As some health systems continue to lose money, marketing teams have to work harder with less dollars, Ramon Soto, chief marketing officer of Northwell Health said on an MM+M podcast.
"From a marketing standpoint, it [health systems losing money] puts extra challenge on us," he said. "There's not extra dollars to go around, so our dollars have to work hard for the interests of the health system."
Mr. Soto said that in its core form, marketing is meant to match those who have healthcare needs with New Hyde Park, N.Y.-based Northwell Health's services. But in today's world, consumers have numerous options for accessing healthcare. This means marketing teams have to be more efficient.
"We have to work hard to be much more efficient and much more thoughtful about how we engage with consumers and how we drive relevant messaging for them so that they know us before they need us," Mr. Soto said. "And that has led to a tremendous amount of experimentation including AI."
Northwell is optimistic about using AI for marketing, according to Mr. Soto. He said the health system has been using it in a few ways. One is content creation.
"If you can use some of these AI tools to run that first version of content, it allows you to leverage your human capital at the highest level possible," he said. "Copywriters can transition to copy editors and you can increase the throughput of your organization without adding staff."
Creating art is another area in which Mr. Soto sees promise.
"We just started using an AI program to generate music so that I don't have to pay licensing fees," he said. "This generates original scores for us, and those scores become proprietary for Northwell."
Mr. Soto said if health systems do not get ahead of this curve, they could end up falling behind because their competitors are going to adopt AI "pretty aggressively."