Insights from HMPS26: 5 Healthcare Trends Shaping Growth, Experience & AI

By Mike Euphrat — Senior Director, Client Partner at Material

Healthcare leaders are facing a common challenge: how to drive growth in an environment defined by margin pressure, rising consumer expectations, workforce constraints and rapid technological change.

Throughout this year’s Healthcare Marketing & Physician Strategies Summit (HMPS26), five themes consistently emerged:

• Trust is becoming a measurable business asset.

• AI is moving from experimentation to enterprise adoption.

• Access and capacity constraints are limiting growth.

• Patient activation is becoming more important than patient acquisition.

• Marketing is increasingly accountable for business outcomes.

These themes point to a healthcare industry that is becoming increasingly interconnected. Over the next 12–24 months, the organizations that outperform their peers will be those that successfully align brand, experience and data around a unified growth strategy.

Trend #1: Rebuilding Trust as a Strategic Imperative

What We Heard: Trust sits at the center of healthcare today, with industry leaders repeatedly highlighting it as one of the most important and fragile assets in the patient relationship. Consumers no longer default to trusting healthcare providers; instead, they validate their choices through reviews, digital touchpoints and personalized relevance.

Why It Matters: Trust is not built through messaging alone — it is earned when the experience consistently delivers on the promise made by the brand. Any disconnect between what is promised and what is delivered creates a trust problem. When trust erodes, patient loyalty, engagement and adherence suffer, ultimately impacting both health outcomes and organizational growth.

Questions Leaders Should Be Asking

• How are we systematically measuring patient trust beyond traditional, lagging satisfaction surveys like CAHPS?

• Where does our brand promise most frequently break down in the actual patient journey?

• Are our internal culture and employee experience initiatives effectively aligned to deliver our external brand promise in every touchpoint with patients?

Trend #2: Transitioning AI from Pilot to Enterprise Capability

What We Heard: AI has officially moved past the novelty phase into a core operational necessity. The conversation has decisively shifted from basic content creation to complex operational orchestration. Generative AI is fundamentally changing how patients discover healthcare information, requiring organizations to rethink how content is structured, surfaced and consumed in AI-driven environments.

Why It Matters: The shift toward AI answer engines is reshaping traditional patient acquisition channels. If health systems do not restructure their website content to be easily consumed by Large Language Models (LLMs), they will rapidly lose market visibility. Operationally, AI offers a desperately needed lifeline for lean teams to automate administrative workflows and patient navigation. But deploying patient-facing AI without rigorous, cross-functional governance introduces severe legal liabilities and risks damaging patient trust through hallucinations.

Questions Leaders Should Be Asking

• Is our digital content architecture currently optimized to feed AI-driven “answer engines” along with traditional Google SEO?

• Do we have a cross-functional AI governance committee that balances rapid innovation with strict legal and privacy safeguards?

• How are we ensuring that our deployment of AI tools enhances, rather than degrades, the human empathy of our care?

Trend #3: Shifting from Patient Acquisition to Patient Activation

What We Heard: Driven by severe margin pressures and rising acquisition costs, health systems are actively shifting budgets toward “patient activation.” This involves looking inward and mining existing Electronic Medical Record (EMR) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data to identify current patients who have unmanaged chronic conditions, lapsed visits or specific care gaps, and proactively nudging them to complete care.

Why It Matters: There is often a disconnect between marketing teams that generate demand and clinical teams that fulfill care. It is exponentially more cost-effective to retain and activate an existing patient than to acquire a new one. This precision approach stops patient out-migration to competitors, drives high-value service line volume and aligns with the financial incentives of value-based care contracts.

Questions Leaders Should Be Asking

• What percentage of our digital budget is allocated to activating existing patients versus acquiring expensive net-new ones?

• How effectively are we integrating our CRM and EHR data to systematically identify and close care gaps within our current patient population?

• Are we leveraging automated, personalized outreach to proactively guide our existing patients to the next best step in their care journey?

