AI Transparency in Healthcare Marketing: A Blessing and a Curse

Healthcare marketers were quick to adopt AI, especially in regards to content creation. And the pressure remains on to deliver more, faster, cheaper - all promises that the AI hype machine makes every day.

However, marketing directors and digital communications managers must find a delicate balance: leverage the efficiencies offered by AI while managing potential risks around trust, accuracy, and compliance.

AI Traps to Avoid

Healthcare marketers operate at the intersection of cutting-edge technology and deeply personal human experiences. The potential for innovation brings specific, critical risks:

Unreliable Outputs

AI is a “black box” with uncertain reliability. Ask your preferred LLM the same question five times, and you’ll likely receive five near-similar but not identical answers. For healthcare marketers, this uncertainty poses catastrophic risks when conveying sensitive medical information.

Patient Trust Erosion

Healthcare fundamentally relies on trust. Automated systems that masquerade as human touchpoints undermine this critical relationship. Patient trust quickly erodes when they realize they’ve been chatting with an AI pretending to be a human representative.

Content Saturation and Dilution of Quality

AI excels at quickly generating content. This has led to information overload across digital channels. Healthcare is no different. The ease of AI content creation has led to a surge of highly similar, mediocre content filling up patient inboxes. Meaningful material must now overcome the challenge of gaining notice through all the noise.

Best Practices for Transparent AI Implementation

Counter to prevailing assumptions, openly revealing your AI use in patient communications doesn't make interactions feel less human. It actually makes patients feel more respected and informed. A recent study actually found that the vast majority (80%) of Americans report that their knowledge of AI use within a practice is important for improving their comfort. Attempts to hide or obscure AI’s use will likely backfire.

The following best practices leverage AI's transformative power without paying the price of eroding patient trust.

1. Truthful AI Disclosure

Patients deserve to know when they interact with an AI chatbot or personalized AI-generated materials. As mentioned above, customers understand that you need to leverage AI to be more productive, but become suspicious if you’re trying to hide it from them. For the marketing team, this might mean that if you have a chatbot on the website, don’t pretend or imply that it’s a human answering their inquiries.

2. Keep Humans in the Loop

Pretty much a no-brainer: AI should help, but not replace human insight and decision-making in healthcare marketing. AI is great for brainstorming and analyzing trends, but always be critical of the content it generates. For example, if you interview an SME for clinical content and write an article based on that using AI, make sure you get the SME’s greenlight before publishing.

3. Focus on Value, Not Volume

It’s so tempting to use AI to create more content instead of helping to write content that truly meets the needs of patients. AI should help you deliver more relevance, not just more volume.

AI is a Double-edged Sword for Healthcare Marketers

With great power comes great responsibility. Successful healthcare marketers will distinguish themselves by being transparent about when and how they use AI. But remember that AI is just a tool. Customer acquisition is about who patients trust most.