Healthcare marketing leaders face radically different mandates from just a few years ago. No longer the center for “billboards and brochures”, marketing departments are expected to make tangible contributions to business KPIs. These include patient growth, first encounter resolution, indisputable ROI, and more.
On the one hand, this is the perfect opportunity to shift Marketing’s perception from a cost center to value generator. On the other hand, given the evolving definition of “value” across the industry, it can feel like a moving target.
Specifically, there’s a widespread transition from the traditional fee-for-service (FFS) revenue model to value-based care (VBC). McKinsey reports 90 million people will depend on VBC by 2027. Just two years ago, 70% of Medicare Advantage participants opted for VBC-based services. And from the provider side, 93% of healthcare organizations offer some VBC-based services.
The marketing funnel for FFS is fairly straightforward: attract patients, convince them your provider can best meet their needs, and get them into the office. The more services provided to that new patient, the more value Marketing has brought to the health system.
Under VBC, however, Marketing’s role is less clear—and certainly more complicated. Colin Duft, account strategy director at Coegi, writes: “The transition to VBC is complex and fraught with challenges. This shift is incredibly complicated and difficult to execute, requiring brands to understand the multifaceted definition of value to connect effectively with their audience.”
To succeed in organizations that adopt VBC, healthcare marketers have to change their strategies. In this article, we’ll look at one specific example: prioritizing digital content to provide value to patients before, during, and after care. The faster your organization adopts this tactic, the more prepared you’ll be when VBC becomes the norm.
What is value-based care (VBC) and, more importantly, why is it happening?
It’s impossible to attend healthcare conferences or webinars without hearing about value-based care (VBC). More than a buzzword, it’s a trend that could reshape the industry as we know it. In fact, 60% of hospital systems have elements of their business models that are tied to value—and that number is growing.
But what is VBC exactly? Simply put, it’s a business model where providers are paid based on health outcomes, patient experience, and quality of service. Contrast that with the typical fee-for-service (FFS) model, where patients are charged regardless of outcomes.
There are a number of reasons why VBC is becoming popular across the U.S. Here are four of the most notable.
Ballooning healthcare costs
As healthcare costs continue to rise, the FFS model is becoming less feasible. This is nothing new. Stuart Guterman, now-retired vice president with the Commonwealth Fund, predicted this problem back in 2013: “Not only does fee-for-service payment fail to provide incentives for efficiency, quality, or outcomes, it encourages the provision of unnecessary care and often discourages coordination of care and management of patients across providers and settings.”
Additionally, Anne Lockner with Robins Kaplan wrote for Bloomberg Law years ago that, “[The] FFS system rewards quantity over quality, which encourages high-cost services and products. While insurers bear the brunt of these costs, healthcare consumers also share these costs in the form of increased premiums and deductibles.”
It’s not sustainable for healthcare costs to trend upward indefinitely. VBC promises one possible solution to this problem by getting costs under control while continuing to drive—and, in some cases, improve—quality health outcomes.
CMS
The epicenter of VBC innovation and experimentation is, without question, CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services). One of the agency’s strategic objectives is to gather data—through both voluntary and mandatory programs—to identify the best approach for transitioning Medicare and Medicaid participants to value-based programs by 2030. CMS is deploying pilot programs across hospitals, health plans, clinics, and various parts of the healthcare ecosystem.
For healthcare marketers, the connection between VBC and CMS can’t be overstated, especially as more seniors enroll in Medicare Advantage (currently, this comprises 54% of participants). Marketers in health systems must identify and implement strategies to communicate with a patient base that is growing accustomed to more choices in their care.
Data ubiquity & access
Digital transformation has offered healthcare providers with access to data that either didn’t exist or, in extreme cases, were so large that converting them into usable insights was prohibitive. The first and most obvious source of these data are EHRs, but can also include population health data, Social Determinants of Health (SDOH), patient/disease registries, lab data, even genomic data and more.
The more information providers have about patient conditions—both individual and social—the more effective they can be at predicting the outcomes of patient success. This makes value-based approaches to care feasible in ways they weren’t before.
Consolidation & resource constraints
Right now, the healthcare market is in a period of heavy consolidation: vertically, horizontally, and cross-market. Add to this the ongoing challenges in healthcare hiring and the reeling aftereffects of Covid-related disruptions, and health providers are staring down numerous resource constraints.
The problem is that with FFS payment, quantity rules the day. Financial growth under this model requires providers to stretch themselves thinner than they already are. VBC opens another avenue for growth by enabling better outcomes with the same or fewer resources.
How should marketers change their strategies under VBC revenue models?
If healthcare marketing departments are responsible for driving top- and bottom-line business results, their strategies should correspond to the business model at hand. As such, it’s vital that marketing leaders consider which strategies best serve and support VBC-based revenue models. That way, they can become an ongoing source of value creation for their health systems.
