Much of what gets written about healthcare websites and tracking comes from lawsuits. A clinic gets sued, the complaint describes what its website was doing, and that one story stands in for the whole industry. We wanted a better picture than that.

So we are measuring it. Sounder is scanning clinic and hospital websites across the country to find out how many of them share visitor data with advertising and analytics companies, which companies, and whether the site waits for the visitor’s consent before doing it. The scanner is the same tool we use in our consulting work. Every site is checked the same way, and the methodology page explains exactly what it does and where it can be wrong.

Our Commitments:

We announce ourselves. Every research request identifies Sounder, links to the methodology page, and carries an address you can write to. We read and obey robots.txt. If your site tells us to stay out, we stay out.

We publish numbers, not names. Results are reported in aggregate: what share of sites did what. We do not publish findings about individual sites from this research. If you want to know what we saw on your own site, ask and we will send it to you.

We publish our failures too. When a site blocks the scanner or does not load, that counts and gets reported alongside everything else. Most web measurement studies leave that number out. We think it is part of the answer.

Findings will appear here as the work progresses. To ask a question, or to have a site excluded from research scans, write to hello@sounderdata.com with the domain and we will confirm by email.

This research describes what websites do. It is not legal advice about any particular site.