AI in healthcare marketing: Striking the balance between creativity and compliance

Healthcare marketing has always been unique. Strict regulations, morally and ethically sensitive topics, and products with a major impact on people’s lives – all this is making healthcare marketing stand out from any other area of marketing. 

And with artificial intelligence (AI) making it big across various industries and use cases, it’s only logical to look into the potential of this powerful new technology for healthcare marketing. 

So how can you leverage AI as part of your healthcare marketing efforts? And what are some of the industry-specific challenges that you can overcome with dedicated AI healthcare marketing tools? 

Let’s have a look! 

The role of AI in healthcare marketing

Did you know that 76% of marketers already use AI to create marketing content? And healthcare marketing is no exception. 

AI and machine learning are completely transforming the field by helping teams create more personalized relationships with patients, maintain regulatory compliance, and manage widespread misinformation. 

Here’s a closer look at the four key roles AI plays in healthcare marketing.

1. Maintains regulatory compliance

Regulatory compliance is a number one challenge in healthcare marketing. Especially for companies present in several markets. Not only do different markets need to comply with different regulations, but each regulation is frequently updated, making it even more challenging to stay on top of it all. 

AI can monitor all your marketing efforts and perform automated compliance checks to make sure all your material stays compliant with regulations like HIPAA or GDPR. When it detects a non-compliant language or an unverified claim, the tool flags those areas, helping you make sure all your content meets the right standards. 

2. Builds patient trust while respecting privacy

The use of AI in marketing has introduced a completely new level of personalization in customer communications. And in healthcare marketing, this is helping companies analyze patient data more efficiently so they can build a stronger bond with patients – all while maintaining their privacy. 

In other words, AI-driven personalization makes sure your marketing messages are relevant without being intrusive. It does this by analyzing de-identified patient data and creating targeted campaigns without compromising your patients’ privacy. 

AI can also assist you in maintaining transparency by providing insights into how your patients’ data is used, which can help increase patient trust.

3. Streamlines audience segmentation

One thing that AI does so much better than us humans is analyzing large datasets to identify patterns. And this is a powerful thing to have in healthcare marketing. By analyzing patient data, AI can help you accurately segment your audiences. 

Here are some segments AI can help you create:

• Demographics
• Health conditions
• Behaviors
• Digital engagement history

Once you have these segments, it’s much easier to create highly-personalized and targeted messaging that will resonate with specific groups. For example, you can create personalized campaigns for patients using the same drug and educate them about different stages of their treatment. 

This will not only improve your ROI but also positively impact the adoption of your products (whether you’re selling drugs or specialized health equipment).

4. Combats misinformation and educates audiences

Today’s digital age, where anyone can spread any information (whether it’s true or completely fabricated), is a powerful yet dangerous time to live in. Especially if we’re talking about health information.  

By implementing an AI-powered chatbot on your platform or website, you can provide accurate, real-time responses to all your patient questions and reduce the spread of misinformation. This improves your patient care at every stage of their recovery and can even be a powerful way to ease their minds in a stressful time.

On top of that, some AI productivity tools can also scan social media and online platforms to identify and flag misleading health information, giving you the opportunity to promptly respond with correct or educational content.

Need help crafting relevant educational content for your audience? Check out this roundup of the seven best AI content creation tools and speed up your content marketing efforts.

Five AI tools helping you maintain compliance in healthcare marketing

Healthcare marketing has always been a field where marketers need to strike a good balance between creativity and compliance.

Here are the five AI marketing tools helping you maintain healthcare marketing compliance while giving your team more time for creativity.

1. Filestage – AI driven tool for automated content reviews

Automated content reviews are a perfect way to make sure your healthcare marketing assets are accurate and compliant. 

And having a dedicated AI driven review and approval software like Filestage can not only make sure you receive all approvals on marketing materials in time for publishing, but also help maintain compliance! That covers everything from medical brochures to medicine packaging designs.

Here are the two main ways Filestage helps you maintain healthcare marketing compliance:

1.  Identify forbidden words – Give the AI assistant a list of words to look out for (e.g. “guarantee”), then it will add comments any time those words appear in your content.
2. Setup disclaimer checks – Set up a compliance assistant that scans your text (e.g. packaging) for specific claims that require a disclaimer. Then the AI will add a comment if the disclaimer can’t be found and it will suggest the right one to include.

Besides powerful AI features, Filestage offers other ways to maintain compliance in all your healthcare marketing activities, including:

• Standardized process for all your reviewers, including your compliance department, to check all content and request changes where necessary
• Password protection of all marketing materials with sensitive information so only authorized reviewers can access them
• Version compare mode to quickly spot what’s new or if any feedback has been missed inconsistencies or errors
• Ability to build a robust review process for AI generated content and avoid publishing any misinformation

2. Microsoft Azure Purview – Data anonymization AI tool 

To maintain compliance and protect sensitive patient information as part of your healthcare marketing efforts, you’ll need to invest in data anonymization. For example, major healthcare providers in the US, like Johnson & Johnson, use Microsoft Azure Purview to anonymize millions of patient records before using the data for personalized marketing campaigns. 

