent Logic: Before launch, validate your CMP setup in a QA environment where all tags route to test containers. “We run the CMP in a QA environment where all marketing tags point to a test container. It lets us catch rogue tag behavior before anything goes to production.”

Monitor Post-Consent Script Behavior: Consent shouldn’t be a one-time check. Implement monitoring for downstream tools that may reintroduce trackers. “You need alerting on post-consent behavior— especially for tags that load dynamically from chat tools or schedulers.”

Simulate GPC Signals Across Browsers: Ensure your CMP respects Global Privacy Control (GPC) signals. “Part of our QA includes simulating Global Privacy Control from different browsers to confirm the CMP respects that signal universally.”

Stakeholder Involvement

A successful CMP deployment includes collaboration from:

• Marketing: for banner language, consent journeys, and performance KPIs
• Compliance: for BAA review, enforcement validation, and audit readiness
• Web Development/IT: for implementation, QA, and system integrations
• Legal: for policy language and contractual oversight with downstream vendors

Quality Assurance & Change Management

A successful CMP deployment includes collaboration from:

• Conduct script audits pre- and post-launch.
• Monitor for rogue tags or third-party bypasses.
• Establish a governance plan for consent experience updates and regulatory changes

Future Outlook

The role of CMPs in healthcare is set to evolve significantly over the next 12–24 months as both the regulatory environment and technical landscape continue to shift. Three major developments are shaping the future:

1. Consent-as-Code Becomes Standard
Rather than relying on visual-only interfaces, advanced organizations are embedding consent logic directly into application code and deployment workflows. This movement toward “consent-as-code” enables real-time enforcement and alignment with CI/CD practices, ensuring privacy is enforced as part of product architecture—not bolted on after the fact.

2. Evolving Regulatory Pressure
Federal and state agencies are increasing scrutiny of online health experiences. With the FTC, OCR, and California AG already active, more states are expected to pass CPRA-like laws targeting health-adjacent data. Expect higher standards for consent specificity, user interface clarity, and auditability—particularly around inferred or behavioral health data.

3. AI-Driven Consent Intelligence
A new wave of AI-powered tools is emerging to enhance consent intelligence. These include:

• Risk scoring engines that flag scripts or patterns likely to trigger non-compliance
• Dynamic UX personalization that adapts banner language and design based on behavioral or contextual signals
• Proactive anomaly detection for unauthorized trackers or misfired tags

CMPs will increasingly need to act not just as control layers, but as adaptive systems capable of interpreting and responding to complex consent contexts in real time. Healthcare organizations that invest in modern, composable, and enforceable CMPs today will be best positioned to adapt to these coming shifts without re-platforming or regulatory surprises.

Wheelhouse POV

The Conventional View

Consent Management Platforms (CMPs) are often treated as superficial compliance tools. In many healthcare settings, we still encounter CMPs deployed as banners: overlays that collect consent without enforcing it. The assumption is that if a banner is present, compliance is achieved. That’s not just misleading, it’s dangerous.

The Wheelhouse Take

In healthcare, compliance is non-negotiable. CMPs must go beyond surface-level signals and function as true privacy infrastructure. That means:

• Blocking scripts and data flows until opt-in is granted
• Logging and storing consent events in auditable ways
• Synchronizing consent status across the stack—from CRMs to EHRs to CDPs
• Respecting jurisdictional nuances and channel-specific preferences

We’ve seen firsthand how poor implementation—such as hardcoding a CMP outside of a tag manager— creates race conditions where PHI can be exposed before consent enforcement takes hold. In these environments, false compliance is more dangerous than no compliance at all.

Wheelhouse Hot Take

Most CMPs are privacy theater. The $1.55 million California AG fine against Healthline exposed a critical industry truth: banners alone are not compliance. Too many CMPs give the illusion of control while still allowing unauthorized data sharing. In healthcare, that illusion isn’t just risky—it’s expensive.

Hard Truths From The Field

• A banner alone isn’t enforcement. Without pre-tag blocking and signal propagation, you’ve created a façade of compliance.
• No BAA, no deal. Any vendor unwilling to sign a BAA should be excluded from healthcare use cases.
• Implementation matters more than the vendor. Most CMPs can work—but only if deployed and configured with healthcare-grade rigor.
• Mobile and EHR compatibility are often overlooked. A CMP that works only in browser-based environments won’t cover your risk surface.

What We Recommend

• Enforce First: Prioritize technical enforcement before UX optimization.
• Integrate Second: Push consent states to downstream systems.
• Optimize Third: Test and improve banner UX only after enforcement is validated.

“Consent is not a banner—it’s a contract. And if your systems don’t honor it at every level, you’re not compliant.”

Resources

Sample CMP RFP Questions

These questions can help vet CMPs for healthcare suitability.

Vendor Scorecard Template

Compare CMPs across critical healthcare evaluation criteria.

Privacy Compliance Evaluation Checklist

Evaluate whether a CMP is viable for HIPAA-regulated environments before selection or implementation.

Legal Disclaimer: The information contained in this communication should not be construed as legal advice on any matter. Wheelhouse DMG is not providing any legal opinions regarding the compliance of any solution with HIPAA or other laws and regulations. Any determination as to whether a particular solution meets applicable compliance requirements is the sole responsibility of the client and should be made after consulting with their own legal counsel.