February is American Heart Month, a time to focus attention on cardiovascular health and importance of cardiovascular disease (CVD) prevention in the U.S. Despite advances in care, heart disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S.
It’s also a good opportunity to discuss how critically important it is to identify and reach the people who may be at risk before a serious cardiac event brings them into the healthcare system. Unfortunately, there are many people with elevated cardiovascular risk who remain undiagnosed or disengaged from the healthcare system until a serious incident occurs. The challenge is that traditional outreach strategies can struggle to engage these audiences early enough to make a meaningful impact.
Healthcare audiences grounded in real data can help close that gap. By using specific metrics and insights, you can develop and reach the right audiences sooner, leading to more successful campaigns that resonate with the people your marketing team care about most.
The challenge: At-risk populations can be hard to reach
Reaching people who may be at risk for cardiovascular disease isn’t as straightforward as pulling a list based on age or ZIP code. Many individuals with an elevated risk for CVD don’t have a formal diagnosis, may only interact with their healthcare network sporadically, or don’t recognize early warning signs as something that warrants care. This means risk often goes unnoticed until the disease has progressed significantly, or a serious cardiac event forcibly brings a patient into the system.
In the early stages of CVD, symptoms can be subtle, temporary, or easy to dismiss. Fatigue, swelling, or shoulder and neck pain may come and go, or be attributed to stress, aging, or everyday aches rather than an underlying heart condition. When symptoms don’t feel urgent or severe, people are less likely to seek care, and marketers have fewer touchpoints to engage them around screening or prevention.
Screening behavior also plays a role. Many individuals, especially younger adults or those without a family history of cardiovascular disease, may not prioritize routine checkups or heart health assessments. Heart disease is also frequently underdiagnosed in women, in part because symptoms can present differently than they do in men. These gaps make it harder to identify risk early using traditional outreach approaches alone.
Access is another major barrier. Some at-risk individuals live in rural or underserved areas where care options are limited. Others face challenges related to insurance coverage, transportation, or financial constraints, which can delay or prevent engagement with the healthcare system altogether. These populations are often the hardest to reach, but also the most likely to benefit from earlier screening and intervention.
For marketing professionals, what we have here is a visibility problem. Traditional audience strategies built on broad demographics can work, but they often miss the nuances of how people actually move through the healthcare journey.
Timing matters too. When outreach happens too late, opportunities for early screening, education, and preventive intervention are already narrowing. Campaigns may reach people after diagnoses are made, or care decisions are already underway, limiting the ability to influence behavior in a meaningful way. Without deeper insights into risk patterns, care access, and social determinants of health, your campaigns won’t be operating at 100%, meaning you’re missing valuable opportunities to connect with sizable patient populations.
Redefining the meaning of “at-risk”
The challenges mentioned above all point to the same issue: Many people at-risk for heart disease don’t fit neatly into traditional audience segments.
To reach these populations earlier, healthcare marketers need to level up their audience segmentation strategy by looking beyond demographics like age, gender, or geography. Rather than focus merely on surface-level characteristics, marketers should dive into more nuanced signals of cardiovascular risk.
One important set of signals comes from how and where people interact with the healthcare system. Irregular primary care visits, frequent use of urgent care centers, or long gaps between appointments can all suggest unmanaged risk factors or delays in care.
Comorbidities provide additional context. Conditions like diabetes, obesity, hypertension, sleep apnea, or chronic kidney disease often overlap with cardiovascular risk. Even when heart disease isn’t the primary concern, the presence of these conditions can signal an increased likelihood of future cardiac issues and a need for earlier education or screening.
There are also medication and treatment patterns that can offer insight. Changes in prescriptions, inconsistent medication adherence, or a reliance on short-term symptom management might reflect risk that hasn’t been fully addressed.
Altogether, these data points can help paint a more complete picture of cardiovascular health and risk in your area of the healthcare market. By grounding your research and segmentation efforts around real-world behavior and population-level insights, your marketing team can find, prioritize, and engage with the most valuable audiences earlier and more effectively.
Level up your campaign performance with Digital Audiences
Understanding who may be at risk of cardiovascular disease (or any condition) is only half the equation. The real impact comes from being able to act on those insights, so your campaigns reach the most relevant audiences at the right moment, across the right channels. That’s where Definitive Healthcare’s Digital Audiences solution comes in.
Digital Audiences helps marketing teams launch better campaigns and generate measurable results with high-quality, HIPAA-compliant audiences across therapeutic interests, patient journey progress, treatment history, demographic-based criteria, and more.
This level of precision outreach is effective for both patient and professional campaigns who want to capitalize on heart health conversations this month. For patient-focused campaigns, Digital Audiences enables marketers to reach populations more likely to benefit from heart health education, screening reminders, or preventive messaging, without waiting for a diagnosis to occur. For healthcare professional campaigns, it supports more focused engagement with providers, organizations, or care settings that are actively involved in cardiovascular care and decision-making. In both cases, it results in campaigns that are more relevant, timely, and effective.
Just as important, all of this is built on a privacy-first, HIPAA-compliant foundation. Digital Audiences are constructed using de-identified data and designed to support compliant activation across digital channels. This ensures marketers can engage audiences responsibly and maintain trust while still delivering measurable results.
Ready to take the next step? Learn more about Digital Audiences here and fill out the form to start building specialized audiences for your campaign needs.
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