This article was written for Greystone.Net by Jessica Levco, a freelance healthcare writer and event strategist. 

For nearly 16 years, William “Skip” Hidlay built brand journalism operations inside three health systems. He started out at Via Christi Health, then moved to UChicago Medicine and, most recently, The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, where he served as the system’s first enterprise-wide chief communications and marketing officer for health.      

Building brand storytelling operations inside hospitals wasn’t too big of a leap for Hidlay, since he began his career as a newspaper reporter in the 1980s and went on to work for such big news brands as The Associated Press and Gannett. Although he’s seen dramatic changes to the media industry, one thing hasn’t changed: Healthcare consumers want authentic, fact-based content. And good news! That’s what bots prefer, too. What a relief.

At #HCIC26 (Oct. 25-28 in Orlando), Hidlay will co-present with Steve Leibforth, managing director at Castle Connolly Top Doctors & Top Hospitals. During their presentation, Leibforth will share Castle Connolly’s latest research on how consumer habits are shifting as more people turn to generative AI to find healthcare services.

“When patients ask AI engines for top provider recommendations, the algorithm looks for content volume and verified authority,” Leibforth says. “When health systems pair brand journalism with third-party validation, they create a ‘zero-doubt’ experience that moves a patient from initial discovery to booking an appointment.”

Hidlay, who retired from The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center at the end of March, says that now is the time for hospital marketers to “double down on creating their own media enterprise because your hospital has built-in authority.” Hidlay started his own consulting firm, W. Clair Communications, which is focused on brand strategy, storytelling and AI advisory.

Here’s a look at how heledhis 125-person marketing and communications team at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center went through the transition of developing the best content for humans and bots, and what he’s advising his clients to do today.

First, create an owned media enterprise

At The Ohio State University Medical Wexner Center, the marketing and communications team functions like a hybrid newsroom, content marketing agency and growth marketing agency. For example, the team launched the Ohio State Health & Discovery website years before generative AI reshaped search, built on schema principles and SEO fundamentals. When AI arrived, the team didn’t have to start over.

“As AI came into full speed, our team pivoted to optimize their work for GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization),” Hidlay says. “The same principles of schema and content authority still apply, even if how patients search for information is changing.”

Even though he loves a good story, Hidlay says that strong content by itself won’t get a health system recognized by AI. It has to be paired with outside, third-party validation. He says the PESO (Paid, Earned, Shared and Owned Media) framework is a great strategy for marketers to follow in the new world of AI-curated search.    

“It’s ironic that in an era where the news media is in rapid decline, AI gives more credit to news media coverage to establish your health system’s authority and credibility,” Hidlay says. “Part of what we’re going to talk about in the presentation is the importance of third-party validation.”

The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center invests paid media dollars in third-party validation and sponsored content. For example, the team partnered with Castle Connolly Top Doctors to bring more visibility to the physicians recognized in its Top Docs program.

In addition, the team actively tracks its performance in U.S. News & World Report rankings and integrates its media relations team as a function and strategic asset within the Ohio State health system’s unified marketing, communications and digital strategy department, rather than a separate function. The team optimized the news media resources area of its website by applying schema to news releases so that AI models could find and cite them when answering search queries.

Train yourself to think like a journalist

Hidlay’s advice for healthcare marketers without a journalism degree is to stop leading with the hospital’s facts and figures, and start looking for stories that impact emotionally with health news consumers and prospective patients. For example, his former team looks for the questions people ask Google, but for which there aren’t good, authoritative answers.       

“We try to figure out what the gaps in authoritative content were,” Hidlay says. “If there was an area of highly searched questions around cardiac health, but tons of great content on most of those questions, we’d stay out of that. We try to answer the questions that don’t have a lot of good content that AI can use to answer them.”

Hidlay says his former team isn’t afraid to write long-form, complex health, science and medical stories, either. One example he provided of why feature stories matter is from an in-depth story his team produced about a patient who underwent a complex skull-based tumor procedure only performed at a handful of academic medical centers.

Months after it was published, an assistant school principal in Colorado was diagnosed with a rare type of bone cancer. His initial prognosis from the Colorado hospitals he visited was that his tumor was inoperable. He happened to know someone at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center who sent him the story that Hidlay’s team wrote.

“He said that after he read that story, that was the first time he had hope that he could be saved,” Hidlay says. “The patient was treated successfully through our destination medicine program and is back working as an assistant principal today. That’s the power of great storytelling.”

[Editor’s Note: It really is a great story. The team went out to Colorado to get videos and pictures. Read it here.]

Add more videos to your content mix

Written content counts, but so does video. The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center built a five-person in-house video team focused on creating one-minute explainer videos designed to qualify as YouTube Shorts, as well as more polished, longer-form video stories. The channel has more than 140,000 subscribers and 2,600 videos.

Choosing which physicians to feature came down to willingness more than charisma, Hidlay says.

“Our philosophy was, ‘We work with the willing,’” Hidlay says. “Because physicians and scientists aren’t compensated for their time on camera, we wanted to find people who were motivated by our hospital’s mission, not the spotlight. Part of our role as marketers is to serve as educators. We want to create stories and content that help inform people so that they make the best healthcare choices for them and for their families.”

Stop stressing about clicks

As click-through rates decline because of Google’s zero-click policy, traditional metrics like page views and time on site are becoming less useful on their own. The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center team now tracks how their content surfaces in AI-generated answers and search snippets. As they always have, they track appointment bookings and completed forms.

“We’re building a deep library of content that compounds over time and grows and grows,” Hidlay says. “I’ve found that if you have really good, well-developed content that answers questions and connects with people on an emotional level, AI agents and bots will see you as a source of authority.”