Jun 17, 2025
Personalizing the healthcare experience has become a top priority for today’s healthcare brands, and with good reason. Beyond meeting rising patient expectations, tailored communication and care approaches result in better health outcomes. Studies show that poor communication between providers and patients can result in critical information loss, diminished care quality, lower patient satisfaction, and preventable harm. It can also waste valuable resources and drive up healthcare costs.
To meet the needs of current consumers, brands must rethink how, when, and where they engage. This shift toward personalizing communications doesn’t require brands to overhaul their processes and technology overnight. The core principles of consumerization—access, participation, and empowerment—can be applied across existing communication channels through thoughtful planning and execution.
Before launching any personalization strategy, you must develop a clear understanding of your audience. This begins with research and insights. Creating audience personas can uncover important preferences related to communication format, timing, language, and tone.
For established brands with existing communication channels, analyzing engagement metrics alongside consumer data can inform the development of personas. Newer brands without this baseline should start with informed assumptions and broader consumer insights to shape initial segments. These early frameworks serve as a starting point, and personas should be continuously refined over time as new data becomes available.
Without these foundational insights, communication efforts risk missing the mark, leading to confusion, disengagement, or diminished impact.
Healthcare communication has traditionally been top-down. Providers speak and patients listen. But today’s consumers are not passive recipients; they are active participants. Communication should feel like a dialogue, not a directive.
That means shifting the tone from instructive to inclusive. Instead of issuing orders, healthcare brands should invite individuals into their care journey, providing clear, relevant information that empowers them to take meaningful action. Brands should reevaluate their brand voice and other tonal guidelines to incorporate collaborative and inclusive language. Brands without such guidelines should look to establish them. This helps communications across all channels maintain consistency and demonstrate a unified voice. Modeling engagement as a dialogue not only supports better health outcomes; it builds long-term trust.
The who is just as important as the what. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges’ Center for Health Justice, from 2021 to 2024, U.S. adults’ trust in public health departments has decreased by 3%, hospitals by 5%, and pharmacies by 8%. As trust in traditional institutions declines, many individuals, especially younger generations, turn to influencers and peers for guidance on health issues. Healthcare brands can tap into this trend by collaborating with credible voices in the community and across social media platforms.
Influencers can help translate complex information into relatable content and amplify impactful messages through platforms where people already spend time. In doing so, they help fill a significant trust gap and strengthen authentic connections between healthcare brands and consumers.
Another way to strengthen authentic connections is to maintain a central focus on equity. Consumerization doesn’t mean catering only to the tech-savvy; it means meeting people where they are, with communication that’s culturally responsive, linguistically appropriate, and accessible across literacy levels. This may involve multilingual outreach, partnerships with trusted community-based brands, or the incorporation of audio/visual content for those who prefer or require alternatives to written materials.
By designing communication strategies that serve historically marginalized populations, brands can help close long-standing health disparities while reinforcing trust and inclusion. This is such a robust opportunity for brands that we plan to dig into this topic further in a future article, so stay tuned.
Many healthcare brands face structural barriers to building personalized consumer experiences. These include:
- Disjointed engagement across channels – A lack of integration between consumer data and engagement platforms makes it difficult to deliver cohesive, personalized messaging.
- Isolated systems – Some brands have a limited ability to analyze consumer preferences across channels and devices.
Bridging these gaps requires more than advanced technology. It calls for intentional collaboration, data integration, and a commitment to continuous improvement in how we communicate.
In addition to designing equitable communication strategies, delivering those messages effectively also requires the right tools. While technology is a powerful enabler of personalized communication, its value lies in how it’s used. Tools like patient portals, mobile apps, automated messaging systems, and AI-driven chatbots can streamline outreach and deliver timely, relevant information. But without a human-centered design approach, these tools can easily become overwhelming or impersonal.
The goal isn’t to replace human connection, but to extend and enhance it, making it easier for individuals to navigate their care, schedule appointments, refill prescriptions, or receive preventive reminders in ways that feel natural and intuitive. By integrating technology with empathy, brands can strike the right balance between automation and authentic engagement.
Even the most advanced tools will fall short without a workforce that’s equipped and empowered to use them effectively. Frontline staff, clinicians, and administrators all play a role in delivering messages that are clear, respectful, and empowering. To create a more consumer-centric communication strategy, brands need to undertake a cultural transition. This means providing staff with the training and tools they need to communicate across cultural and linguistic differences, respond to health literacy challenges, and engage in active listening.
Encouraging feedback, celebrating communication successes, and aligning incentives around patient experience can help embed these practices into the organizational culture. Over time, this shift will improve how care is delivered and strengthen the overall connection between health systems and the communities they serve.
Improving healthcare communication is a long-term strategy. The concepts and ideas presented in this article shouldn’t happen all at once; they’re building blocks that contribute to a cohesive communications strategy that seeks to authentically connect with consumers. In an increasingly consumer-driven landscape, healthcare brands that don’t evolve risk being left behind.
By embracing the principles of consumerization, investing in audience research, elevating new messengers, and closing communication gaps, healthcare brands can turn communication into a powerful tool for building trust and improving health outcomes.