Salesforce Pardot, also known as Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, is not HIPAA compliant for handling electronic protected health information because Salesforce does not make a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement available for Pardot in a way that permits Covered Entities or Business Associates to use the platform to create, receive, maintain, or transmit protected health information for marketing automation workflows.
HIPAA compliance for a vendor service requires both contract coverage and operational safeguards. When a vendor performs functions involving protected health information on behalf of a HIPAA Covered Entity or Business Associate, a written Business Associate Agreement is required and must address permitted uses and disclosures, safeguard obligations under the HIPAA Security Rule, incident and breach reporting under the HIPAA Breach Notification Rule, and subcontractor controls. If a Business Associate Agreement does not cover the specific product and service scope, protected health information cannot be routed through that product.
Salesforce is willing to sign a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement for certain Salesforce services that Salesforce designates as eligible for regulated data use, and the agreement typically limits permitted protected health information processing to those covered services and configurations. That willingness does not extend to Salesforce Pardot for protected health information use cases described as email marketing automation, which leaves healthcare organizations without the required contractual basis to place protected health information into Pardot databases, forms, automation rules, or outbound campaigns.
Pardot functionality can cause protected health information to enter and propagate across multiple data pathways, including prospect records, custom fields, segmentation lists, scoring rules, form submissions, landing pages, dynamic content, campaign assets, tracking parameters, and integrations that sync data to customer relationship management systems or third-party applications. A person’s identity combined with a connection to care, benefits, appointments, diagnoses, prescriptions, test results, or payment status can constitute protected health information even when message content is brief. The HIPAA Privacy Rule also restricts the use and disclosure of protected health information for marketing, and marketing communications frequently require a valid authorization when they use protected health information outside permitted communications.
Healthcare organizations can use Pardot only for campaigns and data sets that exclude protected health information and do not link identifiable individuals to treatment, payment, or healthcare operations. When the workflow requires patient-specific outreach that relies on protected health information, select a platform that will execute a Business Associate Agreement for the in-scope services and can support access controls, audit controls, transmission security, and incident response processes aligned to HIPAA requirements.