Telehealth marketing terms, defined by a physician who runs the ads
You do not need to become a marketer before hiring marketing help. You need enough of the vocabulary to tell when someone is explaining and when they are hiding behind it. These are the terms agencies, ad platforms, and regulators will throw at you, each defined in one clear sentence, followed by the part that matters more: what operators usually get wrong about it. Definitions are free everywhere. The failure modes are what cost money.
The basics
Start here. Every other definition on this page is built from these words and nothing fancier.
Marketing
Getting the right people to know you exist, understand why you matter, and take the next step.
Funnel
The path a person travels from first hearing about you to becoming a patient: they see an ad, visit a page, fill out a form, book a visit, get treated. Each step loses some people. That's normal; the question is where you lose the most.
Lead
A person who has shown interest but hasn't become a patient yet: they filled out a form, booked a call, or downloaded something.
Conversion
The moment someone takes the action you wanted: booking, buying, signing up. "Converting" just means moving to the next step of the funnel.
Pixel
A small piece of code on your website that tells an ad platform what visitors did there: which pages they saw, which buttons they clicked. It's how platforms measure ads, and in healthcare it's also where most privacy trouble starts.
Churn
The rate at which patients leave. If 100 patients start a subscription and 20 cancel in a month, that month's churn is 20%.
Gross margin
The percentage of each dollar of revenue left after paying the direct costs of delivering the service (clinician time, medication, shipping). It tells you how much the business can afford to spend finding each new patient.
The referees
The medicine-side basics, for founders who didn't come from healthcare. Three different agencies police three different things, and mixing them up is how teams fix the wrong problem. Both referees' habits, in detail: why health ads get rejected.
FDA (Food and Drug Administration)
The federal agency that regulates drugs and medical products, including what you're allowed to say about them. When telehealth marketing gets an FDA warning letter, it's almost always about claims made about a medication.
FTC (Federal Trade Commission)
The federal agency that polices advertising itself: whether claims are truthful, backed by evidence, and not misleading. The FTC doesn't care that you're healthcare; it cares whether the ad deceives. GoodRx and BetterHelp were FTC actions, not FDA ones.
HIPAA
The federal law protecting patients' health information. It governs who may see, store, and share that information, which in practice includes your marketing tools, because a pixel can carry health information without anyone intending it to. Enforced by the Department of Health and Human Services, not the FDA or FTC.
Intake
The questionnaire and screening a patient completes before a clinician evaluates them. In telehealth, intake is where marketing and medicine hand off, and where most tracking and consent mistakes happen, because the person filling it out stops being "web traffic" and starts being a patient.
Money and measurement
These are the one-line versions. The working reference (what each number should look like before you buy growth, and what public telehealth filings suggest) is the growth metrics reference. This page tells you what the words mean; that page tells you when the numbers lie.
CAC (customer acquisition cost)
What it costs, in total, to get one new paying patient. What operators get wrong: trusting published benchmarks. No credible public telehealth CAC benchmark exists, and the most-quoted figures are built on numbers that don't support them. Hims & Hers' public filings, for example, don't say how many new patients they added or how many left, so a true CAC cannot be calculated from them. The full argument: what acquiring a telehealth patient actually costs.
LTV (lifetime value)
How much one patient is worth over their whole relationship with you. What operators get wrong: projecting it from the first month or two of behavior, in a category where patients often leave around month two. An LTV built on your earliest, happiest patients isn't a forecast, it's a hope with a decimal point.
LTV:CAC ratio
Lifetime value divided by acquisition cost. Investors read it as "does growth pay for itself." What operators get wrong: improving the ratio by assuming a bigger LTV instead of fixing why patients leave. The ratio is only as honest as its weaker half.
Payback period
How long it takes the profit from a patient (revenue minus the direct costs; see gross margin) to earn back what you spent acquiring them. When cash is limited this matters more than LTV:CAC, because a business can be profitable on paper and still run out of money waiting.
ROAS and MER
ROAS (return on ad spend): the revenue an ad platform credits to your ads, divided by what you spent on them. MER (media efficiency ratio): total revenue divided by total ad spend, a blunter number, useful because platform credit is now unreliable in healthcare, where privacy restrictions deliberately limit what platforms are told about each patient. If an agency promises precise ROAS in a restricted health account, ask them how.
Blended vs. incremental
Blended numbers average everything together; incremental numbers isolate what one channel actually added that wouldn't have happened anyway. What operators get wrong: paying agencies on blended numbers, which quietly credits them for patients your reputation would have brought in for free.
Attribution window
How long after someone clicks an ad the platform keeps taking credit for whatever that person does. What operators get wrong: comparing two agencies' reported results without asking whether both used the same window. Longer windows flatter everyone.
The approval machinery
LegitScript certification
The independent certification Google and Meta require before you can advertise prescription services. Real numbers, from LegitScript's own pricing page: $975 to apply per website (nonrefundable), $2,150 per year once certified, $2,500 extra for expedited review. What operators get wrong: treating it as paperwork to start "when the ads are ready." LegitScript itself declines to estimate how long review takes, which makes certification the longest wait in a telehealth launch. It goes first.
Probationary certification
LegitScript's tier for businesses with a record of compliance problems: $3,995 per year instead of $2,150, with more frequent monitoring. Worth knowing before you're tempted by a shortcut: a compliance record literally raises the annual price of being trusted again.
Restricted category
A label ad platforms attach to certain kinds of advertisers, health among them, that limits how their ads can be targeted, delivered, and measured. What operators get wrong: assuming the label is something you choose. Meta assigns it itself, and per its help center you can ask for a re-review but cannot change a category Meta assigned.
