April 2026 Health IT Marketing Minutes

What makes marketing in the health IT space unique? Who are the movers and shakers? What’s working, what’s trending? Where can you learn more? This monthly roundup post will focus in on all things health IT when it comes to marketing.

ICYMI – On this episode we recorded live at HIMSS 2026 in Las Vegas. My guests were Amber Parmentier, HIMSS Enterprise Marketing Director and Shahid Shah, award-winning Government 2.0, Health IT, Medical Device Integration software expert.

anthonyBarnum
PR in 2026 to Build Credibility – not Empty Visibility – Melissa Anthony at anthonyBarnum writes, AI has to prove out its merit from the hype and buzz of 2025. Agentic AI and other advancing technologies must deliver tangible ROI on their transformational capabilities. Empty press releases and surface-level thought leadership won’t convince B2B tech buyers, nor will they convince increasingly savvy tech reporters and editors. The days of visioning concepts for AI are out the window, as business buyers decipher how they can practically use AI to forward their objectives.

Unlock Health
Healthcare marketing is hitting its target. That doesn’t mean it’s aiming at the right one. – Jamie Mermelstein, VP of Digital Experience at Unlock Health says, Healthcare marketing has never been more technically capable, and in many organizations, that capability has quietly become the problem. When targeting precision advances faster than strategic alignment, the result is not a more effective growth engine. It is a system optimizing toward the wrong destination.

Swaay.Health
The Hidden PR Engine Healthcare Marketers Are Missing – Colin Hung writes, Healthcare marketers spend months producing beautiful patient stories. We secure the budget, navigate legal reviews, and finally publish the video. Then crickets… Are we missing something? Yes we are. There is a whole channel for these types of stories hardly anyone thinks about, but if you do, it’ll change the way you create your video stories.

Merge
When Marketing Performs for the Wrong Audience – Gregory Ng, EVP, Decision Science at Merge writes, A few years ago, a marketing leader told me something I haven’t forgotten. Her organization had purchased a billboard. Not because the location indexed well against their target audience. Not because the market research suggested an awareness gap in that corridor. Because a board member drove that route to work every morning. Does this sound like you? The thinking was straightforward: if he sees our name every day on his commute, he’ll believe the marketing is working. And if he believes the marketing is working, we keep our budget. Nobody said that out loud, of course. But everyone in the room understood it.

Brafton
Creative Strategy: Developing an Inventive Approach to Your Marketing Campaigns – Lesley Morrison, Writer & Marketer at Brafton says, Great marketing doesn’t just look good. It works. But if you’ve ever been part of a campaign that had strong visuals, clever copy and plenty of momentum, only to watch it underperform, you already know something was missing. More often than not, that missing piece is a clear creative strategy. Because without it, even your best ideas can end up feeling disconnected, inconsistent or difficult to scale. A creative strategy is what brings structure to those ideas, connecting them to real goals, real audiences and measurable results.

Matter Communications
The Return of In-Person Networking: Why Real Connection Matters More Than Ever – Angela Bonnici at Matter Communications writes, For a while, it felt like in-person networking might disappear altogether. COVID didn’t start the shift to online meetings, conferences, introductions, or even relationship-building, but it certainly accelerated it. Outreach became more automated, pipelines more efficient, and it was easy to assume that the future of business development would be entirely digital. But that’s not what happened. In fact, COVID may be the reason why in-person interaction DID make a comeback. The almost-immediate shift to fully remote work was jarring at the least, and for many, it was isolating and draining.

Greenough Communications
AI, Algorithms and the Future of Media Strategy – Julianna Ferreiros at Greenough Communications says, You can’t scan a front page, scroll your feed or even open your email today without AI staring back at you. Across sectors, from pharma and biotech to cybersecurity and healthcare, AI is no longer a side dish; it’s the main course reshaping how products are built, decisions are made and reputations are formed. Public relations and communications sit squarely in this blast radius: the algorithms that shape what people see, click and share now define how influence works, AI is no longer a niche topic but the context for everything we say and how it’s heard.

KNB Communications
What human psychology teaches us about high-impact healthcare + life sciences marketing design – Beth Cooper, JD/MBA, VP of Marketing + Sales at KNB Communications writes, Even in healthcare and life sciences marketing, design is often treated as simply aesthetic. In reality, it is neurological. Every layout decision, from spacing to typography to color contrast, interacts directly with how the human brain processes information. And in an industry defined by complexity, regulation, and high-stakes decision-making, understanding these cognitive mechanisms is not just helpful. It is essential.

eHealthcare Strategy & Trends
When: Wednesday, May 13, 2026  2:00 pm ET
Register for this event.
LinkedIn: eHealthcare Strategy & Trends

Maximizing MarTech in Healthcare: From Stack Sprawl to Strategic Growth – Join marketing leaders from UNC Health and Atlantic Health for a candid conversation about what’s working, what’s breaking, and what the ideal state could be. Unlock Health will open the session by outlining a practical vision for full-funnel orchestration, where EMR data, digital engagement, traditional media, and operational capacity align to drive measurable patient action, and then turn to the panel for real-world perspective.

O’Dwyer’s Top PR Firms – 2026
Public relations firms and PR agencies with major U.S. operations ranked by worldwide net fees. O’Dwyer’s ranks PR firms based on net fee income which is defined as charges for PR counseling and time spent preparing and placing stories in media.

Envision Health featured on Swaay.Health: How AI search is transforming healthcare marketing
Envision Health was recently featured in Swaay.Health, highlighting how our team is helping healthcare organizations adapt to the rise of AI search, AI-driven discovery, and generative engine optimization (GEO). As search behavior rapidly evolves, healthcare brands must rethink how they show up, not just in rankings, but in AI-generated answers.

Marchex Launches Freshpaint Integration to Advance Healthcare Marketing Optimization
Marchex®, which harnesses the power of AI and conversation intelligence to provide actionable insights derived from prescriptive vertical-market data analytics, announced the launch of a new integration with Freshpaint, a platform built for healthcare marketers to deliver measurable performance while safeguarding patient trust in a complex regulatory environment.

Elevate Healthcare Marketing
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The Healthtech Marketing Show

Marketing to healthcare is hard. We can all use a little help. Join host Adam Turinas for the Healthtech Marketing Show to learn from the experts. Each episode features an experienced healthcare technology marketing leader, who shares tips, insights, and how to’s on a specific topic. Episodes include B2B marketing, HIT Marketing trends, ABM, brand strategy, digital, and content marketing and more.

Urgent Care Marketing 101 – free, online marketing eBook from Experity (@ExperityHealth)
An urgent care clinic, like any business, is only profitable if patients continue to use its services over time. Unfortunately, many urgent care facilities have a restricted marketing budget, which can severely limit new business volume and community engagement. According to Andrew Ibbotson, Vice President of the National Research Corp. in Nebraska, “Urgent care traffic is driven more by online search results, geography, wait times, and availability than traditional healthcare delivery.” These added complications make identifying the most effective marketing strategies for your walk-in clinic even more essential to success.

Elevate Your Rare Disease Marketing – MERGE life science industry experts created this guide to provide a new perspective towards three tried-and-true tenets of rare disease marketing. You can expect to learn how modern solutions to age-old challenges can make a real difference for your company and the community.