Closing the Gap Between Patient Experience & Marketing [Silo Wreckers Series, Part I]

Why PX and marketing need to collaborate

As healthcare marketers, we don’t control what happens when patients walk into our hospitals. We don’t get to welcome them in, take their names, and personally ensure they receive the very best care, every single visit.

We need to trust that our organization’s patient experience (PX) is delivering on the expectations we set in our content. And if it’s not, we need to recognize the disconnect and align marketing with the patient’s reality. We can’t do that if the only time we speak to the PX team is at the annual holiday party.

If your healthcare marketing department — like many — rarely gets to collaborate with your org’s experience folks, this article is a call to be the fearless leader who tears down that silo.

What role does marketing play in the patient experience?

In case you’re wondering, “Is this really in my lane as a healthcare marketer?” Yes — and it always has been.

Healthcare marketers don’t own the end-to-end patient journey, but we do own the brand promise. Our messaging sets expectations that the care journey must meet. In the realm of patient experience, marketers must:

• Manage patient expectations (before, during, and after care)
• Communicate our healthcare brand promise accurately and honestly
• Build and maintain patient trust (in a time where trust is on shaky ground …)
• Safeguard the brand’s reputation

When marketing aligns with the patient experience, it supports patient satisfaction and strengthens loyalty. But when there’s a disconnect, patients notice — and it feels inauthentic (or downright dishonest).

Of course, marketers don’t overpromise or misrepresent the patient experience on purpose. It happens because many of us are walled up in our offices and twice removed from what’s really going on in our hospitals and clinics.

But distance doesn’t absolve us of responsibility. If you’re siloed from the PX side of your org, here are some steps to improve your content and support marketing’s role in shaping PX.

How to align marketing with patient experience

1. Get to know the true PX

To align healthcare content with the patient experience, marketers need to understand the journey through the patient’s eyes. Not just how it’s envisioned — how it actually feels to move through.

These resources can help:

• Your PX department: They’re the resident experts. And they’ll probably be glad to collaborate, as stronger content supports the patient experience by delivering the right information at the right time.
• Journey maps: These are snapshots of the experience from touchpoint to touchpoint (including insights about patient needs and emotions). As our friends at Cast & Hue shared, journey maps help marketers align messaging, understand key moments that drive loyalty, and spot hidden differentiators.
• Patient feedback: Mine your feedback at scale, including reviews, form submissions, and any verbal input that patients share with their doctors about the PX. (AI tools can make this faster. Reach out and let’s chat about it.)
• Patients themselves: Talk to patients about their experiences with your brand. Ask open-ended questions for deeper insights. Not “What happened next?” but “How did you feel heading into that appointment?” and “Why?”

2. Evaluate your content and messaging strategy

It’s surprisingly common for healthcare content to set the wrong expectations. For example:

• “Same-day appointments” callouts often fail to specify which services that applies to.
• The website may promise “personalized care,” while certain appointments feel rushed and scripted.
• “You might feel some pressure” is a notorious understatement.

Assess your content across channels. What promises are being made to patients, and are they realistic? Also, audit your patient personas, brand guidelines, and messaging pillars to ensure they accurately represent your audience’s needs and the experience your brand delivers.

Seek out opportunities where marketing can better support the patient experience:

• Fill content gaps: Are there moments where patients could use a resource that isn’t yet created?
• Spot unanswered questions: Do the same patient questions come up at certain phases in the journey?
• Reduce friction: Are there places where marketing causes frustration, like confusing patient education materials or a website that’s hard to navigate?

3. Operationalize collaboration between marketing & experience

Occasional check-ins between PX and healthcare marketing teams are a start (and already more than what’s happening in many systems that are fighting silos).

But to support a long-term, meaningful partnership — the kind that improves both content and experience — build systems to help drive collaboration. For example:

• Regular touchpoints: Set standing meetings to evaluate patient reviews, insights from patient-facing team members, survey scores, and other patient feedback.
• Shared objectives: Partner on some of the goals you share, such as reducing patient confusion in certain stages of the journey or bolstering brand trust.
• Collaborative workflows: Experience-focused team members have the insight to bring patient-centric content ideas to the table. They can also review content about the patient experience to ensure it’s represented accurately.

What if the current experience isn’t delivering on the brand promise?

It’s a common sticking point: Balancing aspirational brand messaging about your system at its best (or where your brand would like to be) with the actual PX, which comes with friction points and flaws.

PX is always a work in progress — no experience is perfect. But if you notice a substantial disconnect between your messaging strategy and the experience delivered to patients, be the team member who brings the issue to light. Start the conversation with leadership and demonstrate how the problem affects business goals.

Above all, you can only control what you can control. If you need help communicating with the right level of transparency, we have specific messaging frameworks and strategies for this situation. And we’re just a contact form away.

Want tailored recommendations for your strategy?

That’s our specialty. Let’s review your patient surveys, feedback, and journey maps to match your messaging with reality.

See how we can help