Trend #4: Solving Access Friction to Unlock Capacity

What We Heard: Healthcare organizations are increasingly shifting their focus toward activating existing patients and closing care gaps. However, activation only creates value when patients can successfully access care. As a result, health systems are also turning their attention to the operational, scheduling and experience barriers that prevent patient intent from becoming completed appointments.

Why It Matters: Patient abandonment due to access friction is a multi-million-dollar leakage problem. Complex scheduling pathways and fragmented digital experiences can create significant patient abandonment, resulting in lost revenue opportunities and delayed care. By routing patients to the appropriate acuity setting and removing friction from the scheduling process, organizations can maximize the utilization of highly expensive clinical resources without needing to acquire a single net-new lead.

Questions Leaders Should Be Asking

• Where is the greatest point of friction in our current patient scheduling journey, and how much top-line revenue is it costing us?

• Are our marketing demand generation campaigns tightly aligned with our actual real-time clinical capacity?

• How can we simplify and unify our digital front door to reduce patient decision fatigue and minimize booking abandonment?

Trend #5: Elevating Marketing to an Enterprise Growth Driver

What We Heard: The role of marketing within healthcare organizations is continuing to evolve. Health systems increasingly recognize that marketing is more than a communications function—it is a critical driver of growth, access, patient engagement, and brand trust. As a result, marketing leaders are earning a larger seat at the strategic table and are being asked to help solve enterprise-wide challenges, from improving clinical margins to supporting service line growth and strengthening competitive positioning.

Why It Matters: With many departments facing tightened budgets, traditional awareness metrics such as website traffic and impressions are no longer sufficient on their own. Marketing leaders must clearly demonstrate true, incremental financial ROI. Furthermore, physician referrals continue to drive a substantial portion of provider volume, creating an opportunity for organizations to modernize physician engagement strategies with claims data, market intelligence, and intent signals to reduce referral leakage.

Questions Leaders Should Be Asking

• Can our marketing department definitively prove the direct financial contribution margin of our campaigns to the CFO?

• Are our marketing goals completely aligned with the strategic capacity and margin priorities of the enterprise?

• How are we utilizing claims data and market intelligence to empower our physician liaison teams and defend market share?

Looking Ahead

Three shifts appear particularly important as we look ahead to the future of the healthcare sector.

From Fragmentation to Integration
As health systems continue to expand through mergers, affiliations and partnerships, fragmented digital experiences will become increasingly difficult to sustain. Organizations will be challenged to create cohesive experiences across brands, service lines, websites and patient touchpoints while preserving the equity of acquired organizations.

From Data Collection to Data Activation
Healthcare organizations have spent years investing in CRM, EHR and analytics platforms. The next phase will focus on connecting these systems to create actionable intelligence. Organizations that successfully bridge clinical and marketing data will be better positioned to personalize engagement, close care gaps and improve patient retention.

From Digital Presence to Intelligent Experience
Artificial intelligence is changing how patients discover information, evaluate providers, and navigate care. As AI-powered search and conversational experiences become more prevalent, healthcare organizations will need to re-evaluate the role digital plays across the patient journey. Patients increasingly expect experiences that are personalized, intuitive and easy to navigate. It is now more critical than ever to design digital experiences that build trust, simplify access and help patients make informed decisions about their care.

The common thread across these shifts is integration. Healthcare organizations that can align brand, experience and data around measurable business outcomes will be best positioned to drive sustainable growth in the years ahead.

Meet the Challenges of a Shifting Healthcare Ecosystem

The best healthcare decisions are informed by a broader understanding of the ecosystem.

Material is a strategic growth partner that helps healthcare organizations improve access, engagement and outcomes. We understand that earning patient choice today takes coordinated action across the entire care journey. We use behavioral insights as the connective tissue to drive smarter, more unified decisions across your business — bridging the gap between your brand promise and the actual patient experience.

Let’s continue the conversation. Whether you’re working to improve access, prove marketing ROI, modernize your digital experience, or prepare for an AI-enabled future, we’d welcome the opportunity to compare notes and share what we’re seeing across the healthcare ecosystem. Get in touch today.