By doing so, they’re able to segment their audience, tailor their messaging, and even increase patient engagement without compromising privacy or violating HIPAA regulations.

Here are two main ways AI in Azure Purview can help you maintain healthcare marketing compliance:

• Automated PII detection and masking – Azure Purview uses AI to identify personal information within your data. It can mask, encrypt, or redact sensitive details to make sure the data is safe to use for analytics and personalization.
• Customizable compliance rules – You can set up AI-powered policies that follow compliance requirements and make sure that any shared or analyzed dataset meets legal and ethical standards.

3. Compliance.ai – Regulation monitoring AI tool

How many times have you read through some important documents thinking how great it would be to have a tool that automatically scans and flags compliance irregularities?  

Well, Compliance.ai makes that possible. 

The tool automatically scans regulatory bodies’ websites, healthcare industry documents, and legal updates to track changes in healthcare marketing laws. Then, using its AI capabilities, it alerts teams about relevant changes, summarizes their impact, and suggests updates. 

This way, Compliance.ai helps you make sure your healthcare marketing strategy remains aligned with the latest requirements and reduces the risk of making some costly mistakes.

Here are the two main ways AI in Compliance.ai can help you maintain healthcare marketing compliance:

• Real-time regulatory updates – Compliance.ai monitors changes across multiple regulations and sends real-time alerts to keep your team informed about new healthcare marketing regulations.
• Actionable insights and summaries – The platform uses AI and natural language processing to summarize complex regulatory updates, mapping them directly to your marketing processes. This ensures swift and efficient adjustments to campaigns while staying fully compliant.

4. OneTrust – Consent management AI tool

In the past, a healthcare company could easily purchase a list of contacts containing “health conscious individuals aged 25-40” or even use personal medical records to build entire marketing campaigns around it. You can think of it as marketing El Dorado.

But ever since GDPR regulated this space in Europe, and HIPAA in the US, organizations had to take personal consent very seriously. 

Though this became a great way to protect patients, it also created a lot of headaches for healthcare marketers. Suddenly, marketers could use far less information for their purposes, and it became vitally important to track who had given their permission for what.

A consent management tool like OneTrust simplifies this process by providing an AI-driven platform that automates consent collection and tracking across all marketing channels. 

For example, when launching a personalized email campaign, OneTrust includes only the data from individuals who opted in, while automatically excluding those who opted out or withdrew their consent.

This way, OneTrust helps you manage patient consent efficiently, reducing the risk of violating regulations while fostering trust with your audience.

Here are the two main ways AI in OneTrust can help you maintain healthcare marketing compliance:

• Centralized consent tracking – OneTrust consolidates patient permissions from all touchpoints to make sure your team always has an up-to-date record of who has opted in or out of your messages.
• Automatic enforcement of restrictions – The platform uses AI to detect and restrict the use of data from individuals who have not given explicit consent, preventing non-compliant actions before they occur.

5. DocuSign Insight – AI tool for audit trails and documentation

Managing everything from patient consent forms to documenting campaign approvals with an accurate audit trail is complex and time-consuming. But necessary for compliance!

This is where DocuSign Insight can be a  lifesaver. Its AI-powered platform automatically tracks contract interactions, approvals, and changes and provides you with a streamlined and reliable audit trail.

For example, if you’re launching a new marketing campaign promoting a patient portal, you have to make sure that all patient consent forms and contracts are accurately documented and stored. DocuSign Insight helps you streamline this process by providing automated document tracking and real-time audit-ready reporting.

Here are the two key AI features of DocuSign Insight helping you achieve healthcare marketing compliance:

1. Automated document tracking – This feature automatically tracks every action on a document, from who viewed it to when it was signed or modified. In healthcare marketing, this helps you make sure that all patient consent forms for the campaign are captured accurately, reducing the risk of non-compliance.
2. AI-powered predictive analytics – The platform uses AI to analyze contract language and categorize documents automatically. This lets you quickly identify key terms and compliance requirements to ensure you meet regulatory standards in documentation and reporting.

Looking for more great examples? Check out our roundup of the 10 best AI marketing tools.

Final thoughts

As technology advances and AI becomes more integrated into our marketing processes, we can only speculate what the future holds for healthcare marketing. 

But one thing is certain, AI is improving the efficiency and accuracy of healthcare marketing campaigns while helping build stronger relationships with patients – and this is certainly not going away.