The Ultimate Guide to Customer Data Platforms (CDPs)

What Is a CDP?

At its core, a Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a system that unifies data about individuals from multiple systems, resolves identities across touch points, segments those individuals into audiences, and offers the potential to activate those audiences across digital experiences, marketing and engagement channels.

For healthcare organizations, that might mean:

• Creating a unified profile across EHR, CRM, and digital systems
• Suppressing marketing to unconsented users or current patients
• Orchestrating web personalization and personalized outreach for high-value service lines

But confusion around what qualifies as a CDP is rampant, and in many cases, justified. The term is applied to systems with vastly different architectures and utilities. Many vendors use “CDP” to describe tools that do only a subset of what the term once implied, while other CDPs in the space do much more.

The CDP Promise and Why It’s Fraught in Healthcare

The original promise of the CDP category was both grand and straightforward:

Stitch together anonymous and known data into a single, persistent profile and use it to drive smarter engagement.

That meant linking website behavior to CRM records, identifying users across devices, and triggering real-time personalization based on their actions and attributes.

But in healthcare, this same functionality becomes a liability:

• Linking anonymous sessions to patient records can expose PHI.
• Real-time activation pipelines may bypass consent logic.
• “Personalization” that seems innocuous in ecommerce can appear invasive or noncompliant when tied to a diagnosis, condition or provider interaction.

As a result, vendors targeting healthcare have to evolved. Some focus on audience sync and consent-aware orchestration. Others provide event routers or data pipelines that strip PHI before activation. These are valuable utilities, but they are not always full CDPs. Still, vendors use the term because it’s what buyers are searching for.

This guide aims to bridge the gap between what CDPs were originally meant to do, and what privacy-first organizations actually need today.

A CDP Is Not:

• A CRM: CRMs manage known contacts. CDPs unify behavior across anonymous and known states, often with more dynamic data.
• A Data Warehouse: Warehouses store and analyze data, but doesn’t stitch identities gracefully or drive marketing workflows without extensive modification.
• A Tag Manager: TMS platforms control what gets collected, not how data is unified, segmented, or activated.
• A Consent Management Platform (CMP): CMPs enforce consent, but they don’t unify data or create audiences.

A Healthcare-Grade CDP Must:

• Unify first-party data across platforms in a HIPAA-compliant way
• Resolve identities and link them to consent status
• Segment audiences with privacy-aware filters
• Orchestrate activation without exposing PHI
• Integrate with CMPs, EHRs, CRMs, and outbound channels
• Provide audit-ready logs and suppression capabilities

In essence, a CDP in healthcare must be a privacy-aware data orchestration layer designed to bridge marketing, compliance, and clinical systems without compromising trust.

Why Healthcare May (or May Not) Need a CDP

The conventional wisdom is clear: healthcare organizations need a CDP. Vendors pitch them as the solution to fragmented patient journeys, unstructured data, and rising expectations for personalization. Industry content reinforces the idea that CDPs are a must-have for healthcare marketers.

But here’s the reality: many healthcare organizations don’t need and may not be able to use CDP… at least not yet.

CDPs introduce complexity, cost, and compliance risk. And while their promise is compelling, their utility depends entirely on organizational maturity, internal capabilities, and privacy posture.

So instead of assuming a CDP is needed, let’s ask the better question: what problems are you trying to solve, and is a CDP the right tool for it?

When a CDP May Be Necessary:

You need to unify data across siloed systems

Patient interactions span EHR, CRM, scheduling tools, contact centers, websites, and mobile apps. If you can’t connect those dots, you can’t personalize, suppress, or measure meaningfully.

You want to segment and orchestrate outreach at scale

If you’re trying to run personalized engagement across hundreds of patient segments, while suppressing unconsented individuals and adhering to HIPAA, doing that manually or with disconnected tools isn’t sustainable.

You have the IT and governance maturity to support it

CDPs require strong data governance, clear ownership across marketing and IT, and well-defined integration workflows. Without that foundation, the platform rarely delivers on its promise.

When a CDP May Not Be Necessary:

You’re solving for basic patient acquisition workflows

Many healthcare organizations just need consent-aware analytics and suppression lists synced to advertising platforms. That can be handled with server-side tagging, a CMP, and a warehouse or audience sync tool. No CDP required.

You already unify known data

If your EHR (or CRM) is already the system of record for patient profiles, and it’s integrated with your marketing stack, you may not need a CDP to replicate that function.

Your use cases are few and low-volume

CDPs shine when powering high-volume personalization and segmentation. If you’re only running a handful of campaigns per month, the overhead of a CDP may outweigh the benefit.

