Mastering the Art of Healthcare Writing with AI

The rise of generative AI is a divisive topic. For some, it spells impending doom for mankind. For others, it’s an exhilarating new technology that will relieve humans of monotonous drudgery and free them for more creative pursuits that will bring greater fulfillment. And for organizations with a never-ending need for content, it is promising as a path to greater efficiency and ultimately, profitability. 

But healthcare content requires a different approach than content for many other industries. Whether you’re publishing blog posts about preventative healthcare, creating guides for caregivers, or writing internal resources, everything has to be based on fact. There’s no wiggle room when it comes to factuality in healthcare writing, and that’s why, quite often, physicians themselves must review every piece of content that will ultimately be disseminated by an organization—on top of seeing patients, doing paperwork and all the other tasks they have to perform regularly. 

It’s understandable, then, to be skeptical about whether generative AI would save them any time. After all, ChatGPT is in the news almost every day with another story about its potential to generate content that is misleading or false. So can generative AI work for healthcare organizations, or will it create more work for healthcare writers?

The crisis of accurate information 

Once an excellent place to find quality information, the Internet has become unmanageable. The events of the last few years have shown us that it’s just hard to find trustworthy information these days. There’s already a lot of inaccurate content out there, and it’s only becoming more difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. The COVID-19 pandemic crystallized this problem. And in healthcare, bad content can literally mean life or death. 

People use healthcare content to make decisions that will support their health. The consequences of depending on unreliable content can be disastrous. Illness rates can go up when people rely on misinformation about disease prevention or treatments. Inaccurate caregiver instructions for post-surgery care, for example, can lead to infection and hospitalization.

The state of healthcare content

Healthcare marketing teams know that fact-based content is absolutely critical. That’s part of what makes the job difficult. They don’t usually have medical degrees, so they must come into subjects cold. And to make sure they’re not disseminating inaccurate information, they often rely on physicians to review the content before they publish it.

But this takes a lot of time that those healthcare specialists simply do not have. One study conducted by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality found that half of primary care physicians reported feeling stressed due to time pressures, while one-third said they needed 50% more time to accomplish everything they needed to do at work.

Not only that, but inflation and a looming recession (or one that’s already here, depending on who you ask), have organizations tightening their belts. Marketing teams are chronically understaffed and under-budgeted anyway, and the economy isn’t going to help that situation any time soon. So while organizations might be able to relieve doctors of the need to review content by hiring specialist healthcare writers, this can be quite expensive, and it isn’t feasible for everyone.

This is the landscape in which healthcare marketers must operate, all while they find themselves in need of even more content. (According to one report, healthcare marketing budgets rose 15% from 2020 to 2021, and 9% of that budget goes to content marketing.)

The challenge for healthcare content marketers 

Content needs are rising along with time pressures on the physicians who review the content. It’s clear that greater efficiency is needed. Generative AI can definitely help with that by generating content at scale–whether that’s blog posts, patient-facing materials, caregiver guides. But just as writers risk disseminating false information because they base their research on bad information on the web, how can they be sure that AI won’t do the same. The key point here is that all not generative AI is created equal. 

AI that delivers a first draft based on credible, factual sources

Grafi AI is a generative AI tool for healthcare content. Because accuracy is absolutely critical in healthcare publications, Grafi AI was developed with dependability in mind. It is the first AI-powered content generation platform created specifically for healthcare and medical writers. It draws only on vetted, credible sources like PubMed, Medline, and peer-reviewed medical journals. With Grafi AI, you control the sources from which your content is generated. You can also customize your content with automatic tone and reading level controls. 

Use Grafi AI to create a first draft in minutes and then personalize it for your brand. And because you can trust that your generated content is accurate, your organization’s medical personnel will be relieved of the burden of having to review it on top of all the other important work they have to do.

Key Takeaways

• As the internet has grown, the amount of low-quality content has grown with it.
• Accuracy is king in healthcare content, so if you're going to use generative AI, you have to be certain of its ability to impact content quality. 
• Content needs are only rising, but economic pressures mean that marketing teams must do more with less. 
• Generative AI can help harried healthcare content marketers create the volume of content they need, but it has to be accurate.
• With Grafi AI, you can scale up your content creation while being assured that everything you generate is authoritative and informative. Sign up for an account today and start generating high-quality content faster.