Outdated web pages are lurking on your website right now. This means patients and families are getting outdated information, that you’re missing a chance to persuade them to choose you, and that you’re probably falling behind in being featured in AI overviews and answers. These pages are also waiting to be discovered by a physician who might be alarmed to see outdated descriptions of their department.  

You need to update those pages…but it’s hard! Hard to find time and resources. Hard to get physicians on board. Hard to know how to use AI to help.

Now the good news: We’ve been helping health systems overcome these challenges for years. Here’s four lessons to make large healthcare web content updates manageable.  

1. Know your priorities

Hospital websites are so huge that it can be overwhelming to try to decide what to update and when. To break a healthcare website update into manageable pieces, start by revisiting your business goals and priority programs. 

Are there particular service lines or programs where you’re trying to increase volumes and/or are featuring in upcoming campaigns? The website sections relating to these are a logical place to start.

Remember, you don’t have to update each and every page in that section, at least not right away. Within sections, you can start with pages that: 

• Are highly visited i.e. have attracted significant search traffic in the past and now need to better capture AI visibility. 

• Showcase the specific programs, services and treatments where you’re trying to increase visibility and appointments

That way, you can be sure the highest-priority pages have the latest information. You can tackle lower-priority pages later. 

2. Cultivate clinical champions

If you work in healthcare marketing, you know that physicians can be a big bottleneck. You need their input. But when a subject matter expert’s to-do list includes “review web copy” and “prep for heart surgery”, it’s easy to guess which one (rightly) wins. So how do you get their buy-in?

One solution is to cultivate clinical champions early in the project. These champions are usually service line leaders who see the value of the web update and can help you keep their physicians engaged throughout the process. In large healthcare website content projects we’ve managed for health systems, we’ve had the best results when we:

• Holding kickoff meetings with service line leaders and administrators, where we share analytics and examples of outdated pages, and explain why we’re updating them, how this will help attract patients and what kind of cooperation we need. 

• Having them email their physicians to explain why the work is important and ask them to find time for interviews and content reviews. (We give the leaders a draft email to send or build on.) 

• Getting honest input on which physicians are likely to be engaged and which ones might be too busy, so we can build a plan that avoids potential bottlenecks. 

• Asking the clinical leaders to send a gentle nudge when an interview or review gets stuck. If that doesn’t work, they can help devise a workaround.  
  
  

3. How can AI help? Be thoughtful and flexible

AI can help make updates faster, easier and far more efficient. You have to decide how to balance that with the human input that helps keep pages authoritative and credible. 

Some health systems prefer a human-first approach where professional writers lead the charge, to keep all content authentic and avoid AI slop. Others lean heavily on AI. There’s no right or wrong approach. 

Either way, it’s useful to build a custom AI assistant that’s an expert in things like your brand platform, your differentiators and core messages, your style guide and your web page templates. You can deploy this in a variety of ways, including: 

• Audit: AI can find pages that are out of line with your current standards and/or sorely need updates for GEO and SEO. 

• Drafting: If you’re comfortable trying AI as a writer, it can create first drafts of updated pages. Important: These drafts need to be based on SME interviews and/or other verified clinical sources. And you need to tell AI to flag what’s missing instead of adding information. Otherwise it might fill content gaps with faulty information. Once the drafts are done, a human steps in to review, refine and de-slopify. 

• Review: After a page is drafted and edited, AI can review it and flag where it doesn’t align with your brand, style or templates, or is missing key messages and differentiators. 

• Search and AI visibility: AI can recommend how to adjust pages to improve search ranking and make them more likely to be cited in AI answers. 

Remember to keep people in charge and in the loop. Humans should define the standards, build and test the AI tools, deliver final approval of all content and remain accountable for what gets published. 

Flexibility is also key – be ready to adapt and adjust, as you see what AI delivers and as technology evolves.

4. Lean into your project management rock stars

When launching an update, marketing teams often make a content strategist or writer as the project leader. This often puts them in charge of overseeing the content and managing the project. They need a project manager alongside them.

A good PM thrives on doing the tasks that drive most content people bonkers. On the healthcare website projects we manage, a single service-line update can involve 100+ pages, interviews with 20+ physicians and multiple rounds of clinical review. Planning for all these tasks is something only a good project manager can love.

They can build a clear workflow that tracks every page from audit through interviews, drafting, editing, physician review and final approval. And they’re responsible for identifying when things get stuck and for clearing those roadblocks. This keeps your project moving and leaves content people to focus on what they do best.

If you don’t have a project management rock star on your team, or if yours are busy with other things, our PMs have seen every healthcare marketing challenge in the books, and can step in and keep things running smoothly. 

If you learn one thing, it’s….

…Build a thoughtful infrastructure first. When you’re contemplating a web content update, it's natural to focus only on the content. But to update content effectively, success depends just as much on the underlying system. You need clear priorities, engaged clinical experts, a thoughtful approach to AI and strong project management. 

Build that machine well, and even a website with thousands of pages starts to feel a lot more manageable.

Want more tips?

Message Lab Media is a leading healthcare content agency that has specialized in healthcare content marketing for more than a decade. We help top health systems nationwide solve their trickiest content and communications challenges. Whether you’re updating a large website, creating stories to inspire families and donors, or building a referral and reputation marketing program, our strategy-first approach can set you up for success. 

Don’t hesitate to contact us or schedule a call – we always love meeting new people and trading ideas!