What Healthcare Providers Need From Brand Marketers

The clinical healthcare space looks radically different than it did 10 years ago. New technology, data sources, patient behaviors, and more create both opportunities and challenges for today’s healthcare professionals (HCPs), and the ways diseases are diagnosed and treated has changed.

At this year’s HealthNEXT Summit, a convening of doers, thinkers, and innovators in programmatic healthcare, PulsePoint brought in three practicing providers with distinct specializations to talk about how the clinical space has transformed, how they’re getting their information, and what marketers can do to make their jobs easier.

Moderated by PulsePoint SVP Jonathan Zile, the panel featured expert insights from:

• Chris DeRienzo, M.D., Chief Physician Executive, American Hospital Association
• Michael Zile, M.D., Division of Cardiology, Medical University of South Carolina
• Jessica Treviño Jones, M.D., Breast Oncology, Cancer Genetics and High-Risk Screening, Mays Cancer Center

Here’s what they told us.

The Clinical Space Has Changed

In the last ten years, the average patient has gotten both younger and older. While Dr. Jones said she’s seeing more 30 and 40-year-olds with cancer diagnoses, Dr. Zile works with cardiology patients who are living longer and more likely to be in their 80s. These patients interact with technology and gather information in different ways and require different clinical approaches. 

“Before I walk in the room, the first thing I do is look at the patient’s age,” Dr. Jones said. “I start here because it prepares me for how I'm going to communicate to them and how I'm going to lay out information to them.”

There is a flood of information out there for patients to find, between YouTube, Instagram, and other digital and social media sources. It is up to the HCPs to collate that information and give them guidance they can trust. And to keep all of the details straight, HCPs are increasingly relying on electronic health records (EHR). “We spend all day with it. We go to bed with it, we take it home with us,” Dr. Zile said.

The clinical space is also experiencing a workforce crisis that was exacerbated by the pandemic—and it’s putting increased pressure on HCPs. “I see hospitals around the country leaning on our clinicians to innovate our way through it, and that has only increased in speed over the last five years,” Dr. DeRienzo said.

HCPs Need More Time

All three panelists agreed that the one thing they don’t have is time. A shrinking workforce means many HCPs are stretched thin. In smaller hospital systems or offices, they have to fill many roles and get creative to fit patients’ needs.

A busy doctor might have fifteen minutes or less to tell a patient they’re sick and explain their treatment options—and as Dr. Jones put it, they might only have 30 seconds before the patient hears the word “cancer” and gets overwhelmed. They need to be able to give their patients as much information as possible in the shortest, most succinct way. “I have to be fast, but also transparent and thorough,” Dr. Jones said.

Even in HCPs’ off hours and “blue jeans” moments, there isn’t enough time. The panelists said they spend their lunch breaks skimming journal article headlines or their workouts listening to healthcare podcasts at 1.5x speed to try to keep up.

HCPs deal with this lack of time through various methods—streamlining processes, delegating tasks, etc.—but the panelists said marketers could help by providing a steady flow of accessible, accurate information at the point of care.

HCPs Need Better Ways to Build Trust

Providers not only have to give patients a lot of information in a short amount of time but also convince them to take a certain course of action, and the only way to do that is by building trust. 

Today’s HCPs may not have the opportunity to establish that trust over time, so instead they have to be informed. “It’s our responsibility to know what we need to know in that moment, to be a trusted partner for our patients,” Dr. DeRienzo said. Any delay in getting information to patients could cause them to hesitate to accept treatment.

“There is unbelievable inertia to get patients to make change,” Dr. Zile said. Some patients resist change because they don’t understand the treatment, while others may have read something about it that made them uncomfortable. To overcome this inertia and improve patients’ overall health, HCPs need digitally presented, trustworthy information that’s easy to reach for and share. 

What Marketers Can Do to Help

As one of the most essential components of the clinical workflow, the EHR serves as a key touchpoint for HCPs. By providing relevant information at the point of care, brand marketers have an opportunity to help HCPs streamline their process and establish trust with patients. 

“What I want from marketers is something tangible that I can reach for in a moment that takes only two or three minutes to assimilate and to distribute,” Dr. Zile said. By putting that information directly in the EHR, marketers can give HCPs the sources they need to educate patients without interrupting their workflow.

Dr. DeRienzo cautioned that this information should serve HCPs, not interrupt them. Rather than creating a dam, “what works is shifting the path of the river. We need to build into the pathway and make it easy to use, a little hard to ignore.”

In Conclusion

“It strikes me that healthcare is and will always be a uniquely human experience,” Dr. DeRienzo said. “At the end of the day, in our practices, the two humans at the end of that experience are a physician … and a patient.”

The human aspect of our industry is what motivates programmatic marketers every day to reach HCPs and patients with the information they need—in the right place and at the right time. With PulsePoint’s new Adaptive Optimization™, an AI-powered capability that enables users to optimize campaigns with clinical signals to improve qualified audience reach, marketers can directly impact people’s lives for the better.

Keep an eye out for more blog posts diving into each of the topics we discussed at HealthNEXT 2025. Want to be involved in our next event? Reach out to the PulsePoint team at info@pulsepoint.com.

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