Best Healthcare Media Buying Agencies for Pharma, Health Systems and Digital Health

A pharma brand launching an oncology drug, a regional hospital filling its orthopedics schedule and a telehealth startup selling GLP-1 consultations all buy paid media.

Do they need the same kind of agency?

Our honest answer would be no.

• The pharma team needs prescriber audiences built from NPI data and someone who can run endemic and point-of-care inventory through medical-legal review.

• The hospital needs service-line campaigns that never send appointment details to an ad platform.

• The telehealth brand needs a buyer who can keep Meta and Google accounts alive in restricted categories and still optimize toward patients who actually start care.

So why is this important?

Most lists of healthcare media buying agencies mix these three buyers together, so a shortlist built from them tends to include agencies that are strong for someone else.

This one is grouped by buyer type instead.

Every agency below was checked on its own services and case-study pages, and each entry says what kind of healthcare work it can show you.

One disclosure: 9AM publishes this article and appears in the digital health group. We held it to the same criteria as every other entry and placed it inside its group, not at the top.

Healthcare Media Buying Agencies at a Glance: Buyer Type, Channels and Proof

The table below sorts the nine agencies by the buyer each one serves best, the channels it buys, and the healthcare proof you can open and read before a first call. Use it to cut the list to two or three names, then read those entries.

Best Healthcare Media Buying Agencies by Buyer Type

The first three agencies below buy for telehealth and digital health companies that sell directly to patients. The next three buy for hospitals, health systems and health plans. The last three buy for pharma and biotech brands.

Media Buying Agencies for Telehealth, Supplements, and Digital Health Companies

9AM

9AM plans and buys paid search and paid social for telehealth, mental health, DTC supplements, and digital health brands, with creative testing and acquisition reporting run by the same team. Its healthcare paid media service starts from qualified demand and bookings, because a cheap inquiry that never becomes a paid customer only looks good in the ad platform.

Consumer genetics company Genomelink worked with 9AM for more than three years. Genomelink cut acquisition cost by 77% over that period through campaign management and around 70 new creative assets a month. For Grow Therapy, the work was creative strategy: concepts built around affordability, insurance coverage and first appointments, tested and fed back into new briefs.

Best for: 9AM fits digital and DTC health brands that want performance-based creative, media, and measurement. It is not built for HCP promotion or prescriber targeting.

Flighted

Flighted is a New York performance agency and a badged Meta agency partner with a dedicated telehealth practice. What sets it apart is how it picks the conversion event.

For Season Health, which delivers insurance-covered nutrition care, Flighted dropped lead forms. It then moved Meta's optimization event step by step down the funnel until the account was optimizing on attended dietitian appointments, sent through server-side tracking. Spend grew five times and acquisition cost fell 70% at peak efficiency within about 90 days. State-level ad sets matched creative to the dominant insurer in each state.

Best for: Flighted suits venture-backed telehealth companies that live or die on Meta and need a senior team close to the account. Brands that need programmatic, CTV or broadcast buying will have to look elsewhere.

Interconnections

Interconnections works on restricted-category telehealth, where ad rejections and unpublished pages are routine. Its telehealth page describes server-side tracking that strips protected health information before any event leaves the client's servers, with only hashed signals sent to the platforms. Budget decisions are made on backend signups, which is better than platform-reported conversions.

The flagship case is Mistr, a direct-to-consumer PrEP provider. Over 23 months, monthly spend rose roughly tenfold and signups about 2.5 times. Google grew from around 30% to roughly half of spend, which protected the account when Meta unpublished the brand's page.

Best for: Interconnections suits sexual health, men's health and other telehealth brands that keep hitting policy walls. Its healthcare proof rests on one published case, so ask for a second reference before signing.

Media Buying Agencies for Hospitals, Health Systems and Health Plans

Goodway Group

Goodway Group runs programmatic and omnichannel media for hospitals, health plans and health brands, and it has the longest health-system track record on this list. Its older case studies credit the healthcare team as GRADIANT. Their healthcare page also covers health plans and medtech.

The strongest is RWJBarnabas Health, a client since 2013, where programmatic search, display and social campaigns lifted patient leads 70% in 2021 across 12 hospital locations. A second case for an unnamed multi-specialty health system reports a 17% increase in net patient revenue across bariatrics, orthopedics and cardiology.

Best for: Goodway fits health systems that want one partner buying across service lines and markets. Ask how the team keeps conversion tracking clear of patient data on scheduling pages.

