Since the Ignite Healthcare Marketing Podcast debuted in 2021, we’ve had hundreds of conversations with people doing the work—spanning health systems, DSOs, MSOs, and specialty groups. Work that’s often unglamorous, difficult, and constantly changing. But connecting patients to care and driving better patient outcomes is marketing that matters, and their insights deserve to be shared.
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That’s why we’re celebrating 200 episodes by sharing our guests’ challenges, wins, and advice.
We dug through the archives from the past year and found five themes that came up again and again, regardless of specialty, org size, or location. If you’re working in healthcare marketing, here’s what some of the sharpest people in the industry told us.
AI search anxiety is real, but SEO basics still win
This one came up in nearly every episode, which is no surprise. AI’s impact on the search landscape and the patient journey is impossible to ignore. It dominates every conference program, publication, and LinkedIn page.
The familiar mantra “SEO is dead” has gotten louder across the marketing industry. And yes, AI usage is growing fast. But AI isn’t replacing search—it’s co-existing with it, reshaping how results surface and how patients research care.
Our guests pushed back on the panic. They say the foundation hasn’t changed, but some factors have increased in importance.
SEO and AIO demand accurate content with a real point of view. You still need strong, authentic reviews. Optimized local listings. Trustworthy backlinks. These factors determine whether the LLMs mention you at all.
Caroline Adamec, Senior SEO Data Manager at BetterHelp, put it plainly:
That means backlinks from relevant trusted publications, genuinely helpful content, and local specificity matter more now than they ever did before.
Dane Titsworth, Manager of SEO & Digital Content at Ardent Health, made the same point:
“You can’t fool AI with that anymore. You need to have everything accurate, everything right because if it goes and finds two or three pieces of content, or something digitally that doesn’t match with what you’re trying to say on your websites or wherever you’re driving the patient, then AI is ultimately going to penalize you for it.”
Dane actually welcomed AI for that reason. It punishes the people who were only doing one or two things right. If your foundation is clean—accurate content, strong reviews, consistent local signals—you’re in a better position than you were before.
The consensus across guests: stop chasing new AI tactics. Get your house in order first.
Marketing and operations alignment remains critical
For anyone who follows Cardinal, this one is no surprise. Marketing and operations alignment (or MOPS, as we like to say), continues to surface consistently as a top priority. From a podiatry group in Texas to a dental organization in North Carolina to a PE-backed ortho MSO in Michigan, marketers understand that their success hinges on strong alignment with operations.
Growth must be a company-wide initiative. Marketing, leadership, finance, and operations all have to be working toward the same goals or you end up with a very familiar problem: marketing reports strong performance, and ops sees something different.
The old model—marketing hands off leads, ops handles them—is breaking down. Guests consistently said the biggest efficiency gains came when marketing could see what happened after the lead.
Steven Harrell, Director of Marketing at StrideCare, was the most direct about it. He moved marketing into the same staff meeting as ops leaders, call center managers, and clinical staff. Same numbers, same language, same accountability. Here’s how he described the shift:
“All of us are talking the same language and looking at the same numbers, which is incredible… The fact that I can be with operations and all be measured on the same numbers and looking at the same things can make a super tight loop between my marketing tools and platforms and the feedback loop from the operations, what’s happening on the ground.”
Joseph McLean, Director of B2C Marketing at Synergy Health Partners, came at the same problem from a retail background. He frames provider time as inventory.
Every morning, he reviews provider schedules by location and day, adjusting ad spend based on available slots. If capacity dries up, ads come off. If a location is undersold on Fridays, spend goes up. And it directly protects against marketing dollars driving patients to locations that can’t actually serve them. Simple in concept, but it takes a commitment to build the right processes to gain this kind of alignment.
Patients demand authenticity
Patients are skeptical. After years of pandemic fallout and political interference in public health, trust in healthcare institutions has taken a real hit. Edelman’s Trust and Health report found that friends and family now rival scientists as trusted health voices, and 61% of Americans think the institutions around them are undermining access to care.
Layer on top of that the proliferation of AI-generated content, and the problem compounds. Consumers are being flooded with content that feels fake. The pressure to adopt AI is real, but one misguided move—an AI-generated patient story, a fake testimonial, a generic ad that says nothing real—and it’s easy to lose a patient’s trust before they ever walk through the door.
Genevieve Branco, Marketing and Communications Director at Adventist Health, saw this firsthand:
“The truth is people can spot a fake from a mile away. I have a daughter who is 17. She’s an artist… She says, ‘Mom, that’s obviously AI generated.’ I look close, I’m like, ‘Oh, yes. You’re right. Those are stairs that go nowhere.’”
