Building trust before the appointment…

How much patients trust you before they meet you dictates your bottom-line, but that’s not entirely within your control. 

Unfortunately, there are bigger factors at play making it more difficult for providers to earn patients’ trust before the appointment. 

And since trust is the basis of any transaction, if a patient doesn’t trust you enough before they’ve met you, they’re unlikely to buy from you.  

Why it’s not all your fault

Although there are definitely things you can do to increase how much patients trust you before they book an appointment, certain factors are just out of your hands: 

Rising Healthcare Costs

According to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, national health expenditures in the United States are projected to climb from $4.8 trillion in 2023 to $7.7 trillion in 2032. 

This translates to nearly 20% of the country’s GDP being used to tackle rising healthcare costs, which will continue to outpace the economy’s growth. 

But how is this related to building trust before the appointment? 

Well, imagine a very common scenario where patient X receives a massive hospital bill to pay for their surgery, and now they’re forced to file for bankruptcy. 

It’s reasonable for them to question who the system is benefiting… 

Unfortunately, since providers interact with patients the most, some of that blame is going to get thrown onto them. 

This is especially true if you’re a physician because you’re seen as a leader of the healthcare system in any country, not just the US.

So rising healthcare costs contribute to a decrease in the overall trust that patients have in healthcare systems and their providers. 

This translates to you as a business needing to do more to earn patients’ trust before they buy from you.  

Healthcare Consumerization

For business owners, consumerization just means that patients’ expectations for their healthcare experiences continue to rise, partly because of advancements in technology. 

It likely has to do with innovations in other consumer-facing industries, like hotels and retail, which have raised customer service standards across the board. 

For example, flexible booking is almost a requirement for any kind of travel company, but it’s a rare gem to find in healthcare. 

And in the past few years it’s become clear that patients not only care about customer service, but that they’re even willing to make buying decisions based on the quality of that service. 

For example, a McKinsey report found that 45% of appointments are booked 24 to 72 hours in advance. 

This means that patients are willing to shop around for shorter wait times, which is something that smaller, independent practices are best positioned to offer. 

Another one of their surveys showed that 67% of consumer respondents found health and wellness media (eg. educational content) within the healthcare journey to be helpful and interesting. 

Again, all of this just goes to show that patients’ expectations are higher than ever before. 

But what does this have to do with building trust before the appointment? 

Well, because of the higher expectations, every aspect of the patient experience that you miss the mark on decreases how much patients trust your business. 

And as mentioned before, if they don’t trust you enough, they’re probably not going to buy from you. 

Is AI the right solution?

So there are a lot of different ways to build trust before the appointment, and AI-solutions are by no means the only option. 

However, let’s break down the characteristics of this problem and see which ones are well-suited for AI solutions (and which ones aren’t). 

What it’s good for

Scale and operational efficiency. 

Scale obviously matters because the more patients you can build trust with, the more money you can make. 

And AI, like almost any software product, is going to be great for addressing issues of scale. 

Operational efficiency matters because building trust before the appointment largely comes down to having the right systems in place. 

And these systems are usually made up of small, timely, and repetitive tasks. 

AI (eg. agentic workflows) is great for tackling these kinds of issues. 

By the way, agentic workflows are just teams of AI agents working together. 

Each agent typically has a specific responsibility, and then there will be one agent at the top which acts almost like a manager. 

That “manager agent” basically coordinates all of the other agents to carry out a larger task. 

Figure 1: Example Agentic Workflow

What it’s not so good for

Fighting misinformation and bad actors. 

Misinformation and bad actors have a massive, negative impact on how much patients trust providers. 

One of the ways to address them is through high-quality, online education (a.k.a providers creating content about their area of expertise). 

And right now, AI probably does more harm than good in this arena. 

The main reason is because most generative AI solutions are based on LLMs (large language models) like ChatGPT.

And it’s these gen AI tools that are being used by so many businesses, especially smaller ones, to generate their blog posts and other social media content. 

But the problem is that LLMs hallucinate. 

Hallucinations occur when LLMs output information that sounds correct, but is factually incorrect. 

As in, if you’re not thoroughly reviewing the blog posts generated by ChatGPT, you could be publishing false information. 

