Embrace the virtue of stewardship: Make better health part of the outcome
Confession
The United States spent $5.3 trillion on healthcare in 2024, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. That’s $15,474 for every person in the country and 18% of our entire economy. Yet we continue to struggle on many measures of health.
Healthcare marketers didn’t create that problem, and we’re not going to solve it. But we do influence how people think about health, where they look for information, when they seek care, and how they navigate the system. So what can we do with that influence?
Virtue
My colleague Dan Lavelle has been challenging healthcare marketers to take up this question for some time. He asks us to look beyond the traditional measures of marketing activity and consider what all that activity ultimately accomplishes.
Healthcare marketing has traditionally supported goals such as growing service lines, increasing patient volume, building preference, and strengthening the health system’s position in the market. Those are legitimate goals and achieving them helps health systems continue investing in clinicians, facilities, technology, and services.
The larger challenge is to see those goals in the context of what they ultimately make possible. When healthcare marketers do this work well, we help give the organization its best chance to improve the lives and health of the people and communities it serves.
That’s where stewardship comes in. For healthcare marketers, stewardship means being mindful of the resources our organizations entrust to us and the objectives they need us to advance, while also recognizing the larger opportunity we have to influence health outcomes. We have budgets to invest, data to interpret, technology to put to work, and people’s attention for a few precious moments.
Organizational growth and better health can move in the same direction. A screening someone has been putting off is an appointment. A primary care visit that identifies a problem earlier is an appointment. Helping someone manage a chronic condition creates engagement, while helping someone recognize symptoms and seek appropriate care creates demand.
We aren’t arguing for less care. We’re arguing for a different kind of care:
- Earlier when earlier is better
- Preventive when prevention is possible
- Appropriate to the person’s needs
- Supported by enough understanding for them to participate in decisions about their health
A job healthcare marketers already know how to do
Dan has also argued that healthcare marketers can make a meaningful contribution by helping improve health literacy.
Health literacy gives marketers a particularly credible place to contribute because many of the skills it requires are skills we already use every day. We identify and reach specific audiences, turn complicated information into clear communication, use data to make messages more relevant, and tell stories that help people understand ideas and motivate them to act.
Those skills can help people understand who should receive a particular screening and why, recognize symptoms or risk factors they might otherwise dismiss, know what to do after receiving a diagnosis, or manage a chronic condition between visits.
Some of that work will generate appointments. When it does, better health and organizational growth can move in the same direction.
Follow the thread a little farther
The way we measure our work can reflect this broader ambition. Impressions, clicks, conversions, and appointments tell us whether marketing reached people and whether they responded. The opportunity is to follow that response a little farther and understand what happened next.
If someone clicked, did we help them understand something useful about their health? If they scheduled, did we connect them with appropriate care? A screening campaign might ultimately be judged by whether more of the people who need screening connect the message to their own health risks and then complete the screening.
Healthcare marketers won’t always have access to every downstream answer, and we shouldn’t invent precision where the data doesn’t exist. But asking these questions can influence what we create, what we measure, and how we define marketing’s contribution.
A million impressions can represent a successful media buy and a million opportunities to help someone understand something that matters to their health. We can care about both.
Repentance
The opportunity is larger than adding health education to the occasional campaign. Healthcare marketing can play a role before someone becomes acutely ill, while they’re navigating care, and after they return home.
We can build preventive health into service-line strategies, use audience intelligence to identify people who could benefit from screenings or earlier intervention, and create content around the questions people actually have about their health. We can also engage people where they live, work, and spend their time, using digital tools, community activation, and partnerships to make health information more accessible.
None of this requires healthcare marketers to become clinicians or public health officials. It asks us to bring the skills and resources we already have to a larger purpose. We know how to get people’s attention. The opportunity is to consider what else we can help them do once we have it.
One small act
Take one campaign already on your marketing calendar and ask whether it could help someone become healthier, not just become a patient.
Maybe that means adding screening education, helping people recognize risk factors, or making a complicated health decision easier to understand.
You still get to count the clicks. Just give them somewhere worthwhile to go.
Take a deeper look at Stewardship and how healthcare marketers can lead change.
