For years, the word “community” in the health space has been code for “niche”—a valuable, high-quality corner, perhaps, but one that lacks the scale to truly move the needle at a large scale. At Health Union, we’re changing that narrative entirely.

We’ve not only built the best, most engaging, and largest network of patient communities in the industry, but we’ve successfully leveraged that power to deliver unrivaled performance for our partners, proving that high quality and massive scale don’t have to be mutually exclusive. We are the first community-based activation company that has figured out how to take the high-quality, high-intent patients and actions within our communities and deliver those audiences at scale—everywhere.

The Recipe for Community-Driven Success

How have we managed to transform the perception of community and deliver top-of-plan performance across every key metric, from qualified reach and cost efficiencies to conversions? It’s been a deliberate, intentional focus over our past two years of transformation, built on a foundation of proprietary data and cutting-edge technology.

• Proprietary First-Party Data: Our success starts with the millions of data points collected directly from real people in our 53 communities. This data comes from authentic engagement—content consumption, polls, forum discussions, and large-scale surveys—not just claims data, which can be outdated and doesn’t cover the full spectrum of a patient’s intent. This gives us a crucial competitive edge.
• The ILLUMINÉ Data Engine: We’ve invested in an industry-leading tech stack and the best people to bring our vision to life. The result is our data engine, ILLUMINÉ, which translates those millions of first-party (1P) data points into privacy-safe audiences in real time, enabling us to retarget the patients in our communities at scale and reach additional highly relevant patient audiences.
• Real-Time, Predictive Targeting: Unlike targeting based on past actions, our method is based on what patients are doing now—real signals that help us predict what they are going to do next in their health journey. We also use AI to help us optimize and ensure we reach the highest quality patients.

This combination of quality, scale, and intent to act is what’s truly driving results where it matters most: conversion and ROI.

Proof in the Performance

For a leading pharma manufacturer, we’ve seen superior performance across multiple brands spanning therapeutic areas from oncology to neurology, GI conditions to rare disease. Our direct media programs are outperforming other endemic partners because we are able to reach our engaged patients everywhere they are, in the moments they are actively seeking solutions.

Here’s a look at how our optimization strategy impacted performance in 2025 across diverse conditions (source: Crossix):