You’re not ready to handle PHI in marketing systems

CDPs often require rethinking your compliance model, especially if you’re activating data downstream. If your organization isn’t ready to securely handle PHI or enforce consent across your stack, a CDP could increase risk, not reduce it.

CDP Alternatives in Privacy-First Stacks

For many healthcare teams, the value they seek in a CDP can be found elsewhere:

• Consent-aware analytics and suppression via server-side tagging + CMP
• Audience activation through reverse ETL tools (like Hightouch)
• Data unification through your existing warehouse + ETL processes
• Orchestration via HIPAA-safe marketing automation tools

Bottom line: Healthcare may need a CDP, but only if the organization has the right complexity, readiness, and privacy posture to justify it. Otherwise, the better investment may be in composable tools that offer similar outcomes with less risk. The point isn’t that CDPs are bad. It’s that they’re often overprescribed and underdelivered.

Core Capabilities of a Healthcare-Grade CDP

What makes a CDP truly valuable in healthcare is whether the platform can reliably and compliantly support the core capabilities required to unify, protect, and activate first-party data across complex systems and regulated workflows.

Here, we define the seven key capabilities that matter most in HIPAA-compliant environments, along with the business problems they address and how they work in practice.

Data Unification

What it is: Aggregating data from multiple systems (CRM, EHR, web, mobile, call center) into a centralized record structure.

• Goal: Align siloed data around a consistent schema and person/entity
• Common sources: CRM, EHR, call logs, web events, form submissions
• Core activity: Data mapping, normalization, ETL/ELT pipelines
• Output: A unified profile or record

Identity Resolution

What it is: Determining when multiple identifiers (anonymous or known) belong to the same individual.

• Goal: Link sessions, clicks, and offline data to a persistent identity
• Identifiers used: Email, device ID, cookie, phone number, member ID
• Approaches: Deterministic (exact match), probabilistic (signal overlap), or hybrid
• Healthcare nuance: Risky unless consent is explicit; can introduce PHI exposure

Audience Segmentation

What it is: Creating groupings of individuals based on behaviors, attributes, or lifecycle stage for tailored messaging.

• Goal: Define and manage lists or cohorts for outreach and suppression
• Examples: “Medicare-eligible individuals in service area who engaged with orthopedic content but have no scheduled appointments,” “Women 35-50 who researched maternity services, attended a virtual tour, but didn’t schedule a consultation within 30 days.”
• Common filters: Event-based behavior, demographics, CRM attributes, consent status
• Output: Lists or dynamic segments synced to downstream tools

Consent Enforcement

What it is: Ensuring that any data collection or activation aligns with captured user preferences.

• Goal: Prevent marketing actions that violate user consent or HIPAA
• Consent inputs: Web forms, patient portal opt-ins, CMP signals
• Typical behavior: Block/suppress data collection or activation if consent is missing
• Output: Consent flags stored per profile; used for real-time enforcement or segment filtering

Suppression

What it is: Proactively excluding individuals from marketing or outreach based on regulatory, legal, or preference signals.

• Goal: Prevent PHI-sensitive outreach, noncompliant or inefficient audience targeting
• Use cases: Exclude recent patients, minors, or those who revoked consent
• Data sources: Consent systems, CRM tags, EHR signals
• Healthcare nuance: Often more important than activation; critical to avoid fines and brand risk

Activation

What it is: Sending enriched, segmented data to tools that deliver messages or experiences (e.g. email, ads, SMS, call center).

• Goal: Enable campaigns, personalization, and outreach with current, consented data
• Channels: Google Ads, Meta, Salesforce, SMS platforms, email tools
• Methods: Direct integrations, API pushes, Reverse ETL pipelines
• Privacy considerations: Must control what data is sent, where, and under what conditions. Activation arguably creates the greatest risk, related both to data privacy issues and to the potential for poor patient experiences based on personalization that may be perceived as “invasive”

Governance & Audit Logging

What it is: Tracking how data is accessed, processed, shared, and activated, especially in regulated industries.

Healthcare compliance tie-in: Supports HIPAA’s audit requirement and breach defensibility

Goal: Ensure defensibility in audits, reduce unauthorized data exposure

Includes: Access logs, data lineage, change histories, suppression logs

Output: Immutable records of data flow and decisioning

Core Capabilities vs. Alternative Solutions

Evaluation Framework

To assess HIPAA-ready Customer Data Platforms, we evaluated vendors against five weighted criteria reflecting the demands of privacy-first healthcare organizations.

2. Healthcare Fit (25%)

This evaluates how well a platform aligns with healthcare-specific data, workflows, and use cases.

• Presence in healthcare directories and partner ecosystems
• Evidence of adoption in health systems or payer organizations
• Integration support for EHR, CRM, or claims data
• Verticalized messaging, healthcare-specific features, or templates