DeepIntent this week launched Helix, a purpose-built healthcare marketing cloud designed to give agencies, brands, and their partners access to the company's decade-long investment in health data infrastructure - without the cost and complexity of rebuilding that foundation from scratch. The announcement was made on March 19, 2026, at the company's annual AdLab forum for senior healthcare marketing leaders in New York.

The platform, formally named DeepIntent Helix, sits on top of the same data infrastructure that already powers DeepIntent's own demand-side platform, DeepIntent Cortex DSP, and its outcomes measurement product, DeepIntent Outcomes. For the first time, that foundation is being opened to third parties across the healthcare ecosystem.

What Helix actually is

Helix is a cloud-based build environment, not a finished product. Partners enter the platform and construct their own healthcare marketing solutions on top of DeepIntent's proprietary data stack. According to DeepIntent, the platform provides HIPAA-compliant access to granular healthcare and media insights spanning more than 3.7 million healthcare providers and over 240 million patient lives. Those datasets can be analyzed and operationalized directly within Helix - without moving data out into less secure environments.

Four capabilities form the platform's technical core. The first is frictionless data integration: partners can onboard, merge, and activate data from first-party, third-party, and media sources in a single environment. The second is a flexible build environment that allows partners to create custom, white-labeled solutions they own outright. The third is a powerful analytics workbench equipped with pre-built query libraries and real-time refreshes of both health and media data. The fourth - and technically significant - is support for Standard AI Protocols, including a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. That MCP server allows partners to access Helix directly through the AI tools they already use, rather than building separate integrations.

The inclusion of MCP support places Helix inside a rapidly expanding movement in advertising technology. The ad tech industry has been converging on MCP as a standard layer connecting AI systems to external data since mid-2025. Google explored MCP server integration with its Ads API in July 2025, released an open-source version in October 2025, and Amazon Ads opened its own MCP Server to open beta in February 2026. Amazon's MCP Server, built on the same open standard as Helix's implementation, converts natural language prompts into structured API calls. DeepIntent is now applying this same architecture to the regulated, compliance-heavy context of healthcare.

DeepIntent's background

Founded in 2016, DeepIntent describes itself as the leading healthcare demand-side platform. According to the company, it serves more than 600 leading brands, more than 10 top global pharmaceutical companies, and over 50 agencies. Its client retention rate stands at 98 percent. The company's platform processes 180 billion-plus ad queries per minute and reports an average audience quality lift of 160 percent when its Outcomes and SmartBid optimization tools are used in combination. Campaigns running integrated configurations have achieved up to 25 times the increase in new patient starts, according to the company's own published figures.

The platform is built specifically for the compliance requirements of pharmaceutical and healthcare advertising. It unites media, identity, and real-world clinical data to power privacy-safe, omnichannel campaigns across television, mobile, display, electronic health records, digital out-of-home, and audio. The existing product stack includes DeepIntent Outcomes, a suite of pharma-focused analytics connecting media to real-world health outcomes, and DeepIntent Orchestrate, which dynamically updates healthcare professional (HCP) target lists while pushing physician-level reporting into next-best-action systems.

Why this matters: the structural problem Helix addresses

According to Chris Paquette, Founder and CEO of DeepIntent, "Our clients have no shortage of innovative ideas, but what they've lacked is the infrastructure to act on them at the speed the market now demands." That infrastructure gap has become more pronounced as three distinct pressures converge on the healthcare marketing sector simultaneously.

First, advances in personalized medicine are creating increasingly precise patient populations. Targeting in pharmaceutical marketing has to keep pace with how clinical practice is segmenting patients - by biomarker, by comorbidity, by treatment history. Second, media consumption continues to fragment across streaming, connected television, mobile, and digital environments. DeepIntent's own analysis has shown that 77 percent of healthcare providers are reachable through FAST (free ad-supported streaming television) channels, significantly exceeding the 34.6 percent reach among the general population. Third, rapid advances in AI are raising expectations for faster, more sophisticated solutions from marketing teams that often lack the engineering resources to build those capabilities internally.

Helix is framed as the connective layer between those expectations and the reality of what regulated healthcare data allows. Building HIPAA-compliant infrastructure capable of handling both health data and large-scale media datasets requires substantial technical investment. DeepIntent spent a decade building that infrastructure for itself. Helix is the commercial offering of that internal capability.

Early partners and reported results

Two early partners have disclosed performance figures. Deerfield, described as an integrated marketing, media, and communications partner for healthcare and life sciences companies, was among the first to build on Helix. According to Bill Veltre, EVP and Head of Media at Deerfield, "DeepIntent has done the heavy lifting behind the scenes - from making premium healthcare datasets AI-ready to providing building tools and direct connections to activation channels. That allows us to move from idea to execution much faster, while developing solutions that differentiate how we plan, buy, and optimize media."

Trinity, a strategic, tech-enabled commercialization company serving pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical device clients, used Helix to expand an existing product with a more complete view of physician behavior. The goal was to translate strategic segmentation into coordinated action across both field teams and digital channels. According to Shri Salem, Partner and Head of Data and AI Consulting at Trinity, "Helix gives us an enhanced level of visibility into how healthcare audiences engage across digital channels. In one recent project, campaign engagement increased by nearly 80 percent while prescription volume doubled within a short period of time."