Genevieve’s team is going the opposite direction from easy AI shortcuts by pulling in local employees, real patients, and telling real stories. Her take: people will know the difference, and it will serve them better in the long run.
The marketers winning right now are leading with real stories, real people, and real voices. More brands are exploring influencer marketing and UGC content strategies, and those doing it well are doing so on their patients’ terms, not the brand’s.
Ella McMahan, Director of Brand Marketing at Spring Fertility, built the organization’s entire influencer program on one principle: let the creator tell the story.
“I really try to give them free reign. I say, of course, we want to approve it before you put it up, but I try not to give too many guardrails just because I think then you lose the story, and it becomes this performative thing, and it feels like what everyone else is doing.”
No bullet points about the payment plan. No scripted talking points about brand value props. Content that shows a real patient experience is what builds trust.
Patient experience can’t be ignored
Chelsea Lockhart, Senior Director of Platform Management and Marketing Technology at Sutter Health, described a dinner party scenario she can’t escape—and that a lot of you have probably lived through too (I definitely have).
Friends and family venting about broken healthcare portals. Confusing appointment confirmations. Messages that don’t make sense. Patients don’t see the backend. To them, the journey is one experience, and it either builds confidence or it doesn’t.
It doesn’t matter what the ad says if the patient experience is frustrating. Chelsea said it directly:
When that happens, bad reviews follow. Healthcare marketers have always known that reviews matter. But they matter more now because your reputation is playing a direct role in how AI engines evaluate and recommend your brand. If you want to earn the AI recommendation, you need to show up positively and consistently across review platforms.
That means what happens on the phone, at the front desk, and in the exam room is often more memorable to a patient than any ad you’ve ever run. Marketing has to have a role in shaping those touchpoints.
Ashley Pollard, Practice Marketing Manager at United Digestive, said something referral-heavy specialties need to hear:
“Referrals don’t necessarily guarantee loyalty or even follow-through anymore. Our referred patients are also still acting like consumers. They’re checking reviews, comparing locations. We can do all the centralization that we want, but if that local experience doesn’t reinforce the trust, that referral alone may not be enough to move someone forward in the process.”
Patients who were sent to you are still shopping. Meeting that expectation—at every operational touchpoint—is now part of the marketing job.
Measurement is still the biggest gap, but healthcare has made progress
Four years ago, a single HHS Office for Civil Rights bulletin forced healthcare marketers to rip up their measurement infrastructure overnight and start over. What followed was years of operating with blunter instruments—relying on overall lift and directional signals in place of the attribution frameworks many had taken for granted.
The good news: healthcare marketers have made real progress.
More teams are making deliberate investments in compliant martech stacks, tighter EMR integrations, and the internal relationships—with legal, IT, and finance—that make meaningful measurement possible at scale. Chelsea Lockhart described the mindset shift clearly:
“Gone are the days where you can be a marketer that doesn’t understand how tracking is working or how UTM codes play into what you’re doing, or needing to see the visibility on a downstream lead and how valuable that is. The abyss there is growing, and the marketers who can’t get in that boat are going to get left behind.”
StrideCare is one of the clearer examples of what building measurement the right way actually looks like. Steven Harrell moved marketing out of its silo and into the operations structure, reporting to the same leader as the patient contact center, front desk, and clinical teams. Together, they implemented call tracking integrated with their EHR—including an AI layer that analyzes the content of calls, not just the volume, to identify which conversations represent genuine new patient opportunities.
“All of us are talking the same language and looking at the same numbers, which is incredible… The fact that I can be with operations and all be measured on the same numbers and looking at the same things can make a super tight loop between my marketing tools and platforms and the feedback loop from the operations, what’s happening on the ground.”
Still, there is a lot of room left to grow. Most organizations haven’t gotten there yet. Change in healthcare is slow—sometimes painfully so. But marketers are more sophisticated now. They’re building tighter relationships across the org. And they’re getting closer every day to answering the one question everyone actually wants answered: how many new patients did my marketing drive?
The through-line
If there’s one sentence that captures the recurring theme across the last year of Ignite, it’s this: healthcare marketing is growing up, and the shortcuts are gone.
You can’t hack the algorithm anymore. You can’t ignore operations. You can’t fake authenticity. You can’t skip the measurement layer.
Every winning guest described the same unsexy formula—strong fundamentals, tight alignment with operations, and patient-first thinking at every touchpoint. That’s what 200 episodes sound like.