Value-based care: perception vs. reality
There’s a significant gap between perception and reality when it comes to how health systems are deploying VBC.
This gap came to light in a recent Innovaccer & Morning Consult report: “While providers believe they have moved 96% of revenue into some form of performance risk, they report that 80% of those programs still operate on a FFS architecture, where claims submission (as opposed to true population-based payment, i.e., full risk) remains the driving force for value-based analysis and payment. The FFS architecture is even present in Shared Savings models, where healthcare costs are compared with a goal, and providers and payers share in the savings or losses.”
In other words, even though providers say they’ve moved into VBC, in reality many aspects of their business models remain on a FFS model. Understanding where your organization truly sits on the FFS → VBC path to adoption is critical to ensuring your marketing strategies actually align with your current realities.
Brand marketing: Funnel vs. nurture
Marketers have talked about the “marketing funnel” to the point of cliché. So there’s good news: VBC is far less dependent on the funnel traditionally understood, and more interested in ongoing patient nurture.
According to Duft from Coegi, “Brands can play a pivotal role in supporting the VBC model by providing resources that help HCPs deliver quality care. This could involve offering educational materials, tools for patient engagement, or technologies that enhance treatment outcomes. By alleviating some of the pressures on HCPs, brands can build stronger, more supportive relationships.”
The same goes for post-care patient retention. Ahava Leibtag, President of Aha Media Group, comments, “Where I think health systems should be spending their time is in nurturing, not necessarily in retention, because you can’t retain someone who no longer needs a service. If you get your gallbladder out, you don’t have another gallbladder you need to get taken out…Making sure the patient feels that health system is invested in their future healthy self.”
Under a FFS model, the goal is to get as many patients in the door as quickly as possible. Under a VBS model, the primary measure of success isn’t patients in the door, but the health outcomes your providers achieve on their behalf. By providing ongoing support through your health system’s brand presence, you can provide patients with the information they need to take better care of themselves. This can only improve outcomes when it’s time for treatment.
First-contact or first-encounter resolution
According to Larry Meade, System Marketing Director, Engagement Platform at Franciscan Health, marketing departments are increasingly accountable not only for patient experience, but first-encounter resolution. “We’re doing a lot of work right now with our Engagement Center, our centralized call center, to achieve first-encounter resolution—not first-call resolution—but the first time someone encounters us, whether it’s on the phone or through an EMR app or online, how are we building so whatever they’re coming for, it gets done in that first engagement?”
What is the role of digital content in a VBC marketing strategy?
There are many marketing tactics that can support a VBC business model. But few are better than content marketing. By creating in-depth articles, videos, even podcasts, content marketing offers multiple avenues for distributing valuable information to patients before, during, and after care.
Key to content marketing success in any industry is publishing accurate and relevant information. In healthcare, this is doubly important. When patients have an urgent question about their health, they need to trust that the information is reliable and comes from a trusted source.
This is not a new concept. Both the Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic have their own online Health Libraries. Each is jam-packed with valuable information that can help patients recognize symptoms early and know when to come in for care.
Most health systems have the in-house expertise to create similar valuable content. While everyone else is posting surface-level, fluffy, AI-generated blogs, you can use your digital presence to help patients take better care of themselves, accelerate first-encounter resolution, and enable them to partner with doctors and take ownership of their health outcomes.
Here are four benefits of digital content that can help marketing teams contribute to tangible outcomes under VBC.
1. Cost efficiency
Healthcare marketers are increasingly expected to do more with less. 83% say they expect their budgets to either stay the same or decrease. One of the advantages of content marketing as a tactic is that it costs 62% less than other digital advertising channels while generating up to three times as many leads as other channels.
Although those exact numbers will vary based on specific industries and market conditions, the general principle holds. One of the main reasons is the longevity of a given piece of content. If you create a whitepaper or SEO-optimized blog post, you only have to pay for it once. So long as the content remains relevant, it will continually generate traffic and leads.
But with paid digital advertising, like PPC ads, you only generate leads and traffic as long as the ad runs. Stop the money, stop the funnel.
2. Help solve patient problems
According to a report from Weber Shandwick and KRC Research, 73% of Americans obtain health information from the internet. This number is growing, as it marks a 14% increase over the last decade. And out of all the questions Google fields, 7% relate to healthcare in some way.
Simply put, patients are going to the internet to learn more about their health conditions, ongoing health maintenance, and to decide whether it’s time to visit a provider. For providers, this presents an obvious concern: most people encounter health misinformation from the internet.
Health misinformation doesn’t just erode trust in health systems and providers. It also hinders patient outcomes, and providers have to undo potentially delayed or poor treatment. This obviously hurts the patients. But under a VBC model, this also hurts providers.
Healthcare marketers, however, can be part of the solution. By leveraging in-house medical expertise—from doctors, nurses, and other informed personnel—marketers can strategically deploy search-optimized content to provide more accurate answers to patient questions.