That’s a risk you can’t afford in healthcare, especially if you publicly say that the content was reviewed by a provider.

How can you build more trust before the appointment?

Again, there are multiple ways to build trust before the appointment (whether they use AI or not). 

One approach you can consider is using an augmented content ecosystem (A.C.E). 

It’s just a fancy name for a system that allows you to create a lot of content with a relatively low time-investment. 

Think 300+ pieces of content per month with just 15 minutes a week. 

As mentioned earlier, online education is one of the best ways for any business to build trust with its customers, and healthcare businesses are no exception. 

But, the thing that keeps most businesses from creating content is the sheer amount of time it takes. 

An A.C.E solves this by leveraging AI to do everything for you besides actually generating the information for the content. 

A provider using it would look something like this: 

1. First, they fill out a form to provide the information that the system needs to produce the batch of content. 
2. Second, that’s it. 

All of the content will be created and posted across all of the provider’s social media channels. 

Awesome right? 

Here’s how these solutions are designed: 

Figure 2: Big Picture

So the big picture of these solutions is that once you provide the information needed to create the content, AI does the following: 

1. It takes the information you provided to create a pillar post (the foundation or “pillar” of the rest of your content).

2. It converts the pillar post into different media formats (eg. text, audio, video, images, etc.).

3. It repurposes different parts of the pillar post into unique, shorter pieces of content (per media format).

4. It schedules out all of the content at the best times to maximize exposure on each platform. 

Figure 3: Example Workflow

To really drive the point home, let’s walk through figure 3 in more detail: 

Figure 3.1: Example Workflow Part 1 In-Detail

The survey collects the information needed from the provider. 

Figure 3.2: Example Workflow Part 2 In-Detail

The answers to the survey’s questions are arranged in a specific order so that a pillar post can be created (figure 3.2). 

Notice how each section of the post, in the picture above, corresponds to a particular question that was asked in the survey (figure 3.1). 

Figure 3.3: Example Workflow Part 3 In-Detail

The pillar post (figure 3.2) is then chopped up into smaller pieces of content. 

The X post in figure 3.3 is just the first section (red box) in figure 3.2 with a new hook. 

The LinkedIn post is just a summary of the pillar post with a hook at the beginning and a call-to-action (CTA) at the end. 

The Instagram post is just the X post formatted on a canvas. 

And this can be taken a lot further.

The pillar post can serve as the script for a long-form video, which can be posted on YouTube. 

That long-form video can be cut up into video shorts which can be posted on YouTube Shorts, Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, etc. 

The long-form video’s audio track can also be published as a podcast episode. 

So on and so forth…

Hopefully you can see just how much content a system like this can generate and manage for you. 

But like any solution, it has its pros and cons. 

Pros

• You can educate a lot of patients and reach those who can’t afford to come see you. 

• Building a real brand is the most sustainable marketing strategy there is, and content plays a huge role in that. 

• Minimizes the risk of hallucinations because you’re not using AI to generate the information. 

Cons

• Building a decent audience takes a really long time (usually a few years). 

• Tracking the ROI per piece of content is hard because social media is at the top of your marketing funnel.

• Once you publish something on the internet it will live there forever, so you have to be really careful about what you post. 

TL;DR

• How much patients trust you before they book an appointment dictates your bottom-line. 

• Rising healthcare costs and consumerization are external factors making it more difficult for businesses to earn patients’ trust (and dollars). 

• There are a lot of different ways to build trust before the appointment. 

• Systems that build trust before the appointment relate to 3 major characteristics: scale, operational efficiency, and fighting misinformation.
  • AI’s great for the first two, not so much for the last one (at least, not yet).

• An augmented content ecosystem (A.C.E) is one way to build trust before the appointment. 

• An A.C.E quickly takes information from providers and uses it to mass produce content (and publish it online). 

So now that you know how A.C.E’s are designed, what are your options? 

You can:

1. Build it yourself (if you have the time)   
2. Pay someone else for it (if you don’t have the time) 
3. Get creative and figure something else out (if you’re a thrill seeker) 

Whatever you choose to do, you’ve already given yourself a head start by reading this edition 🙂 

See you next Saturday. 

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