Most Important Lessons from the 2025 Yext Healthcare Marketing Forum

The way patients find care has changed more in the past year than in the last decade — and marketing strategies must change with it.

Adapting to an AI-first world is an org-wide opportunity. At the Yext Healthcare Marketing Forum, industry leaders compared playbooks, shared missteps, and got practical guidance on what to do next.

Here are the biggest takeaways.

Discovery has changed – and patients are in control

Yext’s Chief Data Officer, Christian Ward, opened with a breakdown of how AI is reshaping visibility – and what that means for healthcare organizations.

He emphasized:

• Search isn’t happening on one platform anymore — it’s everywhere
• Visibility isn’t just about keywords; it’s about context

And the stories being told about your brand are often written by others.

So what fuels AI answers?

A mix of:

• Objective content or ‘hard data’ - including but not limited to provider names, addresses, hours, services offered, schema markup, and FAQs
• Subjective content, including but not limited to reviews, sentiment, local relevance, and even YouTube transcripts

Ward also reminded marketers that personalization also plays a role: AI tools factor in patient’s search history and known preferences when deciding which answers to surface.

How does this impact your strategy?

Showing up today requires more than great content. To optimize brand visibility, Ward said, “Focus content on very specific areas and get it out everywhere consistently so AI builds confidence in you. That’s how it decides who to trust.”

Healthcare execs are focused on accuracy, patient education, and alignment

In our executive panel, healthcare leaders shared practical, honest insights about what it really takes to lead through change. From operational trade-offs to the realities of patient access, the conversation reflected what many in the room already knew: there’s no time to wait.

Aniq Rahman, the CEO of Fabric Health, reinforced Ward’s emphasis on the importance of data accuracy when he said, "Providers switch systems, retire, or lose credentials. You need to use third-party signals to update listings in real time so every online listing reflects what’s truly available.” This sentiment was echoed in our 2025 Healthcare Digital Presence Survey, where 85% of patients said information accuracy impacts their decision to schedule an appointment.

Matt ‘O Rourke, the Director of Marketing at Yale School of Medicine | Yale Medicine, expanded beyond listings to talk about content strategy. He shared a great example of how timeliness played a major role in building trust during the pandemic:

“We were one of the first websites to start using the term COVID — everyone else was still saying coronavirus. That small shift made a huge difference. Once we aligned content to what people were actually searching for, traffic skyrocketed. Visitors came to us for clear, reliable health information, and that reinforced our credibility.”

He encouraged other marketing leaders to pay attention to traffic spikes and engagement, adding, “That’s where you have the biggest opportunity to deepen trust and open new doors.”

If AI can’t find you, patients can’t either

Rebecca Colwell’s personal story made everything discussed up to this point real: “I helped my mom figure out what was causing her sinus issues. Doctors were stumped, and Google was a dead end, so I turned to AI for answers. The entire experience — figuring out what was going on, finding the right specialist, checking reputation and insurance — all happened inside ChatGPT. I even scheduled an appointment and got validation that AI’s suspected diagnosis was accurate. And if you didn’t show up in that search, you were invisible to me as a patient.”

Why this matters now:

• AI is taking a growing share of discovery. By 2026, Gartner predicts that 25–50% of searches will shift from traditional search to AI answers.
• Even in traditional search, clicks drop when a Google AI Overview appears. Website CTR falls from ~16% to ~8%, meaning you have fewer chances to “win” with classic SEO alone.

So what should marketers do?

Colwell shared a three-step plan to help healthcare organizations stay visible:

1. Expand beyond Google search. Publish the facts everywhere AI looks (across listings, local pages, reviews, social, and more).
2. Create content for people and machines (LLMs). Structure entities (providers, facilities, procedures, insurance, FAQs) to make answers machine-readable.
3. Measure and benchmark visibility everywhere. Track citations, sentiment, local performance, and competitors to close gaps.

“You don’t have to control everything to influence what matters,” Colwell emphasized. “But you have to be proactive because the cost of inaction is high.”

Meeting patient expectations starts with providing effortless access

In a session led by Susie Germer, the Sr. Director of Marketing & Digital Strategy at Tufts Medicine, Annie Stone, the Director of Marketing Services at Phase 2, and Kyle Kilpatrick, the VP of Enterprise Sales at Yext, the focus shifted to pre-care patient experience.

Digital-first patients expect to find the right provider, in the right place, at the right time. When that doesn’t happen, they move on. To meet those expectations, Susie is helping Tufts Medicine personalize find-a-doc tools and location pages, localizing content to reflect community needs, and making it easy to schedule an appointment.

Germer shared how she navigated the challenges Tufts faced:

• Cleaning up fragmented data
• Getting approvals across teams
• Dealing with schedule inconsistencies
• Leading change across systems

Step one was finding vendors (both systems and people) that work well together. "My goal was to build the right infrastructure and foundation — the ‘puzzle pieces’ — so we’d be well positioned for all the AI innovation happening now,” Germer explained.

“It’s like sports: before you can pull off the fancy trick shots, you have to master the fundamentals. The same goes here — we need solid data, strong structure, the right vendors, and smart people at the table. With those fundamentals in place, we can start doing some really cool things."

AI is raising the stakes – and creating new opportunities

To close the event on a high note, Francesca Belmer, Sr. PMM, Healthcare at Yext, outlined pragmatic opportunities for marketers to pursue, grounded in how patients search today.

1. Establish yourself as an industry leader: Align content, listings, and reviews to what patients actually search for to win the moment of consideration.

2. Break down silos and rethink the patient experience: Marketing and PX should operate as one loop: Discovery → Access → Reputation → Feedback. Having shared goals and shared data helps organizations resource more efficiently, move faster, and stay focused on providing an excellent patient experience.

3. Prioritize powerful partnerships: Pair goal-focused execution (show up everywhere patients search) with strategic rigor (establish benchmarks and continuously measure) and operational enablement (consolidate tools and phase your rollout).

Now is the time to make smart, durable investments in data, tools, and cross-functional partnerships that will define your brand for many years to come.

Thank you to all who joined us for Yext Healthcare Marketing Forum. Whether you were in the room or are catching up now, we’re grateful to be connected to such an engaged, passionate community. Until next time!

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