Vision Media

Vision Media is an independent, media-only agency based near Seattle. With no creative or web retainer to sell alongside the buy, its advice stays on where the money goes. Its healthcare page covers planning and buying for hospitals and health systems across TV, digital and out-of-home.

In January 2025, Banner Health chose it to lead media planning and buying. Banner runs 33 hospitals in six states. Its best-documented work is Medicare, though, for Geisinger Health Plan. Geisinger Health Plan has used Vision Media for more than six years, and the 2025 AEP campaign recorded a 9.1% lift in ad recall and a 15.5% lift in brand awareness from CTV.

Best for: Vision Media suits health systems and Medicare Advantage plans that still put real money into broadcast and need someone to negotiate it.

Strategus

Strategus is a connected TV specialist, and its healthcare case library is one of the deepest among CTV buyers. One case covers a Seattle hospital foundation that raised $14.1 million in a nine-week campaign. HIPAA concerns ruled out pixels on the hospital and foundation sites, so Strategus measured results by matching campaign exposure against the foundation's own CRM.

That same workaround is what most hospitals need for service-line campaigns. Other cases include a children's health system that recorded a 10.6% brand awareness lift and a multi-state vein center that tested CTV against unexposed markets.

Best for: Strategus is the right call when CTV is the main channel and you want it bought by a team that does nothing else. It is a weaker fit if you need search and social run by the same agency.

Media Buying Agencies for Pharma and Biotech Brands

CMI Media Group

CMI Media Group is WPP's health-only media agency, and its scale is the reason to put it on a pharma shortlist. Its services page describes an identity dataset covering 4.4 million HCPs and 265 million consumers, which it uses to plan prescriber and patient media in one plan instead of two.

In August 2026 it formalized a Rare Disease Center of Excellence on the back of more than 67 rare disease launches. Partner case studies give a view of the work: with PulsePoint, CMI ran HCP social on Meta for a hard-to-diagnose disease and measured script lift among the doctors reached.

Best for: Large brands get buying clout through its sister company Compas. Smaller biotechs should ask how much senior attention a single brand at their budget will actually get.

Publicis Health Media

Publicis Health Media, now branded PHM, is the health media arm of Publicis Groupe. According to Fierce Pharma, it plans and buys paid search and social, programmatic, publishing and content, point-of-care and video, with offices in Philadelphia, New York and Chicago. Stephen Farquhar took over as CEO in 2026 after running Publicis Health in the US.

As you can imagine, the agency's main draw is access to Publicis Media's buying scale, plus HealthFront, the annual health upfront it runs for clients. The issue, however, is evidence: PHM's site lists news and events but no case studies. Before you shortlist it, ask for two current pharma references in your therapeutic area and a sample report showing how it tied media to prescription outcomes.

Best for: A consumer health or primary-care brand with national TV in the plan is the most natural fit.

Underscore Marketing

Underscore is an independent, women-owned media agency of about 90 people that works only on rare disease and oncology brands. Its homepage claims more than 50 launches and makes a point most agencies avoid: it does not trade its own inventory, so its recommendations are not tied to media it resells.

Its impact page reports more than $850 million invested in paid media and work on more than 83 brands. The clearest public example is an unbranded rare lung disease campaign from 2024, where Underscore built modeled patient audiences from claims data and measured reach through PulsePoint. That is the kind of work a small patient population demands.

Best for: Underscore suits mid-size biopharma teams that want senior strategists on the account and an agency of record that will plan around a narrow prescriber list. Brands with broad primary-care audiences and big TV budgets will get more from a holding-company buyer.

Healthcare Media Buying Agency Selection Criteria

Each agency had to show that it plans and buys paid media, and that it has current healthcare work on its own site or in a named partner's case study. In other words, we didn’t pick agencies that offer generic marketing services.

We grouped agencies by buyer type because a pharma media agency and a telehealth performance shop have different capabilities.

We checked four things for every candidate:

• Paid media planning and buying listed as a core service on the agency's own services pages

• At least one healthcare case study, client appointment or partner case naming the agency

• Evidence of healthcare-specific practice, such as (but not limited to) HCP data, HIPAA-aware tracking or platform policy work

• Signs the work is current, such as 2025 or 2026 cases, leadership changes or launches

HIPAA-Compliant Digital Advertising: How Healthcare Media Buyers Handle Tracking

HIPAA-compliant digital advertising depends less on the ad and more on the tags behind it. In 2022, The Markup found the Meta Pixel on 33 of 100 top US hospital websites, sending appointment clicks to Facebook.

