As health systems face financial pressures and tighter budgets, they are also operating in a business environment where traditional digital strategies are less effective.
Artificial intelligence is changing the game for healthcare marketing, creating a "perfect storm of AI disruption, budget scrutiny and rising expectations from patients and providers," according to Ann Bilyew, executive vice president of health and president of the Healthcare Solutions Group at WebMD Ignite.
WebMD Ignite rolled out a new solution, called Pulse, that it calls an end-to-end marketing growth solution that uses performance metrics such as response curves and persuadable-lift analysis to guide marketing investments. The solution provides turnkey activation, performance tracking and AI-driven optimizations. Health systems can launch full-funnel, omnichannel campaigns across both consumer and healthcare provider audiences, executives said.
"With Ignite Pulse, we give health systems predictive intelligence, creative precision and turnkey execution together with the largest clinical-grade content corpus in the world to reach the right audiences and demonstrate measurable impact – all within the guardrails of a client's HIPAA and privacy requirements and patient trust," Bilyew said.
Search engine AI Overviews (AIOs) dominate health-related queries, driving down click-through rates and reducing the effectiveness of traditional search-based acquisition channels, according to Kyle Hufnal, WebMD Ignite's vice president of activation. "Healthcare systems that continue relying solely on generic search tactics will see declining reach, higher cost per acquisition and weakened consumer funnels."
"Right now, many hospitals are struggling to maintain patient volumes, reduce leakage and prove the value of their marketing investments, especially as AI changes how people search for health information online. Traditional tools can’t keep up — they waste money targeting the wrong audiences and offer little visibility into ROI," Hufnal said.
Healthcare organizations need to shift from traditional marketing to a focus on data-driven marketing performance and operational simplicity, he asserts.
He notes that there is an ongoing technological gap with direct implications for market share and margins.
Health systems that use advanced predictive intelligence can "capture demand earlier, identify micro-moments of intent and optimize spend based on true clinical referral patterns and downstream conversion," he said, noting that healthcare institutions that invest in intelligent infrastructure gain outsized visibility and conversion efficiency, while those using legacy tools fall further behind.
The company says its Pulse solution combines de-identified condition, conversion, demographic and health interest data to build predictive segments that reach consumers and healthcare providers with clinically grounded, performance-optimized campaigns.
"It helps health systems spend smarter and connect marketing outcomes directly to encounters. In short, it’s giving healthcare marketers the kind of precision, speed and accountability they’ve never had before — at a time when every dollar and every interaction counts," Hufnal said.
WebMD is well known for offering medical and health information to consumers, and it launched the Ignite brand about two years ago to develop tech solutions for providers and health plans. The company's healthcare provider applications include data analytics, targeting capabilities and omnichannel activation services. Last year, it rolled out analytics and tech solutions purpose-built to drive higher provider referral volume.
WebMD Ignite has also been building out its tech solutions for payers, targeting member engagement and care management.
The company claims that its Pulse solution provides more precise clinical intelligence while ensuring tech integration that aligns with organizations' HIPAA and data privacy requirements.
"WebMD Ignite’s access to large-scale de-identified healthcare encounters and claims-verified conditions enables far richer personalization than generic audience buckets," Hufnal said. "For example, instead of targeting 'knee pain interest,” Pulse can target audiences showing indicators of an active orthopedic referral. That level of precision reduces wasted spend, improves conversion and creates experiences more relevant to the care journey. By using clinically-grounded data, health systems improve engagement, foster trust, and drive measurable business outcomes, such as fewer no-shows and higher uptake of high-value services."
WebMD Ignite processes data in a "secure clean-room environment," Hufnal said. Clean-room architecture lets AI work where the data lives, analyzing, optimizing and generating insights without risk of leakage, he explained.
"It's a secure, controlled data ecosystem where sensitive healthcare data, such as claims, encounter, or conversion information, can be analyzed without ever exposing or moving personally identifiable information. In practice, that means data from health systems and WebMD Ignite’s own de-identified datasets stay within their respective environments. Our algorithms enter the 'clean room' to identify predictive patterns and performance insights, but no individual-level data ever leaves or is re-identifiable," Hufnal said.
Early adopters of the solution report measurable improvements in appointment conversion rates, service-line growth and ROI. Organizations report that campaigns demonstrate 15% higher spend efficiency compared to third-party segments and up to 25% more relevance through claims-verified condition targeting, according to the company.
Components of the solution include Ignite GeoIQ, which pinpoints real health demand by market, using catchment modeling and condition-level insights to tailor outreach and Pulse Segments, which blends clinical and behavioral signals to create audience strategies with higher efficiency, the company said. The solution also offers media mix modeling to quantify the ROI of every marketing channel and prescribes the optimal spend allocation to maximize campaign outcomes.
As AI and tech reshape online search and digital engagement, there is a need for healthcare organizations to shift their marketing strategies, Hufnal said.
"Instead of treating marketing as a separate support function, health systems increasingly view it as integrated into access, capacity, and referral operations. That means rebuilding tech stacks to unify CRM [customer relationship management], EHR [electronic health record] referral data, campaign performance and predictive modeling into a single intelligence layer," he said. "Health systems that embrace this approach will deploy marketing infrastructure that works with care delivery workflows rather than around them, enabling real-time decisions aligned to scheduling, care coordination, and capacity utilization."
Over time, this could move marketing from a cost center to an operational lever embedded in the system’s architecture, he added.
The use of technology and AI can reframe marketing from a "siloed discretionary expense into a measurable operational and financial lever," Hufnal said.
"Chief marketing officers gain access to predictive intelligence and actionable metrics, such as response curves and persuadable-lift, that tie marketing spend directly to referrals, conversions, and revenue. Chief financial officers see marketing investments modeled like capacity allocation, optimized to maximize ROI, reduce missed volume and improve return on digital spend," he said.
While chief information officers CIOs can view WebMD Ignite's Pulse solution as part of the integrated data infrastructure rather than as yet another point solution, he added.
This can shift the conversation among health system executives from 'How much did we spend?' to 'How many appointments did we capture, how much revenue did we recover, and how efficient is our access funnel?', Hufnal said.