In this special episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, Jenny dives into a critical update for healthcare marketers. Google is requiring advertisers to opt into call recording for its Click-to-Call feature, creating potential HIPAA compliance risks. Jenny explains the changes, why they’re a concern, and what steps you need to take to protect your organization.
Key Points:
•Google’s new terms for Click-to-Call could result in PHI or PII being recorded, violating HIPAA.
•The rollout is inconsistent, so accounts must be monitored closely.
•You can contact Google support to opt out of call recording.
Action Items:
•Check if the terms were accepted for your account.
•Share this episode with your team or agency to ensure awareness.
More Information
•Search Engine Journal Article
Connect with Jenny:
•Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
•LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am your host, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. We specialize in working with payors and providers across the country.
I am not so thrilled to be here with you today, because I’m going to complain a little bit about Google. I had to hop on immediately to record this podcast so we could get it live this week. Today I’m recording, it is Tuesday, December 17th, 2024, and I wanted to record and get this live immediately because this is a huge potential compliance and HIPAA concern for all of us healthcare marketers who are running Google ads.
So if you run Google ads for your healthcare organization, you need to be very careful about any new terms that [00:01:00] you accept within your Google ads account. Google has begun randomly creating notifications within accounts, kind of similar to account verifications, where it’s like no rhyme and reason about when you’re prompted for account verification, we had some clients prompted months and months ago, and some prompted yesterday, right?
So it’s not like it’s being done on the 15th of each month or based on budget or size, you’re just prompted and you have 30 days to do it. They’re doing the same thing. This one is specifically around call extensions. So if you’re doing a text ad within Google ads, you likely have called extensions activated, right?
It is a great way to allow patients or potential clients to click to call in to immediately speak with your team to schedule an appointment, book a service, et cetera. Right? Everybody uses it. Well, these new terms that you’re receiving under the notifications. What it’s trying to do is to force you to accept [00:02:00] call recording in order to continue using the call extension feature.
And why is that a bad idea? Well, we’ve been talking about HIPAA for a very long time. The last thing you want to do is share any potential PHI or PII with a third party such as Google. We’ve done all of this work getting our marketing analytics tech stack set up and now Google is trying to record those inbound calls from call extensions.
So let’s back up a little bit and talk about the history of this. We did a little bit of digging because we didn’t know Google had ever really done this. Turns out, a Search Engine Journal posted an article in 2018 that said they were starting random call recording in order to reduce fraud and spam. So it was not a system-wide thing.
It was not something they did regularly. It was just to try to improve the user experience. There was another search engine journal article in mid-2020 where they [00:03:00] said that within Google ads, it became a feature that you could turn on not turn off, but turn on. So it was off by default is our understanding.
Well, now, what they are doing is they are actually saying that they want you to opt into it being turned on all of the time. And whenever it specifically says about call recording Google monitors and records a small percentage of phone calls that are initiated by call-only ads or call assets for some advertisers in the United States, allowing us to improve call quality for both users and advertisers alike.
Evaluating call quality ensures that advertisers are providing a positive call experience and prevents caller spam and business fraud. So according to that, it sounds like it is not 100 percent of the calls, but is it 1%? Is it 80%? Does it vary by the day? We don’t know. Even one call recorded by Google, if you’re a healthcare organization, is too many.
Because from a privacy perspective, [00:04:00] we don’t want to do that. So where are you? What’s going to happen? Well, just like the Google ad verification, the account verification process, you actually can contact Google support and you can actually opt-out of this if you click on the terms themselves, it specifically has a section around HIPAA disclaimer, and it reads like this, unless otherwise specified in writing by Google, Google does not intend use of the communication features to create obligations under the health insurance portability and accountability act as amended and makes no representation of the communication features satisfy HIPAA requirements.
You and any third party that is advertising on your behalf are so for applicable compliance with HIPAA. So what does that mean? That means you have the ability to actually opt-out and tell Google Hey, we do not want you to do any call recording on our account. What is the concern? The concern and the [00:05:00] reason why I had to publish this podcast episode immediately, we modified our publishing schedule in order to get this out.
If you have an agency or a third party that is managing your Google ads on your behalf, they likely will receive this notification of change of terms and just accept it without understanding what they are accepting that will be opting you into this. And then again, we’ll be creating additional compliance issues and concerns for your organization.
So we’re going to have a variety of links that we’re going to share in the call notes or in the show notes for today’s episode. And what you need to do is if you have a third party managing your Google ads, number one. See if they’ve received a notification and opted into anything within your account, but number two, send them this episode, have them listen to it, and make sure that they are not accidentally opting you into this and creating additional compliance consideration.
Again, these are at the account level. So for example, heavy and hot, we have [00:06:00] hundreds of accounts that we manage. Every single one of them has begun to receive this notification. We received two yesterday. And so, again, just like account verification, it’s going to be a slow roll. You may receive 80 tomorrow, who knows but you need to know about this and make sure that you are not accidentally opting into it.
As always, this should be a great reminder that if you are not working with a healthcare-specific marketing agency to manage your media strategy, this is a great reminder that maybe it’s time to start shopping around. This is a kind of situation where somebody could accidentally opt into something without realizing the potential implications to your organization.
So just a little pitch to wrap up this episode. If you’re currently working with an agency that has not yet brought this to your attention, or perhaps even accidentally already accepted the new terms without realizing what they were doing, call me. You can shoot me an email, at jenny@hedyandhopp.com.
I’d be happy to chat with you about our [00:07:00] media and marketing services. But otherwise please share this episode with anybody who’s managing it, whether it’s an internal team or a third-party team, and make sure you don’t accidentally accept these new click-to-call terms. With that, I will wrap up today’s episode.
Thank you so much for tuning in, please like, and subscribe. We really appreciate all of our followers across all of the various podcasting platforms. And I will be with you again next Friday for a new episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.
