GenAI and Healthcare Tech Content Marketing: 5 Prereqs You’ll Need to Get Started

I’ve been experimenting with GenAI in hospital and healthcare content. (I’ve been doing it for a while now to bring my consulting clients a broader range of options.)

I’ll be up front—for the most part, the results haven’t been good.

I’ve played with a few tools (including ChatGPT and Claude) and on their own, they simply cannot generate the kind of content that wouldn’t be a complete embarrassment for an enterprise healthcare technology vendor. Tools like Jasper and Copy.ai are strong, but they have their drawbacks. Here are the results of query on Jasper’s results in creating content for buying committees.

Jasper AI struggles with producing in-depth content on niche topics, generating repetitive sentences, and accurately following complex instructions, especially for long-form pieces…while the tool excels at generating first drafts, it requires detailed prompts and significant human oversight to ensure accuracy, natural keyword integration, and the avoidance of plagiarism, with users noting that it doesn’t always grasp the nuances of good SEO or complex tasks...it needs significant human intervention to refine, fact-check, and ensure the content meets high quality standards and doesn’t violate plagiarism policies.

This explains why I had a client bring me in after working for months to apply Jasper in their program marketing to clinical, financial and administrative decision makers.

In my experience, the outputs were painfully generic, completely missed the nuances of the industry, and were devoid of the spark that differentiates great tech vendors in this space. Anything that the tools spit out…the rewrite work has been extensive (which is fine and how this works).

That said…I have found a way to make it work pretty well. But there’s a caveat. Five caveats, actually.

To get generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to function in B2B healthcare tech in a way that won’t get you laughed out of the hospital buying process, you have to do the same work required of any maturing content program—and that starts with these five elements.

1. Intentionality in Content Marketing Is Step 0

If you’re still in the early stages of a content strategy or campaign, there’s really no point in fiddling with GenAI (for content creation) until you’ve got the beginnings of a content strategy. All those experimental queries can be hard on the environment and can deceive you into thinking you’re making progress when you aren’t. So spend a little time kicking off a content strategy for healthcare before you go wild with ChatGPT.

2. A Clear Value Prop Is Table Stakes

If you don’t know the value you provide healthcare leaders—how a relationship with you helps them win a gold medal in their work—your results with AI are going to be weak and not worth publishing.

But “value” in this case is deeper than just results or functionality.

You need differentiation. You need to know and articulate the pain points you solve at the organizational, departmental, and individual levels. You need value from the perspective of your healthcare market. Without this information, your AI outputs will sound like everybody else’s…at best.

3. A Style Guide Will Keep Your Tools on Task

You can save yourself a lot of wasted time rewriting AI-generated content by giving whatever tool you’re using an editorial style guide to work with. A good tool will be able to ingest a style guide and apply it effectively to figure queries.

Take a little time to define your voice, key terms, sources, and preferences for different content types and you’ll be doing much less cleanup on the back end.

4. Personas Will Help You Scale

A content marketing strategy that moves business in enterprise healthcare can require a lot of content, especially if you’re making an account-based marketing play in healthcare tech.

The hospital buying group, for example, can be a highly complex mix of influencers, advocates, and decision makers from multiple departments֫—each with their own language, goals, content preferences, and relationship with your technology.

Ideally, whatever you create should be refined to speak directly to the needs of the different members of the healthcare buying group—clinical, financial, administrative and beyond. GenAI can be amazingly effective at scaling content in a way that sends a strong but precise message. You want to be clear that, as a tech vendor, you understand the intricate needs of an organization.

Build out your personas first and feed them into your tool to start producing content that speaks directly to the individual needs of hospital buying groups and other healthcare decision makers.

5. A Rich Source Document Is Your Strongest Ally

“If you haven’t taken the time to write it, why should I take the time to read it?”

There’s some truth to this criticism of AI-generated content, even in B2B content marketing. Taking the time to write a rich source document that an AI tool can then feed off is helpful for a few reasons:

• It teaches the tool your voice and style.
• Your unique perspective and insights will flow through to your content outputs.
• You’ll be teaching your tool with internal knowledge that can be used to improve the results of future queries.

I’ve talked a bit about this before over at The Content Standard, but this is a concept called “Atomization” and is useful whether you use AI or not. This approach has been the most effective of all my AI experiments.

I’m in the process of refining a couple of GenAI tools that allow newer content programs to get up and running on micro-personalization as early as possible. In the meantime, if you have any questions about how to apply AI to your home program, grab some time on my calendar for a quick (non-salesy) chat.

Megan Williams

Consulting/Content Creation/Custom Guides & Workshops