What Telehealth Companies Can and Can't Say in Their Marketing

Telehealth marketing operates under more rules than almost any other category, and they come from several directions at once. The FTC cares about your claims. The FDA cares about how you describe drugs. State medical boards care about advertising by licensed practices. The ad platforms have their own rules, which are often stricter than the law.

Most of the enforcement risk is avoidable, and it mostly comes down to a few habits.

One caveat before anything else: this is an engineering team's summary of the landscape, not legal advice. Regulated health marketing needs review by counsel who practises in it. What follows should help you ask better questions, not replace the answer.

Claims have to be substantiated

The FTC's basic requirement is that you have adequate substantiation before you make a claim, not after someone challenges it. For health claims specifically, that generally means competent and reliable scientific evidence.

In practice:

Don't claim outcomes you can't cite. "Patients lose an average of 15% of body weight" needs a study, and the study needs to actually match what you're offering.

Be careful with implied claims. A before-and-after image next to a price makes a claim even if no sentence does. So does a headline like "finally get rid of it."

Watch the qualifiers. "Results may vary" in small grey text at the bottom doesn't cure a headline that promised a specific outcome. Regulators look at the net impression, not the disclaimer.

Typical results, not best results. If you show an outcome, it needs to represent what people generally get, or you need to clearly state what they generally get.

Testimonials are a specific trap

The FTC updated its endorsement rules recently, and health is where they're strictest.

• A testimonial has to come from a real customer describing their real experience
• If the experience isn't typical, saying "results not typical" is not enough — you generally need to disclose the results people should actually expect
• Any material connection has to be disclosed. If you paid, gave free product, or the person is an employee or investor, say so
• Fabricating a review, or suppressing negative ones, is straightforwardly illegal

The last point catches companies out. Only publishing your five-star reviews and quietly burying the rest is a practice the FTC has taken action on.

Prescription drugs have their own rulebook

If you're prescribing, FDA rules on drug promotion come into play, and they're detailed.

The general shape: promotional material naming a drug and its use has to present benefit and risk in balance, including the important safety information. Ads that name a drug but not its use, or the condition but not the drug, work under different rules.

There's also the compounded-drug question, which has been an active area of attention. If your model involves compounded medication, that's a conversation with counsel before it's a conversation with your marketing team.

Do not let a growth marketer write drug copy unsupervised. This is the highest-risk surface in telehealth marketing and it needs medical and legal review on every asset.

The ad platforms are stricter than the law

Google and Meta both restrict health advertising heavily, and their rules are private policy rather than statute — meaning there's no appeal to fairness, only to their process.

Expect:

• Certification requirements for some categories, particularly anything involving prescription drugs or addiction treatment
• Blanket prohibitions on certain claims and conditions, regardless of whether they're true
• Restrictions on personalised targeting for health. You generally cannot target based on inferred medical conditions
• Account-level risk. Repeated violations don't get you a warning on one ad, they can cost you the account

Build for that: keep landing pages compliant even for traffic that isn't from ads, because reviewers look at the destination, not just the creative.

Your tracking is a compliance surface too

This is the one engineering teams need to own.

Ad pixels and analytics on pages where patients enter health information can transmit that information to third parties who never signed a business associate agreement. Regulators have been active on exactly this pattern, and there have been substantial settlements.

The practical rules:

• No third-party tracking on intake, portal, or any authenticated page
• Never put a condition or treatment in a URL, query string, or page title
• If marketing needs conversion data, send a de-identified server-side event rather than firing a pixel in the patient's browser
• Audit what actually loads on those pages, not what you think loads

This is why the architecture matters. If your marketing site and your patient-facing app are cleanly separated, your marketing team can work normally on one side without dragging the other into scope.

State-level rules exist too

Medical boards regulate advertising by licensed practitioners, and the rules vary. Common themes:

• How practitioners and their credentials may be described
• Restrictions on terms like "specialist" or "expert" without corresponding certification
• Rules on patient solicitation
• Requirements to identify the responsible practice or physician

If you operate in many states, this is a matrix your compliance team maintains, not something to work out per campaign.

A workable process

For a team shipping marketing regularly:

1. A claims document. Every claim you make, with its substantiation, in one place. Marketing writes from it rather than inventing.
2. Medical and legal review before publish, on anything making a health claim. Not after.
3. A "safe" component library — approved testimonial formats, approved disclosure blocks — so the same reviewed patterns get reused.
4. Periodic re-review. Claims go stale. The study you cited two years ago may have been superseded.
5. A clean separation between marketing pages and anything touching patient data, enforced in the architecture rather than by convention.

The honest summary

Most telehealth companies get into trouble the same two ways: a marketer writes an outcome claim nobody substantiated, or a pixel ends up on a page it should never have been on.

Both are process failures rather than knowledge failures. Fix the process and the rest is manageable.

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We build telehealth sites with the marketing and patient layers genuinely separated, so your tracking never lands where it shouldn't. See the telehealth build.