Personal attributes policy
Meta's rule that an ad cannot imply it knows something personal about the viewer's health. "Tired of what you see in the mirror?" is a violation, not a hook. This is where many weight-related ads die even after certification, because the instinct in ad writing is to name the reader's problem, which is exactly what the rule prohibits. More on the claims side: why health ads get rejected.
Data restrictions (Core Setup, event restrictions, full restrictions)
Meta's three levels of limiting what a health-labeled website's pixel may report back. The first level strips out details like which exact page was visited; the middle level blocks reporting of the actions closest to purchase (the ones ads are normally tuned on); the full level blocks everything. What operators get wrong: discovering their level from a performance drop instead of checking it in Meta's Events Manager before planning the funnel.
Warning letter
A public letter from the FDA or FTC saying your marketing violates the rules, with a deadline to respond. It is not a fine, and it is permanent: the letters sit in a public database your investors, partners, and competitors can search. What the letters keep flagging: the seven patterns regulators keep flagging.
Privacy and tracking
PHI (protected health information)
Health information connected to an identifiable person. In marketing this covers far more than people assume: the fact that someone visited a condition page, started a health questionnaire, or booked a consult can qualify. The operator mistake is thinking PHI lives only in the medical-records system. Regulators think it lives in your pixel.
BAA (business associate agreement)
The contract HIPAA requires before an outside vendor touches PHI on your behalf. What operators get wrong: assuming a BAA makes a tool safe to use. Ad platforms generally won't sign one for advertising data, which is why "we'll just get a BAA with Meta" is not a plan.
Hashing
Scrambling names, emails, or phone numbers into code before sending them to an ad platform. It does not make data anonymous; the FTC titled a 2024 post "No, hashing still doesn't make your data anonymous," because a scrambled identifier still identifies the same person. The full argument: can you hash patient data for Meta ads.
Retargeting and lookalike audiences
Retargeting: showing ads to people who already visited your site. Lookalike audiences: asking a platform to find strangers who resemble your existing patients. In telehealth both run on health-related data, which is why the safe version is designed into the funnel from the start, not bolted on: HIPAA-safe pixels and retargeting.
Consent (the marketing kind)
Specific, informed permission to use someone's information for marketing. What operators get wrong: believing a paragraph in the privacy policy counts. Courts hearing pixel lawsuits are increasingly skeptical that a standard legal paragraph nobody reads is the specific consent health data requires. Design consent into the funnel as its own step; don't cite it from the footer.
TCPA and CAN-SPAM
The federal laws governing marketing texts (TCPA) and marketing emails (CAN-SPAM). The operator mistake: treating leads and patients the same. A person who typed their phone number into your intake form has not agreed to promotional texts, and text-message violations are fined per message sent.
Claims and evidence
Substantiation
The evidence you can produce, on request, for every claim your ads make. The FTC's standard is that the evidence exists before the claim runs, not that you could assemble it after the letter arrives. If your team can't point to the file, the claim isn't substantiated. It's pending.
Fair balance
The requirement that promotion of a drug present its risks alongside its benefits. What operators get wrong: treating the risk language as legal filler to shrink. For someone deciding whether to trust you with their health, the disclosure is part of the sell: a page that states risks plainly reads as medicine, and a page that hides them reads as marketing.
The denominator problem (intent-to-treat)
"Intent-to-treat" is the clinical-research term for counting everyone who started a treatment when you report its results, not just the people who stayed on it. "Our patients lost 16% of body weight" means something different when the number quietly excludes everyone who quit. The FTC's guidance calls for counting the people who dropped out too. How to use your outcomes honestly, and why they're the one asset a competitor cannot copy: can you market your patient outcomes.
Off-label promotion
Marketing a drug for uses beyond the ones the FDA approved it for (the approved uses are spelled out in the drug's official labeling). Prescribing off-label can be a legitimate medical decision by the clinician; promoting off-label is prohibited. The line operators miss: your clinicians may prescribe off-label; your ads may not say so.
Testimonial (the regulated kind)
A patient's public endorsement of you. In healthcare it triggers three rule sets at once: the patient's documented consent, the FTC's requirement that results shown be typical (or clearly disclosed as not), and HIPAA. "She agreed to it" answers one of the three.
Hiring and vendors
Fractional CMO
A senior marketing leader who owns your growth decisions part-time. What operators get wrong: evaluating fractional as a discount on full-time. The argument for the seat is what the other half of the week is made of; in Off-Label's case, practicing medicine and seeing the patients the marketing is aimed at: who should actually hire a fractional CMO.
Retainer and the spend ladder
A retainer is what you pay an agency monthly regardless of output. The spend ladder is the order to buy things in: start closest to revenue (the offer, the message, the page people land on, the follow-up) and work outward. The beautiful brand system comes after the market responds, not before. The full ladder: the agency-hiring guide.
Whitelisting (agency ad accounts)
Running your ads through an agency's already-approved ad account instead of certifying your own business. What operators get wrong: hearing "we're already whitelisted" as a shortcut. To the platform, that structure can look like hiding whose product is being sold, and hiding what you sell is the category of violation Google bans permanently, without warning. Certify your own business. Slower once, faster forever.
This page defines terms; it does not give legal advice. Definitions of regulated concepts (PHI, substantiation, fair balance, off-label) describe how these terms function in marketing operations; your counsel owns what they require of you. Figures cited: LegitScript published pricing (legitscript.com), FTC.gov, and the pages linked above, each carrying its own sources. The last-updated date reflects the most recent substantive revision.