This article was written by Jessica Levco, a freelance healthcare writer who covered the 27th Annual Healthcare Internet Conference (HCIC) for Greystone.Net.
AI is an evolving situation. 
That’s how Ahava Leibtag, president of Aha Media, described what our industry is facing when it comes to AI.
And we wanted to make sure we covered the situation.
At the 27th Annual Healthcare Internet Conference (HCIC), we dedicated several sessions and keynotes to this topic. More than 800+ attendees had the opportunity to learn about the benefits and risks of AI, how health systems were integrating AI into their content strategy and so much more.
Let’s take a look at some of the key learnings from the conference:
5 AI tools that will make your job as a marketer easier
Daniel Fell, senior strategist at Optum, and James Gardner, director of healthcare strategy at OHO Interactive, shared several AI tools that marketers should check out:
- Zoom (the AI Companion): This feature summarizes your meeting, drafts chat and email messages and generates ideas for your whiteboard.
- Dropbox (the Dropbox Dash solution): Connected to the tools you use every day (like Salesforce and Outlook), you can now use one search bar to find what you’re looking for.
- Canva (Magic Studio): Instead of jumping around to different AI platforms, explore all the AI-driven photo, video and writing tools inside the Canva platform.
- Adobe (Firefly): Explore using generative AI and simple text prompts to start creating eye-popping images.
- Grammarly: An AI-writing assistant that makes sure your copy is in tip-top shape.
Even though these tools can be helpful, Fell recommended approaching them with a degree of skepticism and care. Training your team on detecting incorrect results and biases is essential. Also, make sure your legal team is involved on your AI adventures.
“When you’re getting started with these tools, it’s helpful to form a small exploratory group with others who are just as curious as you,” Gardner says. “These tools should help you focus on enhancing productivity, improving work quality and adding capabilities — not reducing costs.”
Need more tools to add to your toolbox?
Sujal Raju, CEO & founder of Enqbator, reminded attendees during his presentation that AI is all about experimenting.
“The more and more you use these tools, the better you'll get at crafting prompts that will get you the results you want," Raju says. “AI marketing tools are becoming more and more user-friendly, so you don't need to be a data scientist to get started.”
Here are a few of his favorites:
- Humata AI: It’s like ChatGPT for your files, allowing you to interact with your documents and PDFs.
- Undetectable AI: Did AI write your latest email? Click “humanize” on this tool, which removes AI detection to make sure your copy bypasses AI detectors.
- Riverside FM: This records podcasts and videos, using AI features to find, edit and distribute viral content.
- ClickUp: This is an app that manages all your marketing teams, along with AI tasks.
- Sybill AI: Meet an AI meeting assistant that automates CRM updates and crafts follow-up emails.
How to optimize your content for AI
Carolina Anthony, executive director of digital brand and content strategy at AdventHealth, recognizes that making healthcare decisions can be difficult for patients. Making sure AdventHealth’s content appears authoritative and trustworthy is a top priority for the organization.
To do so, AdventHealth prioritizes SEO and partners with companies like Schema App. Schema Markup (known as structured data) is data that you put on your website that enables search engines to understand your content and its context within your Health System.
Martha van Berkel, CEO, Schema App, explained to attendees that as our industry transitions from SEO to contextual AI-powered search, healthcare organizations need to make sure their website has connected Schema Markup.
“With the latest changes with AI, whether it’s through ChatGPT or Bard, you’ll see many applications consuming your hospital’s website data,” van Berkel says. “Google isn’t your only digital front door. It’s also everyone who is building the next AI platform.”
Here are three tips to optimize your content for AI:
- Know your consumer and look beyond demographics. For example, King Charles and Ozzie Osborne have similar demographics, but they are different consumers. Understanding how your consumers make sense of the world is important to add the right context to your content and SEO strategy.
- Add context. You can do this through Schema Markup or by building a marketing knowledge graph.
- The search and AI landscape is changing quickly. Be agile, test, measure and iterate.
How an AI web assistant helps inform Austin Regional Clinic’s digital strategy
Heidi Shalev, vice president of marketing at Austin Regional Clinic, explained how her team uses
insights from AI-powered interactions to close the gap between patient expectations and workforce capacity.
ARC's journey with Hyro, as recounted by Rom Cohen, the CIO and co-founder of Hyro, began with Hyro’s COVID-19 assistant, which offered accurate and vetted answers to patients during the pandemic.
Over time, this assistant evolved into a sophisticated "digital front door web assistant" that offers a broad range of services. The assistant helps patients search for providers, schedule appointments and navigate ARC's website.
Hyro's platform automatically retrieves information from the internal health system’s sources such as EMRs, websites, PDFs, intranet and provider directories. It’s adaptable for deployment across various channels, such as web, mobile apps and call centers, resulting in an average of more than 6,000 monthly patient conversations.
The real-time insight into patient searches is Shalev's favorite aspect of the assistant. She appreciates the ease and agility of the tool, particularly the ability to update its responses in-house within 24 hours.
“I didn’t realize so many patients were asking about mammograms until I saw the analytics from the chats,” Shalev says. “I contacted our customer service team to update the information we want to give patients about this service, and it was updated the next day.”
Thinking about launching something similar at your healthcare organization? The duo shared three tips to ensure these AI conversations are effective:
- Review missing terms: “We saw we didn’t have a comprehensive response on our website to meet an increase in interactions surrounding the topic of ‘patient registration,’” Shalev says.
- Add new flows based on patient interactions and missing terms: The team added a new flow that helps new patients find a doctor, book an appointment and register.
- Update website content to meet patient needs: The team also updated its patient registration page and created specific registration-related responses.