3. Support multiple healthcare marketing strategies
Another advantage of content marketing as a health system is that your content investment can support multiple strategies. This not only helps with cost efficiency, but can also help accelerate your marketing department’s objectives of acquiring and retaining new patients faster.
Generate inbound traffic through SEO
Given the volume of inbound patient traffic through search engines (namely Google), many providers are missing an incredible opportunity to provide helpful, informed, expert answers to their key questions.
SEO has changed just in the past few months. Google’s recent core update has undercut many of the traditional tactics that got companies to rank on search. Even HubSpot, long considered the “gold standard” for SEO success, lost more than half their organic traffic over the last quarter.
Not to mention the fact that Google’s AI Overview is changing how users engage with search. It’s not enough to rank on the search engine result page (SERP). Now, you also need to rank in AI Overview, or risk your content falling by the wayside in a zero-click landscape. This requires tight alignment not only with keywords, but their underlying queries (i.e. user intent).
So what does SEO success look like in 2025 and beyond? Based on what Google is telling us + our own experience, content needs to meet three criteria:
- Fitting within your narrow niche and area of domain authority & expertise. Outliers are less likely to be picked up by Google.
- Highly aligned with user queries and, by extension, buyer intent
- Detailed information that has instant takeaway value for the user (no more teasing your downloadable buyers guides)
Other tactics that can help you find success with healthcare SEO include:
- Thoughtful, informed, and researched answers to patient questions—don’t post a bunch of fluff
- Target queries and keywords that are within competitive reach of your website based on your current stage of SEO maturity
- Engage in both on-page and off-page optimization practices to increase your visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs)
- Optimize for local SEO to attract an audience that can convert
Convert traffic into leads
SEO is a great approach for attracting an audience to your website. But audience doesn’t equal new patients. Converting traffic into leads requires additional effort.
Most of the information you’ll find online about lead gen in content marketing is about audience generation in content marketing. These are the tactics that involve building your website traffic, social media presence, promoting content, etc.
But if you want to convert that audience into leads, you need to invest in the tactics that do so. Here are the three that work best:
- On-Page Lead Generation. This is the easiest type of content-first lead gen, but it also will generate the lowest volume of leads. This approach involves placing calls to action within your content so that when an audience reads it, they’ll be enticed to take further action in real time.
- Retargeting. Often you’ll have readers who want to learn more about your business, but the realities of life prompt them to click away. Retargeting ads help you follow up with an additional conversion offer so they can finish their interrupted journey.
- Boosted Content. Sometimes, you’ll have contacts who may be interested in your conversion offer but haven’t visited your website. Boosted content helps you get more audience into the funnel and, if you structure your ads correctly, can drive more conversions on your high-value content offers.
By sharing helpful information with your audience, you can help to build trust and rapport with them, increasing the chances of a conversion either immediately or down the line. What’s more, by educating future patients before they even come through the door, the patients you do convert will be more likely to have positive outcomes.
Drive the conversation through thought leadership
Right now, the healthcare industry is facing major disruption. It’s during times like these that experts—including those in your health system—need to lead the conversation, not just follow it. By investing in content that actually changes how people think about the major issues facing their care, you can not counter false narratives and misinformation among your patient base. This can also provide an example for other industry leaders to follow.
4. Build your patient nurture ecosystem
Earlier we talked about the shift from a traditional marketing “funnel” to a more holistic “nurture” approach. Instead of constantly trying to drive patients in for a visit (the old FFS approach), VBC care encourages ongoing support outside the traditional office visit. This can create more positive outcomes down the line.
More than that, investing in digital content helps to build trust between you and your audience. You become the “expert” in their eyes. Which means when future health problems arise (as they inevitably do), you’re the first person they contact.
At the same time, you don’t want to inundate patients with too much information. People have lives, and they don’t want to think about their health more than necessary. So it’s important to create an opt-in, permissive structure for your ecosystem. For example:
- Offer multiple tiers of email newsletters at varying degrees of frequency—some patients get a monthly newsletter vs. more engaged patients receiving one weekly
- Create a clear, straightforward linking structure and search engine on your website so patients can navigate from article to article easily
- Make it easy for your audience to scale their engagement up and down based on interest (e.g. a pregnant individual will want lots of information about pregnancy, labor, and delivery for their term, but after the child is born their interest will wane)
How to generate digital content at scale
Investing in digital content to support VBC initiatives requires a certain degree of scalability. You need to create enough content to cover all the potential scenarios your patients might face. At the same time, you don’t want to spread yourself so thin that you sacrifice content quality and distribute inaccurate or even harmful information.
So how do you strike the right balance? The best approach is to partner with an agency with proven experience in harnessing internal expertise and transforming it into a large-scale marketing operation. Fearless Content Group prides ourselves on achieving the perfect balance of speed, quality, and performance in the content we create.
Schedule a consultation and see how we can build a content strategy tailor-made for your health system here.
