Four Questions to Ask Before Using AI-Generated Content in Health Care

In-house marketers and agencies alike grapple with how and whether AI should become just another part of our marketing toolkit. What are the benefits? What are the pitfalls?

// By Rachael Sauceman//

You get into work, grab your coffee, boot up your computer, and look at your to-do list for the day. The one and only thing you’ve left for yourself on the to-do list is the thing you’ve been putting off for days — weeks even: Write that blog on the dangers of high blood pressure.

Now instead, imagine that your process looks like this:

You open a browser and go to your favorite AI platform, like the buzzy ChatGPT, which has recently become a media sensation, leading to a multibillion-dollar investment from Microsoft. You type in a series of questions for ChatGPT to answer:

• What is high blood pressure?
• How do I know if I have high blood pressure?
• Why is high blood pressure dangerous?
• How do I treat high blood pressure?

The AI writes back cogent answers that follow widely held understandings of high blood pressure, a common condition. In mere minutes, you have a 1,000-word blog. Maybe you even go the extra mile: You ask the AI to rewrite the content in layperson’s terms to bring the reading age down a little, making sure it’s fully accessible.

But can AI really replace the style, knowledge, and judgment of a human writer? Or understand the nuances of language? Does it have to be either/or, or are tools like ChatGPT another technology tool that smart marketers can use to their advantage? What guardrails should we all put around AI to use it responsibly?

Below are four considerations for all health care content — AI-generated or not — that may help you set your guardrails.

1. Is it medically accurate?

The first and most important consideration is ensuring that the content you publish on your website is medically accurate. We recommend clinical review for all content published on a health care website because patients expect that information provided directly by their doctor or advanced practitioner is sound and up to date.

This is particularly important in health care because our understanding of the science is constantly evolving, and clinicians always integrate new information into their daily practice of medicine.

While this might seem obvious for cutting-edge fields like advanced heart disease or neuroscience research, the standard of care for even common diseases constantly improves.

An AI platform pulls only common answers, and sometimes outdated information, rather than prioritizing the latest research.

And even if it did pull the latest research, those in the medical field know that the flashy headlines about health and science often don’t change the day-to-day practice of medicine until that research is thoroughly substantiated through broad studies.

2. Does it add true value?

If you’ve been around for a while in the digital marketing world, you may remember the days when search engine optimization (SEO) felt more like a bag of magic tricks than actual marketing. “Keyword stuffing,” spammy link-building, and tucking invisible keywords into the margins of a website ran rampant.

Those days are over, but given how big a trend content marketing is in health care right now, you may be tempted to jump on the content marketing train by pumping out as much content as you can. But the days of easy tricks are gone, and a real content marketing strategy should truly add value.

Whether you’re writing a blog, a condition page, or a service page on your website, the content should not only give a patient a boilerplate understanding of a disease or a treatment, it should also tell them about your practice’s specific approach to it.

Lists of conditions and services, or WebMD-type content, don’t add any real value to patients because they can find that content in plenty of other places. Instead, create content that speaks to your organization’s value:

• What treatment options do you offer that are unique?
• What is the patient experience like at your facilities?
• Can you share information about outcomes or recovery?
• Do you offer expertise that is beyond competitors in your city or region?

We worked with a robotic surgeon who was able to share the millimeters of the incisions he made below the armpit to perform heart bypass surgery. Now that is adding value! It allays a patient’s concern, helps them understand what recovery will be like, and isn’t communicated on the websites of regional competitors.

3. Is it unique?

If you’re adding true value, you’re adding something unique to your content, but it’s still important to understand some basic things about how search engines work.

Search engines prioritize content that is unique, fresh, and valuable. Google, which owns the vast majority of search share in the U.S., has an enormous R&D budget. It is also concerned about how AI may water down search results by flooding the internet with basic, low-value, and even identical content.

Google has outright stated that AI-generated content is against its guidelines. If free tools, like this one, can detect AI-generated content, Google most certainly can.

If you’re using AI to create content or perform research, be sure to edit and adapt it so it is truly unique. If another organization out there is using the same AI, it may create very similar content with parts that may be the same as yours, word for word.

But more than that, search engines can detect AI-generated content. So be sure to revise your content to have that human touch!

4. Do you have a plan to promote it?

We preach this all the time: Just because you build it does not mean they will come.

Many organizations start producing content because they’ve heard it’s a good marketing strategy. Some even produce wonderful unique, high-quality blog, video, or podcast content, but then no one sees it.

Great content still needs a great marketing strategy built around it. Is SEO research informing the topic selection? Has the piece of content been fully SEO optimized? Is the topic particularly trendy right now? Beyond SEO optimization, it’s important to have a good plan to market that content across social channels and other mediums to showcase your expertise.

So should you use AI at all?

If you’re considering using AI just to execute a high-volume, low-energy content marketing plan, you may find that it wasn’t worth the time at all. Worse still, your website could face penalties from Google if the algorithm detects a lot of AI-generated content on your website.

But if you want to use AI as a tool with a specific set of guidelines around how you use it to generate unique, valuable content, why not? After all, even Google is looking for ways to harness the power of AI, so why shouldn’t marketers also be looking for innovative ways to use it?

Whatever you choose to do, becoming AI savvy will be important, whether it’s keeping an AI detector at your fingertips to evaluate the work of your vendors or simply monitoring the trends in AI-provided answers to medical questions compared to the true expertise of your trained medical provider.

Rachael Sauceman is director of strategy for Full Media, a health care digital marketing agency. In addition to digital advertising, SEO, and website development, Full Media specializes in building reporting and analytics strategies that help its clients make sound decisions with their investments and prove the value of their marketing.