Clarity Requires Capacity

Chelsea D’Amore (L), Emily Hirsch and Marjani Williams co-authored this article.

Healthcare is a deeply personal, high-stakes, high-emotion business with a litany of audiences that require nuanced healthcare communications. The growing complexity of today’s healthcare landscape makes it even more challenging for organizations to break through the clutter and build trust with clear, consistent messages.

We know that one-size-fits-all strategies no longer work and to succeed in the current media climate, communicators must create integrated models that allow them to deliver the right messages, through the right channels, at the right times.

Clarity requires capacity on three distinct levels:

Organizational capacity. Your organization’s communications team must have the depth and experience to fully engage with many diverse and dynamic audience sets.

Leadership capacity. Business leaders must prioritize communications and their role within this function as the key faces and voices representing their organizations.

Cultural capacity. A healthcare organization’s approach to communications must also hold the capacity to be caring, despite the demands of business goals, and courageous in the face of challenges like rampant misinformation. The vulnerability and fear when someone’s health is at stake demands communications that not only adds clarity but also carries compassion.

The challenge

Health audiences have diverse needs and interests, as well as varying levels of understanding of the business of healthcare that directly impacts their access to care and experience. Personal beliefs and comfort with the technical language of medicine greatly shape how consumers—your business’s patients and members—approach their health, and the level of trust they hold. Beyond the everyday consumer, healthcare organizations are also working to build and maintain relationships with government entities, communities, employers, shareholders and other stakeholders in the industry, covering providers, payers, pharma, tech and more.

Channel strategy is critical and must evolve. And while tools like Epic, email and social media are well established, it is neither strategic nor effective to blast the same messages across all platforms in the hopes of reaching everyone. The ways people engage with these platforms come with individualized expectations and AI is rapidly changing the game.

Generative Engine Optimization is reshaping the way people proactively hunt for healthcare information. Large language model tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Perplexity deprioritize content rooted in marketing and sales in favor of content that aims to educate and inform. Breaking through requires a content strategy that adapts to these rules.

This complexity is even more apparent against the backdrop of an industry under extraordinary pressure. Organizations from every facet of the healthcare ecosystem are right now determining how they will survive with significant reductions to programs like Medicare and Medicaid due to the implications of the One Big Beautiful Bill. Infectious disease trends are rising while vaccination rates are dropping. Nontraditional healthcare players like Amazon and Google are entering the market with new offerings that challenge the norm. And we are facing an overall aging population with greater healthcare needs with a workforce that is burned out and shrinking. Together, these factors contribute to the lack of trust in the healthcare landscape and in the institutions that support it.

The responsibility

Healthcare organizations serve a public function—to provide accessible care, advocate for public health practices, and educate patients on how to care for themselves and their communities. This includes countering a great deal of misinformation that puts people’s health at risk.

With tensions high and trust low, it’s natural for organizations and their leaders to want to lie low when no one has definitive or universally satisfying answers. But leaders need to understand that saying nothing is also saying everything. The fear of getting something wrong or upsetting an audience with accurate but potentially uncomfortable information delivers the message that your organization is disengaged.

In addition to accountability to patients, healthcare organizations also hold a high level of responsibility to support the incredible workers who keep these systems running. A healthcare organization’s most critical resource is its people—those who make accessible, affordable care possible. Without clear, personalized and prioritized internal communications, organizations risk confusion and misalignment—a disconnect that inevitably shows up in culture, patient experience and reputation.

The solution

If you don’t feel like you understand the depth of your audience set, it’s time to change that. That includes understanding how, where and when different audience subsets prefer to receive information.

Clarity requires capacity. An undertaking like this is time-intensive and requires an understanding of how audiences think outside of the healthcare setting as well. People want their experiences working with their health partners to mirror the ease and convenience they’re used to with retail, tech, etc: fast, personalized, channel-appropriate and concise. Bringing in an external partner like an agency that spans sectors can be beneficial, because experts can bring learnings from across industries to reimagine how messages are created and how they are disseminated to diverse audiences affected by complex healthcare business challenges.

Evaluate your internal communications cadence and channels as well. When leveraging intranet tools, email communications and even written and verbal communications internally, measurement processes must be in place to gain insight into engagement. Are staff members across the organization flooded with content but no direction on what is most important, meaning core messages get lost? Are part-time vs. full-time employees receiving mixed signals based on the channels they have access to? And critically, how is information moving up and down the chain so that employees who are the boots-on-the-ground interfacing with your customers feel aligned with leadership?

The most important shift is cultural. So often, communications experts are positioned as order takers for an organization, tasked with amplifying priorities decided by others. But in a space as complex as healthcare, communications experts need a seat in that strategic conversation when priorities are decided and messages are developed. In essence, they need to represent the needs of all audiences in order to develop the right communications strategy. In today’s healthcare landscape, the right strategy fosters the capacity organizations need to bring clarity to complexity and impact.

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Chelsea D’Amore and Emily Hirsch are Account Directors at G&S Business Communications. Marjani Williams is Vice President, Client Service and DE&I, at G&S Business Communications.