Healthcare Thought Leadership: a ‘how to’ guide
Most healthcare organisations share plenty of thoughts, but few share thoughts that truly lead the way. Even fewer lead the way on the issues that matter to their target audiences.
In healthcare, trust is paramount, which is why many organisations place recognition as a thought leader high on their list of marketing priorities. Yet most fall short, because the thoughts they share merely reflect the opinions of the majority.
In an article in PR Daily, the publication’s editor proposes that thought leadership must be bold and provocative, and I agree to an extent. But in healthcare, where evidence, authority and regulation are so important, the situation is more nuanced. It is less about provoking a reaction and more about forging new ground and shaping how others think.
If this resonates, the rest of this article may help you. I'll walk through the three qualities that make healthcare thought leadership effective, and how to develop each one, based on 20+ years of experience in helping health organisations become recognised thought leaders.
Defining thought leadership
In healthcare, it is my view that thought leadership is increasingly built through campaigns, evidence and coalitions, and these typically come from organisations rather than individuals. So, while people can be the mouthpiece for thought leadership, it is most effective when it is developed at the organisation level and that’s how I’ll talk about it through this article.
Thought leadership should not be confused with creating expert-led content. Content can demonstrate deep expertise and even contain solutions to problems, but if it fails to inspire change and actually move thinking forward, it is not really thought leadership, in the true sense.
In healthcare, true thought leadership combines many things. They include:
A unique perspective that is interesting, evidence-based and consistent
A willingness to tackle complex and emerging industry challenges
An ability to influence the perspectives and behaviours of others
For a lucky few, that combination comes naturally. For the rest, it can be developed with the right frameworks and methodologies.
1. A methodology for unlocking your unique perspective
The starting point for your thought leadership activity should always be the audience you are intending to reach, and the challenges they are facing.
People will always want help with the problems that keep them up at night, and so your first job is to work out what they are. This will take some significant research - information gathering, data analysis, conversations - but it is the foundation of creating thought leadership that adds genuine value.
There will probably be plenty of problems troubling your target audience though, and so, once you have identified your long list, next you need to dig deeper into them to identify which ones to focus on.
Let’s start with where your organisation’s expertise lies. There is no point writing about something that you don’t have deep knowledge on, just to appeal to your target audience. The Press Gazette’s campaign against ‘fake experts’ covers overclaiming, which has become more commonplace in the post-AI age, but overclaiming is easy to spot and does not lead to being recognised as a true thought leader. What you are looking for is the intersection between where your audience is struggling and where you, with your knowledge, expertise and capacity to build, could genuinely help.
Next, you need to look at where your competition is focused. If a healthcare organisation is just talking about the same issues as their competitors then it is very unlikely to stand out, even if the content it is producing is more knowledgeable, more expert and more evidence-based than the competition. The missing ingredient is the unique perspective. And while offering a distinct view on a similar issue is good, if you can focus on a whole different topic, area or issue, that is even better.
Lastly, you need to ensure that the thought leadership area you wish to focus on provides a ‘fertile topic’, i.e. it is interesting, exciting or evocative, and it contains room to grow or expand over time. This room for growth is important, since thought leadership is most effective when it is consistently delivered over an extended period.
At Evergreen, when we successfully identify the point where there is overlap between an audience struggle, organisational expertise, absent competition and a fertile topic, we call this a ‘Strategic Ownable Territory’ and it provides the basis for our thought leadership.
Healthcare Today, a key health trade publication in the UK, recently ran a thought leader article from one of our clients, Steve Seccombe, Clinical Director at Blatchford. The piece centred on a campaign we developed with Blatchford to address the issue of amputee patients not feeling as involved as they’d like in decisions about their prosthetic limb.
Blatchford is showing great leadership by picking up on academic literature identifying this problem. Not only that, but, with our support, it has used its expertise and network to bring the problem to life and work with partners such as the University of Colorado and Living With Amplitude to provide a solution, in the form of a decision aid for lower limb prosthetics that meets international standards.
This campaign is thought leadership in action because it picked up on a very real challenge being experienced by the company’s target customers - a challenge that was not yet being addressed by the industry - and it created a practical evidence-based solution. Importantly, the campaign has laid the foundation for ongoing activity in this area that, over time, could reshape thinking and behaviour when it comes to decisions around prosthetic technology.
