HMPS26 in Salt Lake City put trust on the main stage. Ron Tite’s keynote called it the differentiator that unlocks innovation, brand and growth in the Intelligent Age. The panel kept circling something underneath that: whether healthcare marketing has the institutional standing to act on trust at all.
The Health System CMO Survey from Digital Health Strategies and the Forum for Healthcare Strategists, previewed at the conference, named the constraint directly. 72% of marketing departments don’t track campaigns through to completed care. 40% have zero visibility into why leads don’t convert. 60% of healthcare AI marketing spend goes to content creation. 6% goes to identifying patients who need care. 47% of organizations have no clear owner for getting existing patients to complete physician-ordered care. The numbers describe a function organizations talk about strategically but won’t resource operationally. That gap shaped the conversation in the room.
Trust erodes when the people responsible for relevance can’t measure their own impact. Loyalty stays an aspiration when activation has no owner inside the org chart. AI gets pointed at low-risk content production while patient identification, the use case with the highest mission alignment, sits at 6% of spend. Eighty-six percent of CMOs know patients are dropping off before completing care. The infrastructure to intervene isn’t built.
Recorded live on day two of HMPS26, Chris Boyer is joined by Craig Blake of Amsive Health, Jane Crosby of True North Custom and John Berndt of Valtech Health. The panel brings together agency and consulting leaders who spend most of their time inside health systems navigating the gap between strategy decks and operating reality. Their vantage sharpens the conversation in places where industry rhetoric usually goes soft.
The panel explores:
- Why “the senior tsunami” reframes the data and targeting conversation
- The gap between activation and acquisition, and the question of who owns it inside a health system
- Why outside CMOs often fail in healthcare, and what bringing outside thinking actually requires
- What the 60-to-6 mismatch in healthcare AI spending reveals about institutional priorities
- How LLM disruption is showing up at urgent care visits, and what schema and taxonomy have to do with it
- John Berndt’s argument that institutional resistance, not IT plumbing, is what’s actually blocking progress
Trust will not get rebuilt by a function the organization has decided not to measure.
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