Patient acquisition is the top digital advertising goal for 58% of healthcare marketers. Sixty-two percent have a marketing CRM. Yet only 15% report a well-integrated website and CRM.
That’s a consequential disconnect in the 2026 Healthcare Digital Marketing Industry Trends report from Geonetric, Greystone.Net, and Klein & Partners. Organizations want digital advertising to bring in patients, and many have purchased technology intended to support that work. The connection between those investments needs attention.
The acquisition goal and the CRM should have something to do with each other
A CRM can help an organization build relationships with prospective patients, support relevant follow-up, and understand which efforts lead to care. Investing in content and ongoing campaign management helps nurture those relationships when people are considering care but aren’t ready to schedule. Connecting the CRM to the website helps make that follow-up relevant to the interests people have already expressed and the steps they’ve already taken.
These findings reinforce an argument we made in Stop the sprawl: maximizing your MarTech. Healthcare organizations have acquired powerful capabilities, but getting those capabilities to work together remains unfinished business. When patient acquisition leads the advertising agenda, the connection between the website and CRM has a business purpose. It should help the organization turn interest into care and understand what produces results.
The report doesn’t establish that organizations are leaving their CRMs unused or that every acquisition program has a measurement problem. It does give leaders reason to ask how effectively their CRM supports the advertising goal they’ve identified as their highest priority.
That question gets more pressing when 34% of respondents say they can’t adequately demonstrate ROI. Campaigns can keep generating leads while disconnected data limits what advertising platforms learn about which leads become patients. Teams may see activity in individual platforms while struggling to follow the acquisition process across them.
How much of that process can the organization follow? Where does it lose the connection? What useful information is sitting in a system without influencing what happens next?
Those are business questions for a platform that may already represent a substantial commitment of money and staff time. A CRM’s presence on the technology inventory tells leadership very little about its contribution to growth. Before expanding the acquisition program, it’s worth understanding whether the CRM is doing the job the organization needs it to do. More demand flowing into the same disconnected experience can make an existing weakness more expensive.
Individual AI experimentation won’t organize itself
The AI findings reveal another distance between access to technology and a plan for using it. Forty-six percent of respondents report individuals experimenting with generative AI without organized efforts. Only 17% have incorporated it into standard operating processes, and AI strategy receives the lowest confidence grade in the survey.
Individual experimentation can uncover useful applications. But an organization can accumulate a considerable amount of AI activity without deciding which applications matter to its goals, which are producing good work, or which should become shared practice.
That leaves value dependent on who happens to be experimenting. One person finds a better way to complete a task. A colleague repeats the same discovery. Someone else spends longer correcting the output than the original task would have taken. The organization needs a way to distinguish progress from activity.
This reinforces an argument from our work on AI strategy in healthcare marketing. Individual experimentation needs direction grounded in the organization’s goals, capabilities, and strengths. The opportunity is to turn individual discoveries into a deliberate organizational approach.
That approach starts with understanding the advantages an organization already possesses and deciding where AI expertise can help put them to work. Its knowledge of its community, physicians, patients, and market gives the organization something specific to build on. Experiments become more useful when they help determine how AI can support those strengths.
Output quality is the leading reported barrier to greater AI use, cited by 56%. That makes a strategy grounded in the actual work essential. Where can AI make a useful contribution? What requires human judgment? What would constitute a result worth repeating?
Whether you’re beginning to consider how to implement AI or have been testing it through small pilots, those efforts should connect to what your organization wants to accomplish with AI as a whole. That shared direction gives teams a basis for deciding which applications to pursue and how to measure whether they’re working.
Across CRM and AI, the report reinforces the importance of connecting technology to intent. Patient acquisition should shape how the CRM is connected and used. Organizational priorities should shape which AI experiments advance. Both investments need a purpose specific enough to guide the work.
