Terms & Conditions

Who we are

The Healthcare Marketing, also written as THM, is a digital marketing agency working with healthcare businesses. In these terms, "we", "us" and "our" mean The Healthcare Marketing (THM), and "you" means the person or business using this website or engaging us for work.

We operate online from the United States and work with clients there and in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.

What these terms cover

These terms cover two things: using this website, and the general framework for working with us.

Anything specific to your project, such as what we are building, what it costs and when it is due, lives in the proposal, quote or statement of work we agree with you. Where that document and these terms disagree, the signed document wins. These terms fill the gaps it does not address.

Using the site means you accept the terms in sections 3 and 4. Engaging us for work means you accept the rest.

Using this website

You may read, print and share pages from this site for your own business purposes. You may not:

• Copy our content and publish it as your own, here or anywhere else.
• Scrape, harvest or bulk-download the site.
• Try to break, overload or gain unauthorised access to the site or anything behind it.
• Use the site to send anything unlawful, misleading or harmful.
• Submit someone else's personal information through our forms without their knowledge.

We keep the site available as best we reasonably can, but we do not promise it will never be down. Hosting, software and the internet all fail occasionally, and we may take the site offline to maintain it.

Information on this site is guidance, not advice

Everything we publish here, including articles, guides, case studies and the pages describing our services, is general marketing guidance for healthcare businesses.

It is not medical advice, legal advice, regulatory advice or financial advice, and it is not a substitute for any of them. Healthcare advertising rules, privacy law and professional obligations differ by country, by state or province, and by profession, and they change. Before you act on anything you read here, check it against the rules that apply to you, and take professional advice where the decision warrants it.

We take care to keep what we publish accurate, but we do not warrant that it is complete or current, and we are not responsible for decisions you make based on it alone.

Our services

We provide digital marketing services to healthcare businesses, which may include search engine optimisation, paid advertising, content, web design and development, social media and reputation management. What we are actually doing for you is whatever your proposal says.

We are a marketing agency. We do not provide clinical services, we do not give medical advice to your patients, and nothing we produce should be presented as though we do. Clinical accuracy in anything we write for you remains yours to confirm, which is why clinical review is part of how we work.

We may use subcontractors or specialists for parts of a project. Where we do, we remain responsible to you for the work.

What we need from you

Most projects that go wrong do so because one of these was missing rather than because of the work itself.

• Timely answers and approvals. We will tell you what we need and when. Work pauses while we wait, and timelines move with it.
• Accurate information. What you tell us about your services, credentials, locations and prices is what we publish. We are not in a position to verify it for you.
• Rights to what you give us. If you send us photographs, logos, text or testimonials, you confirm you are entitled to use them and to let us publish them.
• Consent where people are identifiable. Patient photographs, stories and testimonials need the patient's consent before they go anywhere near a website or an advert. Getting that consent is yours, not ours.
• Access we can actually use. Where a project needs access to your website, hosting, domain, analytics or advertising accounts, access has to be granted to us properly rather than by sharing a password.

Fees and payment

What you pay, when you pay it and what it covers are set out in your proposal or invoice. Those terms apply rather than anything general we could write here.

Unless your proposal says otherwise: fees exclude any taxes that apply where you are, advertising budgets and third-party costs such as hosting, domains, software licences and stock media are yours and are not included in our fees, and invoices are payable by the date on the invoice.

If an invoice goes unpaid we may pause work, and on a retainer we may stop the ongoing work until the account is settled. We will tell you before we do that rather than letting a campaign quietly stop.

Who owns what

What becomes yours

Once we have been paid in full for a piece of work, the deliverables we produced specifically for you are yours: the website build, the content we wrote, the designs, the campaign structures and the documentation. Where it makes sense, accounts such as your advertising account, analytics, hosting and domain are registered in your name from the beginning rather than transferred later.

What stays ours

The things we bring to every project stay ours: our processes, templates, internal tools, code libraries, frameworks and know-how. You get a licence to use them as part of what we built for you. You do not get to resell them or hand them to another agency as a starting point.

Third-party material

Fonts, stock images, plugins and software used in a project are licensed rather than owned, on whatever terms their owner sets. Where a licence is ongoing, keeping it current is yours once the project is handed over.

Showing the work

Unless you tell us otherwise in writing, we may show work we have produced for you as an example of what we do, including on this website and in proposals. We will not publish anything you have told us is confidential, and we do not publish patient information in any circumstances. If you would rather we did not reference you at all, say so and we will not.

Third-party platforms

Much of our work runs on platforms nobody controls but their owner: search engines, advertising platforms, social networks, review sites, hosting companies and content management systems.

Those platforms set their own rules and change them without notice. They can reject an advert, suspend an account, change how results are ranked or alter what a tool can do, and they can do it overnight. We work within their rules and tell you what we know of them, but we are not responsible for their decisions, their outages or their pricing, and a change at their end is not a failure at ours.

Results

This section matters more than its length suggests, so it is written plainly.

We do not guarantee results. We cannot promise a position in search results, a volume of traffic, a number of enquiries, a number of patients, a cost per enquiry or a return on your spend. Nobody who is being straight with you will.

What we will do is tell you what we would do and why, forecast from real data where real data exists, report honestly on what happens, and say so when something is not working. Where you have seen figures from past projects, they describe what happened for that client in their market at that time. They are not a prediction for yours.

Marketing results depend on things outside our control, including your market, your competitors, your pricing, your availability, how quickly you respond to enquiries, and how each platform behaves.

Confidentiality

Each of us will keep the other's confidential information to ourselves, use it only for the work, and not pass it on without permission. That covers your business information, your figures, your plans and anything else not already public, and it continues after the work ends.

It does not cover information that is already public, that we already had, or that we are required by law to disclose.

Data protection and patient information

How we handle personal information is set out in our privacy policy, which forms part of these terms.

Where we work on your systems, any personal information in them stays yours. You decide what happens to it and we act on your instructions. We do not seek patient health information, we do not want it, and we do not use it for our own purposes.

Where a client or the law requires a specific data agreement before we are given that access, such as a business associate agreement in the United States, we enter into one before access begins.

Ending the work

How either of us ends an engagement, and how much notice is required, is set out in your proposal.

Whatever the notice period, when work ends: you pay for work done up to that point, we hand over what you have paid for in a usable form, access we hold to your accounts is returned or removed, and anything we have not been paid for stays ours.

We may stop work immediately if an account goes seriously overdue, if we are asked to do something unlawful or in breach of a platform's rules, or if continuing would put us in breach of a professional or regulatory obligation.

Liability

Nothing in these terms limits liability where the law does not allow it to be limited, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

Subject to that, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, lost profits, lost revenue, lost data or lost business opportunity arising from our work, and our total liability in connection with an engagement is limited to the fees you have paid us for that engagement.

We are also not liable for losses caused by inaccurate information you gave us, approvals you granted, decisions by third-party platforms, or changes made to the work by someone else after handover.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the United States and the state in which we are established, and any dispute will be dealt with by the courts there, unless your proposal says otherwise.

If you are engaging us from the United Kingdom, Canada or Australia, that choice of law does not remove consumer protections that apply to you where you live and cannot be contracted out of.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as the business or the law changes. The date at the top shows when they last changed, and the version in force is the one published here when you use the site.

For work already underway, the terms that applied when we agreed it continue to apply, unless we agree a change with you in writing.

Contacting us

Questions about these terms can go to the address below. There is no form here on purpose: an email reaches a person, and a question about a contract should.