Viewpoint: Strategies for Success

Navigating Thought Leadership in a Politically Charged Environment

By The SHSMD Team posted 4 days ago
Written by: Shannon McCormick; Vice President of Public Relations, MediaSource As health care organizations enter 2026, communications leaders are navigating an environment shaped by heightened scrutiny, rapid information flow and continued polarization around topics once viewed as neutral. Issues such as vaccines, medications and public health guidance now require additional context and care. For health care communicators, this reality raises a critical question: How can organizations engage in thought leadership that advances their mission, informs the public and builds trust—without becoming entangled in political debate? The answer lies in approaching ...
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Synthetic Audiences: A New Lens for Understanding Healthcare Consumers

By The SHSMD Team posted 11 days ago
Written by: Amanda Herriman, Director of Strategy, WAX Healthcare Marketing Why do 80% of healthcare consumers say one thing in surveys and do another when choosing care? Traditional audience research misses what matters most: actual behavior. Focus groups capture what people say. Surveys record stated preferences. Both methods cost thousands of dollars and weeks of time. Neither reveals what people actually do when making healthcare decisions. Synthetic audiences use AI to simulate real decision-making behaviors, uncovering insights traditional research cannot capture. Healthcare organizations are already using this technology to identify ...
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A grateful farewell: Nine years of growth, friendship and impact with SHSMD

By The SHSMD Team posted 12-17-2025
Written by: Alan Shoebridge, SHSMD Board member and Associate Vice President/Chief Communication Officer, Providence All good things must come to an end. Yes, I know say that’s a cliché, but it’s also true. Every November, the Society for Healthcare Market and Strategy Development (SHSMD) advisory board holds its final meeting of the year where departing board members are given a nice send off. It gets emotional. That last part might seem a bit strange to you, but I swear it happens every year. The bonds between SHSMD board members are strong. So many life-long partnerships and friendships are formed. I’ve served on other great boards, ...
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Hospitals Advance AI-Enabled Prevention at Scale

By The SHSMD Team posted 12-02-2025
A new study from Johns Hopkins Medicine offers hospitals a glimpse of how artificial intelligence (AI) could make prevention programs more accessible without compromising results. Researchers found that participants in an AI-powered diabetes-prevention program achieved nearly the same health benefits as those in traditional, coach-led programs. After 12 months, about one-third of participants in each group met Centers for Disease Control and Prevention benchmarks for lowering diabetes risk, such as losing 5% of body weight or reducing A1C levels. What set the AI group apart was engagement: 93% of participants began the program, compared with 83% in the ...
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Precision Audience Targeting: Turning Data into Human Connection

By The SHSMD Team posted 11-11-2025
Written by: Amanda Herriman, Director of Strategy at WAX Healthcare Marketing *“41% higher click-through rate. 66% stronger lead quality. Precision turns data into connection.”* The most expensive marketing reaches the wrong people. Most healthcare marketing campaigns still chase reach. Bigger audiences. More impressions. Wider nets. This approach wastes millions of dollars annually. Healthcare decisions happen at deeply personal moments of vulnerability and choice. Demographics alone cannot predict who is ready to act. Precision audience targeting transforms data into measurable patient acquisition by reaching the right people at the right ...
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Holding the Pen

By The SHSMD Team posted 11-03-2025
Dear SHSMD Members, When I stepped into this role 20 months ago, it was clear that healthcare was not just evolving—it was being rewritten in real time. The forces reshaping our field are immense: economic strain, workforce fatigue, technological acceleration, and rising expectations from every direction. Yet through it all, one truth endures—our community of strategists, communicators, and planners has never mattered more. In Dallas, and throughout the year, I’ve seen the best of SHSMD at work: professionals who meet uncertainty not with panic but with purpose. People who bring clarity where there is noise, compassion where there is pressure, and imagination ...
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The Future of Rural Health Care Marketing: Navigating Demographics, Dollars, Distance, and Digital Transformation

