Keeping it Human While Embracing AI
Healthcare
Few developments have surged as rapidly as artificial intelligence (AI), which now stands as the top priority and major concern for marketers worldwide according to multiple industry surveys including recent ones from Gartner and Salesforce. Healthcare marketers, who encounter parallel challenges in learning, adopting, and implementing new AI tools, require a practical framework to navigate this evolving marketing landscape without letting this crucial inflection point become overwhelming or counterproductive.
Rather than a hesitancy or resistance to adopting the technology, many of the conversations I am having with marketing leaders revolve around how best to start organizing a more thoughtful and structured approach to using AI technology and tools. This is good news and demonstrates that marketers are attempting to balance the urgency to move fast and jump in headfirst with the realization that it’s also a journey and an evolutionary trajectory we’re on—and not a sprint to some magical promised land (despite what the media may lead us believe). Those who are patient and approach AI as they would any new marketing technology are going to come out ahead and waste less time and resources chasing every shiny new AI application and solution along the way. And there will be many of them.
Below are five ways we’re seeing clients and colleagues across the healthcare industry prepare for a future of AI-driven healthcare marketing. For even more ideas, feel free to reach out to us at BVK to schedule a one-on-one brainstorming and ideation session, or discuss a full-on AI discovery and solutioning workshop for your team. In the meantime, this should get you going in the right direction and provide a framework for how to approach implementing AI in a more structured manner.
1. Introductory Exploration. Experimentation is perfectly appropriate right now and marketers should be playing around (at home and work) with various publicly available AI-powered apps to become more familiar with them and develop a baseline comfort level in talking about what’s out there and who the companies are behind the technologies. This can be as structured or unstructured a process as you feel comfortable with, and while some health systems like Cleveland Clinic are running organized “tests and trials” with AI, others are taking a more organic approach to the introductory learning process. The most important thing is to start now.
2. AI Functionality Audits. It’s never too early to begin auditing where AI is showing up across your organization and within your marketing departments. Epic, the electronic medical record giant, has been embedding AI-driven algorithms for clinical care management for years and now has more than a hundred built into its software. Other AI-enabled tools are routinely showing up in billing, coding, HR and purchasing systems. And almost every marketing software vendor including Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, Zoom, and Google (just to name a few) all have AI powered capabilities running in the background as well as enhanced functionality and AI features for an additional investment.
Marketers, along with their cross-functional team members and other c-suite execs, need to document everywhere AI is being injected into daily processes within the organization to fully understand the implications, uses and risks. Conducting surveys, audits, tech and vendor reviews and mapping where all AI is already showing up in your organization is a critical first step to appreciating its potential value and future impact.
3. Keep it Human. Similarly, marketers and business leaders should be assessing the human and infrastructure readiness for AI across the organization. Not just where does AI exist and who is using it today, but how educated, trained, prepared, and capable are we as a business to make the best use of AI – and ensure safety, privacy, security, and compliance at the same time.
This is the human-side of understanding how “AI-ready” we are, and it involves looking at everyone and every process from the board and top leadership all the way down to individual team members. Think of it as assessing the IQ (intelligence quotient) and EQ (emotional intelligence) of your team when it comes to managing and working alongside what is shaping up to be another “intelligent” addition or co-working partner in many of the tasks we perform.
4. Boundaries, Limits and Guardrails. A critical component of “getting our arms around AI” is in defining the legal, ethical and value-driven boundaries of how and where AI can and will be used across our organizations. Marketers are in the ideal role to help research, educate and facilitate those types of discussions with internal and external stakeholders alike. In addition, given the high-profile attention AI is getting in almost every industry today, and especially healthcare, organizations need to be able to clearly articulate how AI is being used in their products and services and how customers (patients and members, in the case of healthcare organizations) will encounter AI within your brand. From evolving federal and state regulations to internal assumptions, policies and procedures, healthcare organizations must be prepared to respond to media inquiries, customer concerns, and stakeholder questions at a moment’s notice – and with the understanding that it’s still early, and that both the tech and policy surrounding AI is changing almost daily. The recent ad-pixel tracking issue many hospitals face is a vivid reminder of how quickly plans can go awry in the digital marketing space.
5. Advocacy and Leadership. As marketers, this is our opportunity to lead. Just like the early days of the Internet, when we served as both champions and innovators around how digital technologies could revolutionize brand experience, we can and must be the pioneers for our organizations. Marketers should seek to understand and apply the power of AI to improving marketing efficiency, reducing conversion costs, and enhancing consumer experiences. While it’s too early to know if AI will be as revolutionary as the World Wide Web and IP-protocols, it’s a safe bet that it will be very close. Even in this early phase we see first-hand how generative AI and agentic AI are profoundly impacting how we think about patient and consumer engagement.
You are in a unique position to lead your organization and leverage this new technology at a time when it’s needed most. So step-up, join your AI advisory group (or start one if there isn’t one already), start forming use-cases, exploratory and solutioning groups, and embrace the change that is coming with AI.
For more ideas about developing an AI strategy, or just talking through some AI best practices and approaches, contact Danny at [email protected] or (423) 580-8823.