Across early partners, DeepIntent reports workflows running up to 50 percent faster and campaign engagement increases of nearly 80 percent. Prescription volume doubling within short deployment windows is also cited, though the company does not specify the exact duration of those windows in the public announcement.

Technical architecture: HCP and patient data at scale

The datasets underpinning Helix cover more than 3.7 million healthcare providers - enabling targeting at the level of individual physicians - alongside data on more than 240 million patient lives. Within the platform, partners can analyze those datasets to uncover market insights, understand competitive dynamics, and build high-value HCP and patient audience segments, all within a single HIPAA-compliant environment. The platform also supports direct endemic connections to major publishers including Everyday Health, Healio, and Veradigm.

Helix's pre-bid protections include HUMAN IVT and Jounce fraud prevention, ensuring ads run only on sites built for humans and viewed by real people. The analytics workbench includes pre-built query libraries that reduce the time needed to move from a data question to an actionable audience segment. Real-time health and media data refreshes mean that audience segments are not built on stale data - a meaningful distinction in healthcare, where clinical behavior can shift quickly.

The MCP server component deserves particular attention. The Model Context Protocol, originally developed by Anthropic and donated to the Linux Foundation, functions as a standardized connection framework between AI applications and diverse data sources. By implementing an MCP server, DeepIntent allows partners to query Helix data and capabilities through AI tools that already speak MCP - without requiring custom integrations for each tool. The Ad Context Protocol, launched in October 2025 by a coalition including Scope3, Yahoo, PubMatic, and others, built on the same MCP foundation. DeepIntent's decision to adopt MCP positions Helix as compatible with that emerging ecosystem, though the company operates in a distinct, regulated vertical where compliance requirements shape every technical decision.

Context for the marketing community

The launch sits within a broader competitive dynamic for healthcare advertising infrastructure. StackAdapt launched in-platform National Provider Identifier (NPI) targeting for pharmaceutical advertisers on January 6, 2026, enabling deterministic, one-to-one HCP campaigns with daily impression-level reporting and HIPAA compliance. That product targets the same category of marketer - pharmaceutical brands needing to reach verified healthcare professionals - but operates as a self-serve tool within StackAdapt's broader platform rather than as an open infrastructure layer.

Helix operates at a different level of the stack. Rather than offering a finished targeting product, it offers the underlying infrastructure on which partners build their own products. That positioning - opening proprietary infrastructure to third-party builders - has precedent in other technology verticals but is relatively novel in healthcare advertising. The platform gives agencies the tools to create custom, white-labeled solutions they own outright, meaning the intellectual property of whatever is built on Helix belongs to the partner, not to DeepIntent.

DeepIntent had been expanding its media channel coverage in the months leading up to today's launch. The company launched its HealthFirst Audio Package on September 30, 2025, partnering with iHeartMedia and SiriusXM to target healthcare audiences through streaming audio, marking what the company described as the first major healthcare DSP to unify connected television and audio under a single suite. That expansion of inventory access, combined with the opening of Helix, suggests a strategic direction: DeepIntent is building both the channels through which healthcare advertising reaches audiences and the infrastructure through which partners construct the campaigns.

Healthcare brands face specific measurement pressures that general-purpose advertising platforms do not address. Proving that a media impression contributed to a prescription - what the industry calls script lift - requires connecting media exposure data to clinical claims data. DeepIntent's Outcomes product handles that connection. Helix, by extending access to the underlying data and tooling, allows partners to build their own measurement logic on top of that same infrastructure.

Timeline

Summary

Who: DeepIntent, the leading healthcare demand-side platform founded in 2016 and headquartered at 4 Bryant Park, New York, NY 10018. Early partners include Deerfield and Trinity.

What: The launch of DeepIntent Helix, a purpose-built healthcare marketing cloud that gives agencies, brands, and partners access to DeepIntent's proprietary data infrastructure. The platform provides HIPAA-compliant access to data on more than 3.7 million healthcare providers and 240 million patient lives, along with a flexible build environment, analytics workbench, and an MCP server for AI tool integration. Early partners report workflows up to 50 percent faster and campaign engagement increases of nearly 80 percent.

When: Announced on March 19, 2026, at DeepIntent's AdLab annual forum for senior healthcare marketing leaders. The platform is now available to brands, agencies, and partners within the DeepIntent ecosystem.

Where: New York. DeepIntent's infrastructure and the Helix platform are available to the company's ecosystem of partners globally, operating across omnichannel healthcare advertising environments including CTV, display, EHR, DOOH, and audio.

Why: A widening gap between what healthcare marketers are being asked to deliver and what their current infrastructure can support. Advances in personalized medicine are creating more precise patient populations, media consumption is fragmenting, and AI is raising expectations for faster, more sophisticated solutions. Regulatory compliance requirements make building HIPAA-safe data infrastructure internally costly and complex. Helix is designed to close that gap by externalizing infrastructure that DeepIntent has spent a decade building for its own platform.

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