2. Tackling complex and emerging challenges
There is risk attached to being a thought leader - especially in healthcare, if you are challenging existing practice or commenting on an area where there is not yet consensus.
This element of risk, to some extent, comes with the territory. It means your perspective might be challenged in public. Someone might disagree with you in a comment underneath your LinkedIn post. Your viewpoint piece in a key health title might feature a counterpoint the week after. But the risk can be mitigated significantly when you build the right evidence base and support network, which I’ll cover below.
On the plus side, by taking on these difficult subjects, there is also the promise of exceptional reward when you get it right. When your argument captures the imagination of a potential buyer or user and reshapes how they see an issue, their perception of the organisation it came from shifts significantly. This is thought leadership.
The key to tackling complex and emerging issues in a way that wins attention and minimises risk is to follow a systematic process. At Evergreen PR, we have developed a blueprint for breakthrough health campaigns.
Impossible to ignore - surprising, consequential and unfair
Impossible to deny - backed by evidence, supported by others
Possible to lead - the mechanics for delivery
In our work supporting Big Health to encourage national procurement of their NICE-recommended digital CBT for insomnia programme, Sleepio, we followed this framework throughout.
The premise of the narrative was that this is an evidence-based treatment that is recommended by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) and yet it is not available to the majority of insomniacs in the UK. In its absence, data suggested that health professionals were prescribing medications that NICE guidelines acknowledge could carry some risks. This was surprising, consequential and unfair, making it impossible to ignore.
The combination of evidence provided by NICE guidelines and academic literature and a coalition of clinicians, academics, charities and patients we helped build in support of the cause made it ‘impossible to deny’.
Over a period of several months, articles were picked up by an extensive stream of media outlets, including The Times, The Telegraph, LBC, Digital Health and MIMS and we hosted a roundtable event to encourage discussion and debate on the topic, which led to strengthened support. These were our mechanics.
Since the campaign was launched, the Department of Health and Social Care has committed to undertaking a process to secure national access to digital CBT for insomnia.
3. Influencing the perspectives and behaviours of others
Once you have the attention and interest of your target audience, you need to keep it and, ideally, provide a way for it to create value from it, both for your audience and for your organisation.
Giving your audience the chance to engage more deeply with the topic that interests them, via your organisation and its thought leadership, enhances a health organisation’s reputation, provided that the platform is of high quality.
There are some practical things you can do to increase your chances of success:
Fill a genuine knowledge gap
Give expert value freely
Bring other leaders into the platform
We are currently working with Accurx to help it increase awareness and adoption of Accurx Scribe, its Ambient Voice Technology (AVT) offering.
This is a new and emerging technology, which NHS Trusts are being encouraged to adopt at-scale, but the roadmap for doing this is less clearly defined across the NHS, providing a knowledge gap that needs to be filled.
To help with this, we worked with Accurx to launch ‘The AVT Academy’, the home of real-world learnings for rolling out AVT at-scale across the NHS.
Over recent months, we have been driving a steady stream of articles in the digital health and health tech media titles consumed by medical and technology decision-makers in NHS Trusts - and using those, plus other digital content channels, to send traffic to The AVT Academy, a high-value resource that contains written and webinar content from Accurx and its NHS partners.
The fact that high numbers of clinicians and NHS Trust staff are choosing to learn about AVT from Accurx demonstrates that the company has become a trusted source on the subject. Accurx Scribe is scaling rapidly and is now deployed in more than 40 NHS Trusts.
Conclusion
Latest data from Echo Research suggests that, on average, more than 25% of the market value of listed companies could be attributed to their corporate reputation, and a strong reputation also provides a protective layer should a crisis ever hit.
In healthcare, thought leadership is one of the most effective ways to build reputation, but it requires actually leading the way - not just creating knowledge-based content. It also requires that you lead the way on the issues that matter to your audiences.
Uncovering your unique (and compelling) perspective is not easy, and nor is building the evidence-base and network you need to ensure it is trusted. But taking the time to do the groundwork and then continuing to innovate, invest and build over time is what will allow you to forge new ground and shape how others think - which carries enormous reputation and commercial value.
Leigh Greenwood is the founder and managing director of Evergreen PR, the healthcare PR agency that makes health happen. He is a chartered PR professional who has been working in healthcare PR, public affairs and communications for the last 20 years. He has worked across the whole spectrum of healthcare and has won more than 40 industry awards for effective health campaigns that generated measurable outcomes.
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