By The SHSMD Team posted 10-07-2025
Written by: Mark Crow, President, Tenth Crow Creative Rural and small health care organizations have always operated under pressure. But today, the future feels especially uncertain. Aging populations, rising operational costs, and cuts in government funding are converging to create an environment where providing comprehensive care locally is increasingly difficult…and yet the demand is greater than ever. For health care marketers, this moment isn’t just about promoting services. Rather, it’s about shaping the story of survival, resilience, and innovation. And a critical component to that story is the growing importance of medical technology (MedTech) ...
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How to Create Accessible Healthcare Websites: 5 Tips

By The SHSMD Team posted 09-23-2025
Written by: Anne Stefanyk, CEO/Founder, Kanopi Studios Over a quarter of U.S. adults live with a disability. For these individuals, an inaccessible healthcare website can prevent them from scheduling appointments, accessing medical information, or communicating with providers. This guide offers a step-by-step process for evaluating and improving the accessibility of your healthcare website, from web development to testing. Use these best practices to build trust and loyalty with your audience by ensuring your website is an equitable resource for your community. 1. Survey your audience to understand their accessibility ...
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How Do Health Executives View AI? 3 Takeaways from New Survey

By The SHSMD Team posted 09-16-2025
Health care C-suite leaders see no shortage of potential for artificial intelligence (AI) to help the field advance, but their optimism remains restrained due to many factors. How to safely implement AI, the ongoing need to monitor algorithms to ensure that they perform up to standards and the potential for misleading or biased AI outputs have kept health care executives cautious about the technology, a recent Sage Growth Partners survey shows. Interesting Dichotomies Emerge Key findings from the Sage survey of 101 health care C-suite executives from integrated delivery networks, academic medical centers and independent hospitals found that ...
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Close the Gap - Save your Bottom Line

By The SHSMD Team posted 09-09-2025
Written By: Khrista Boster, MBA, Chief Marketing Officer, Woodlawn Health In 2022, Woodlawn Health underwent an external marketing effort to increase volumes from the outside. In October 2023, the organization started phase two with an internal review to identify any outmigration issues. The clinic visits increased, but the hospital volumes stayed stagnant. The team contacted the office managers, who were unaware of what had happened. The organization did not think it had the capabilities to track referrals. So, beyond the state hospital association's data, they had no idea who was going out of the health system for services. One challenge was that the ...
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How to Unlock Capacity for Targeted Patient Populations

By The SHSMD Team posted 08-26-2025
At many hospitals and health systems around the country, demand for services exceeds supply. The ability of hospitals and health systems to balance this situation by increasing supply is limited by real-world challenges like financial constraints, available space and workforce shortages. The answer to this challenge, as many in the field have discovered, is care transformation. Care transformation is a strategic objective of most, if not all, hospitals and health systems. But what is it? It’s certainly much easier said than done. A Systematic Approach to Unlock Capacity A new AHA Market Scan report, “Unlocking Capacity for Targeted Patient Populations,” ...
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How to Boost Healthcare Marketing Results with Predictive AI

By The SHSMD Team posted 08-05-2025
Written by: Paige White, Director of Marketing, SocialClimb, SocialClimb, an RLDatix Company Healthcare marketing has evolved far beyond traditional demographic targeting and broad awareness campaigns. Today's most successful healthcare organizations are leveraging AI and machine learning to anticipate patient needs, optimize marketing spend, and create personalized patient experiences. This approach represents a fundamental shift from reactive to proactive marketing, reaching patients before they even begin searching for care. Understanding Predictive AI in Healthcare Marketing Predictive targeting uses machine learning algorithms to ...
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Rebuilding Trust, One Message at a Time: A Purpose-Driven Approach to Patient Engagement

By The SHSMD Team posted 07-22-2025
Written by: Melissa Fors Shackelford, Principal Marketing & Growth Consultant, Principal Marketing & Growth Consultant; Shackelford Strategies The latest Edelman Trust Barometer confirms what many of us in healthcare already feel: people’s trust in healthcare institutions has taken another hit. While doctors, nurses, and scientists are still widely trusted, the systems around them aren’t getting the same credit. And in many communities, especially those who’ve been overlooked or mistreated, its getting even worse. If you’ve worked in healthcare long enough, you know trust isn’t automatic. It has to be earned. And a lot of it has been ...
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Mid-Year Perspective from the SHSMD President

