Archetype — AEP-Locked Healthcare CX Evaluator

Organizational profile

Healthcare organization — health system, regional payer, or specialty care network — with 50K–500K patient or member profiles. Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) is the incumbent CDP, typically selected as part of a broader Adobe licensing agreement (e.g., alongside Marketo Engage or Campaign). Snowflake is the active CDW; the data engineering team (medium staffing) manages both layers. Stream processing staffing is small: real-time pipelines exist but are not heavily built out.

RACI-Accountable: VP Engineering (not CMO or CDO). This is the defining organizational signal. The evaluation is not pure marketing-led — IT, compliance, and engineering jointly own the architecture decision. Marketing may hold the Responsible role for activation outcomes but engineering owns the governance question.

HIPAA data residency: true. Every layer of the CDP stack — ingestion, storage, processing, activation — must be covered by a BAA. This eliminates cloud-agnostic activation vendors that do not offer BAAs; constrains CDW-based composable CDP approaches to Snowflake and Databricks (both BAA-available); and limits pixel/event-collection vendors to those with HIPAA-compliant SDKs.

Trigger pattern

Usually precipitated by one of:

• AEP contract renewal approaching — VP Engineering and Legal jointly re-evaluate total cost of ownership against realized CX outcomes.
• Healthcare organization grows through acquisition; new facilities or member populations use different digital systems, and AEP profile unification across the acquired entities is proving complex or expensive.
• Compliance audit surfaces gaps in the data residency posture: AEP feature flags or integrations that route data outside the BAA-covered scope.
• Engineering team implements Snowflake CDW for data science; begins questioning whether AEP activation layers are redundant with Snowflake-native capabilities.

Common presenting questions

• "We have AEP. We have Snowflake. Are we paying for the right thing, or should we be doing more from Snowflake directly?"
• "Our patient portal personalization is still batch-based. Can AEP do intra-session without a major architecture change?"
• "We want to unify member profiles across our regional affiliates, but each affiliate has separate Salesforce and Epic instances. Is AEP the right unification layer, or should we look at something purpose-built for healthcare?"
• "Every new vendor we consider for digital personalization needs a BAA. Our legal team is slowing down everything — is there a compliant architecture that reduces the BAA surface?"

Recommended direction

Three viable paths, each appropriate for a different sub-variant:

Path 1 — Maximize AEP on Snowflake (stay-and-optimize): AEP's Healthcare and Life Sciences (HLS) industry cloud includes HIPAA-compliant data handling, BAA-covered pipeline components, and Epic/Salesforce Health Cloud connectors. The AEP–Snowflake zero-copy integration (Real-Time CDP + Snowflake Data Cloud) allows profile enrichment without data movement out of the BAA-covered boundary. Appropriate when: AEP is deeply embedded (multiple Adobe products), switching cost is prohibitive, and the CX gap is a configuration/staffing gap rather than a fundamental capability gap.

Path 2 — Supplement with composable activation on Snowflake: Add vendor.hightouch (Hightouch offers HIPAA BAA; Snowflake-native activation without data movement) to AEP as a CX activation layer, keeping AEP as the profile store. Reduces activation lag (intra-session latency achievable via Hightouch's Live Syncs) without replacing AEP. Appropriate when: AEP is the source-of-truth but activation speed or campaign flexibility is the gap.

Path 3 — Evaluate Amperity as AEP replacement: vendor.amperity (Lakehouse CDP, HIPAA BAA available, Snowflake zero-copy, Stitch identity resolution suited to fragmented healthcare records) is a viable long-term alternative for organizations where AEP was selected for completeness but the healthcare-specific identity resolution and data model flexibility are a better fit. Appropriate when: AEP's generalist data model is creating friction for patient identity resolution across Epic/Cerner/Salesforce Health Cloud systems.

Key tradeoffs

• Switching cost is real. AEP licensing, training investment, and integration depth mean the stay-and-optimize path (Path 1) has a strong total-cost advantage even when individual capability gaps favor alternatives.
• BAA surface area. Each additional vendor in the architecture expands HIPAA BAA administration burden. Engineering and compliance teams bear this cost. Prefer architectures that extend existing BAA relationships over architectures that add net-new ones.
• Intra-session latency: AEP's native intra-session personalization requires Real-Time CDP + Edge Network configuration — not trivial. Hightouch Live Syncs (Path 2) may be faster to stand up against the same Snowflake source.
• VP Engineering RACI. Proposals to this stakeholder must address governance, BAA scope, and total cost of ownership — not just marketing activation metrics. A recommendation framed only in campaign performance terms will not land.