Your agency should explain how it avoids that.

HHS Guidance on Online Tracking Technologies

The HHS Office for Civil Rights issued its tracking technologies guidance in December 2022 and revised it in March 2024. In June 2024, a federal court in Texas vacated the part that treated an IP address plus a visit to a public health page as protected information, and HHS later withdrew its appeal.

That ruling covered unauthenticated pages.

Patient portals, logged-in apps and scheduling flows still carry HIPAA risk, and private lawsuits continue regardless. In fact, Advocate Aurora Health settled a pixel class action for $12.225 million.

What that means for you: Ask any candidate which of your pages it will tag and which it will leave alone.

Business Associate Agreements Across the Media Stack

A media agency that gets its eyes on protected health information needs a business associate agreement, and so does every vendor in its chain that receives the same data: tag managers, call tracking, CRM connectors and server-side platforms.

Ask the agency to list each vendor that will process your data and confirm which ones will sign a BAA. Ad platforms such as Meta and Google generally will not, which is why the data you send them has to be clean before it leaves your systems.

Server-Side Tagging and Conversion Events Without Health Data

Server-side tracking lets the agency decide what an ad platform receives. Done well, it strips names, conditions and appointment details and sends only a hashed, non-clinical signal, such as a completed consultation request.

Our guide to paid media server-side tracking covers the setup.

A good agency will show you the exact event payload. It should also explain which conversion it optimizes toward and why that event stops short of a diagnosis or treatment.

Google, Meta and LegitScript Rules for Health Advertisers

Platform rules set limits that no tracking setup can work around. Google requires advertiser certification for online pharmacies, telemedicine providers and prescription drug manufacturers, and some categories need LegitScript accreditation first.

Since January 2025, Meta has restricted lower-funnel event data for many health and wellness advertisers.

Remember: Ask a candidate how its last three health accounts were classified and what it changed.

Our article on HIPAA-compliant marketing goes deeper on the consent side.

HCP Targeting in Pharma Media Buying

HCP targeting means reaching named prescribers.

The double-edged sword here is that the market is big (that means a large audience, which is great) but also diverse (harder for targeting).

In fact, the US has roughly one million physicians, and Doximity reports that its members make up more than 85% of them.

So, a pharma agency should prove how accurately it reaches yours.

NPI-Level Audience Lists and Match Rates

Every pharma media plan starts from a target list of prescribers identified by National Provider Identifier, usually segmented by specialty and prescribing volume.

The number you should care about is the match rate, meaning the share of your list a given network or platform can actually reach.

Ask each agency for match rates by channel on its last comparable list, and who verifies them. An agency that quotes reach without a match rate is reporting impressions, not doctors.

Endemic, Point-of-Care and EHR Inventory

Endemic media is placement on sites and apps doctors use for work, such as clinical references and medical news. Point-of-care and EHR inventory places messages inside the systems clinicians use while treating patients.

These channels cost more per impression than open-web display and reach a smaller audience with less waste.

Ask the agency which endemic partners it buys directly, which run through a healthcare DSP, and how it decides the split for your therapeutic area.

HCP and Consumer Campaign Linkage

Pharma brands have long run HCP and patient media as separate plans with separate agencies. Newer tools connect them.

In 2026, PulsePoint and CMI Media Group announced the first agency activation of a product that uses prescriber signals to adjust consumer targeting.

You don't need that exact product, but you should know whether your agency can coordinate both audiences in one plan and one budget.

Prescriber Reach and Script-Lift Measurement

The outcome that matters for pharma is new and total prescriptions, measured against a control group of unexposed prescribers. Script-lift studies rely on claims data and usually take several months to read.

Ask who runs the study, whether the measurement partner is independent of the media seller, and what the agency changed after its last study came back flat.

Side note: If you want more info on engaging HCPs, here’s a good video:

Healthcare Programmatic Advertising: Fees, Inventory and CTV

Healthcare programmatic advertising loses a large share of budget before it reaches a person. In the ANA's Q4 2025 benchmark, quality-led advertisers converted nearly 57% of programmatic spend into qualified impressions. A good agency should show you where the rest goes.

Healthcare Data Partners and DSPs

Health brands can buy through general demand-side platforms or healthcare-specific ones that carry prescriber identity, condition-level audiences and endemic supply. Healthcare DSPs bring better targeting at higher platform fees.