By The SHSMD Team posted 07-09-2025
Written by: David C. Grandy FACHE, SHSMD Advisory Board President and Head of Product, Risant Health Earlier this year, I shared my personal approach to setting intentions—prioritizing what matters and how I aspire to lead through complexity. That same discipline shapes how the SHSMD Advisory Board determines where to focus, especially at inflection points in health care. Guided by our three-year strategic plan, SHSMD continues to deliver relevant, high-value content for our members—from podcasts and webinars to self-paced courses and toolkits. If you haven’t already, take advantage of the most accessed resources from this past quarter —each one ...
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3 Strategic Workforce Planning Moves to Make Now

By The SHSMD Team posted 07-01-2025
A confluence of factors has complicated the health care workforce picture. The field’s workforce is aging, patient demand for services is rising and so is the need for more nurses and physicians. Add in the high levels of stress and burnout many clinicians report feeling and the financial pressures many providers face, and some experts believe it’s time to take a fresh look at strategic workforce planning. Count Kunal Khashu, a digital transformation leader at HCA Healthcare, among them. When hospitals and health systems combine predictive analytics, decision-support systems and automation, they can optimize staffing, cut costs and improve outcomes, Khashu ...
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Ensuring Service Line Readiness: Key Questions Before You Market

By The SHSMD Team posted 06-16-2025
Written by: Kelly Frazer Johnson, Healthcare Marketing Strategic Advisor, Crystal Lake Marketing & Coaching If you’re like most healthcare marketing professionals, you’re juggling requests from multiple service lines, each eager for marketing resources. The challenge is prioritizing those service lines that have the capacity and operational readiness to drive revenue. To help, I’ve developed a questionnaire for service line leaders to complete before meeting with marketing. It encourages them to assess their business from every angle and confirms they’re ready to market. Marketing a service line that isn’t operationally prepared can backfire, ...
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Rural Marketing Channels

By The SHSMD Team posted 06-03-2025
Written by: Mark Crow, President, Tenth Crow Creative Which Marketing Channels are Best for Your Rural Health Care or Community-Based Organization? If you’re like most marketers working in the health care field, you probably come from a marcomm background, and don’t have a med school or a social work degree. And if you’re working for a rural organization, you may not hail from the area you’re serving. That’s common, too. But for marketing leaders, it’s important to know that rural and urban health care systems can be quite different — not as much in what they offer, but to whom. Take our home ...
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4 Critical Steps to Scale Generative AI

By The SHSMD Team posted 05-13-2025
As health care organizations grapple with rising operational costs, an aging population and a worsening workforce crisis, the need for transformative solutions has never been greater. A new Accenture report, “Gen AI Amplified: Scaling productivity for health care providers,” highlights how generative artificial intelligence (AI) can offer a critical path forward — unlocking unprecedented productivity gains, enhancing patient care and reshaping the future of care delivery. Health Care’s Inflection Point Health care providers face a historic staffing shortage: By 2033, the U.S. is projected to lack as many as 139,000 physicians while the global nursing ...
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5 Smart Strategies for Managing Health Care Marketing Priorities

By The SHSMD Team posted 04-15-2025
Written by: Mark Crow, President, Tenth Crow Creative The leader of the cardiology practice wants additional social media messaging for American Heart Month in February. Then the head of orthopedics drops by your office to chat about her idea for a campaign to spotlight a new surgeon. No matter the size of your health care organization, you probably field a constant stream of one-off requests that fall outside your thoughtfully crafted marketing plans. Marketing folks in health care are often pulled in different directions, and sometimes those demands conflict (Ortho and surgery want more attention, but it’s primary care that really ...
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The Secret To Creating Campaigns That Win Trust And Improve Outcomes

By The SHSMD Team posted 04-08-2025
Written by: Beth Gromada Scott, Director, Marketing & Sales, Institute for Healthcare Advancement, Anaheim, CA Last year, I experienced severe chest pain while vacationing abroad. The pain was scary, as were the linguistic challenges and financial options at the hospital. After the busy central city ER doctor rushed my tests and quickly gave me the non-life-threatening results, I was told to leave. However, I needed clarification about the test results, so I asked to talk with an interpreter. I also spoke with a financial representative to settle my insurance, and a pharmacist about the prescribed medications. Only then did I feel comfortable ...
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