Healthcare content management is complex and error-prone. Streamline your process with automation, checklists, and better content tracking to save time and reduce compliance risks. Learn how to optimize publishing for accuracy and efficiency.
Managing content is a burden for healthcare marketers. First, there is the highly specialized content. Your writing team works very closely with SMEs to craft expert content that needs to comply with legislation and regulations. Then, your content is highly interconnected: Symptoms related to conditions, then treatment and physicians.
You’re spending hours clicking through your CMS, copying and pasting the same information in multiple places, manually tracking content updates, and praying you didn’t forget to change a crucial detail on a related page.
Healthcare marketing teams don’t just need to "manage" content; they need a highly optimized, streamlined process that reduces manual work and minimizes errors. Otherwise, inefficiencies pile up, deadlines become impossible, and compliance risks escalate.
Without a structured approach, content management quickly turns into a chaotic, error-prone mess. Here are some of the biggest pain points:
Let’s say you update a physician’s profile. It appears on their bio page, a department page, a service page, a search results page, and maybe even a featured list of top providers. Did you catch all of them?
If you don’t have any ways of knowing where your content is used, you risk inconsistencies—where one page is up to date, but another is still showing outdated details.
If you have to manually enter the same information in multiple places rather than linking or automating updates, you’re wasting time and increasing the risk of errors. A small typo could require updating five, ten, or more different pages. When you think of conditions, treatments or symptoms, you don’t want to edit them over and over again.
Ever needed to change a simple label on a physician’s bio, only to find yourself clicking through eight different menus just to make the edit? This kind of friction adds up across dozens of daily content updates, killing efficiency.
Every time you update a piece of healthcare content, you risk making errors that can backfire… If your team is constantly scrambling to meet deadlines, mistakes happen: outdated terms, incorrect descriptions, or compliance violations can slip through, causing legal headaches.
The good news? All of these issues can be fixed with the right content publication optimization process.
Before you optimize anything, you need to understand how your content connects.
We recommend a visual tool for this, a site map is a good start but you can go one step more sophisticated using an entity relationship diagram. You want to show that, for instance, a Physician has its own page, but also shows up in the Physician List (Find a doctor) and on a specific treatment page where they are the resident expert.
This type of content mapping isn’t a one-time project—it should be maintained throughout the lifecycle of your digital properties.
Content creation shouldn’t start in the CMS.
Instead, have a structured workflow outside of your platform where you:
By organizing these elements before they enter the CMS, you reduce the need for last-minute fixes and repeated edits. You can even incorporate AI and automation where it saves you time and avoid it where you need to redo the whole thing manually because it lacks quality. Here’s my top 3.
Ever had to send multiple emails just to fix a missing image or broken link? A publishing checklist ensures every content update meets key standards before going live—reducing rework and frustration. In some instances this can be automated while doing the content entry, for instance, making some fields mandatory in the CMS. This is one of the best ways to reduce errors in content publishing.
Your CMS should tell you where content is used.
When editing a practitioner’s profile, the CMS should display information like:
These self-reporting tools prevent errors before they happen and help content editors make informed updates.
This is a matter of both using the right modules and configurations in your CMS. It is also about working with your digital agency so you can iterate on styling the back-end of the CMS in a way that saves you clicks and gives you quality information about your content.
Healthcare organizations manage massive amounts of content—locations, symptoms, provider profiles, treatments, etc.
Instead of navigating the front-end UI to track everything, create backend inventory lists in your CMS. This simple step is often overlooked because we have the bias that the CMS lists are front-end tools. Establish with your digital agency what this list should look like, what information should be included, how you should be able to filter it.
I recommend table format with a quick search; here are my recommended fields:
Throw in that list any relevant information related to your publishing process. It could be the business unit in charge of that content, it could be the campaign this content is related to, or any other type of thing you find relevant.
This makes bulk updates and audits faster and more structured
Even with a strong content entry process, errors and inconsistencies creep in over time.
That’s where automated content scanning tools come in:
Acquia Optimize, SiteImprove, Lumar, – These tools scan your entire website for policy violations, outdated content, or broken links.
Yes, these tools cost money, but they save more in manual labor costs and prevent costly compliance issues.
Now that you are equipped to save time and reduce risk of managing healthcare content by:
You can start applying effort to create even more impactful content. The work you do isn’t just about efficiency, it directly impacts patient experiences and healthcare outcomes. Every well-managed provider profile, every correctly linked treatment page, and every accurate condition description helps someone make an informed decision about their health. That’s something to be proud of.