Ask your agency which platforms it uses, whose seat the campaigns run on, and whether audience data is licensed to you or to the agency.

Working-Media Share and Platform Fees

Working media is the share of your budget that buys impressions after platform fees, data costs, verification and agency margin. The ANA's Q1 2026 benchmark found that the weakest group of advertisers lost more than two-thirds of each dollar before it reached a consumer.

Ask for the working-media percentage on a comparable account, in writing, and ask what happens to rebates and volume discounts.

Connected TV for Service Lines and Condition Awareness

CTV gives hospitals and pharma brands TV-style reach with household-level targeting and post-view measurement. It also carries its own waste. An ANA review found that only 37.5 cents per CTV dollar reached an attentive, non-fraudulent impression.

Ask whether the agency buys CTV through direct publisher deals or open exchanges, and how it measures lift without a pixel on your site.

Inventory Transparency and Brand Safety

Health ads that appear next to misinformation or on made-for-advertising sites damage trust and waste money.

Ask for log-level reporting by domain and app, a list of blocked categories, and the verification vendor's raw reports. Agencies that only send summary dashboards make it hard to see where your ads ran.

What to Keep in Your Own Name When You Hire a Healthcare Media Buying Agency

The agency you choose may change. Your data, accounts and audiences should not leave with it. Most health brands change media partners at some point, and the ones that have to start over are the ones that let the agency own the infrastructure.

Three assets decide how painful that switch is.

• The first is the ad accounts and platform seats. If your Google, Meta and DSP accounts are registered to the agency, you lose their history and any platform certifications when the agency goes.

• The second is the tracking setup: the tag manager, the server-side container and the event definitions that tell platforms what counts as a patient. In healthcare, that setup usually goes through legal review, and rebuilding it costs months.

• The third is the audiences, from prescriber lists and match files to CRM segments and lookalike seeds.

Put all three in your name before the first campaign launches, and write it into the contract. A good agency will agree without hesitation, because it expects to keep you on results rather than on access.

9AM's healthcare paid media work starts from the same idea.

Before campaigns launch, we agree on funnel definitions with the client. Reporting then reads spend next to qualified demand and bookings, with the attribution assumptions written down where everyone can see them.

If you're not sure whether your tracking and account setup would survive an agency change, start there. Book a strategy call and we'll review it with you.

FAQ

What does a healthcare media buying agency do?

A healthcare media buying agency plans where a health brand's ad budget goes, negotiates and buys the placements, and reports what they produced. Unlike a general media agency, it works within HIPAA, FDA and platform health-ad rules, and it often has access to healthcare-specific data such as prescriber lists.

How is a healthcare media agency different from a healthcare marketing agency?

A media agency focuses on planning, buying and measuring paid media. A healthcare marketing agency usually adds SEO, websites, reputation management and patient experience work. If your main need is organic growth and patient acquisition across many channels, see our list of healthcare marketing agencies.

How do healthcare media buying agencies charge?

Most charge a percentage of media spend, a fixed monthly retainer, or a mix of both. Large pharma accounts often pay a retainer plus commission through an agency-of-record contract. Whatever the model, ask for fees, data costs and platform costs listed separately so you can compare proposals.

What questions should you ask a healthcare advertising agency?

Ask which healthcare clients it buys for today and whether you can speak to one. Ask what conversion events it sends to ad platforms, who owns the accounts, what share of spend reaches working media, and how it handled its last platform policy change. Our guide to healthcare PPC compliance questions adds questions for search campaigns.

Should a health system hire a healthcare specialist or a generalist media agency?

A specialist usually saves time on tracking, consent and platform policy, which are the areas where generalists make expensive mistakes. A generalist can work if it has current health-system clients and agrees to a tracking review before launch. Ask either type for a health-system reference from the last two years.

Do healthcare brands need separate agencies for PPC and programmatic?

Not necessarily. Many health brands use one agency for search and social and another for programmatic or CTV, because the skills differ. One agency for both makes budget shifts easier. Two agencies make sense when one channel dominates your plan and needs a specialist.

About Mustafa Alkhtab

Mustafa Alkhtab is Head of Performance Media at inBeat Agency, where he oversees paid media and performance creative results across the agency's accounts. Before inBeat Agency, he built growth programs for ecommerce, lead generation, and mobile app businesses in international markets. He writes about media buying, measurement, and conversion rate optimization.

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