Strategies to tackle the top content challenges for healthcare

Figuring out how to work with content in healthcare can resemble a complex operation. On one side, there’s the challenge of managing content—often both public and restricted—across various platforms while ensuring everything is organized, localized, and easily accessible. On the other, there’s the need to provide a humanized, patient-centered experience all while complying with strict regulations like HIPAA. 

As fellow professionals, we understand the pressure—managing vast amounts of digital assets, balancing precision with empathy, and delivering actionable content that not only supports patients but also meets HIPAA requirements. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the top four digital content challenges healthcare organizations face, and we’ll recommend effective strategies for tackling them.

Challenge #1: Complex content needs in healthcare

While not every healthcare organization faces these challenges, many find themselves managing a mix of public and restricted content across multiple platforms, including websites, PDFs, and print materials. They also often deal with considerable amounts of data—patient records, research insights, clinical trial information, and multimedia content like medical images and videos—that require efficient storage, organization, and retrieval, often using native or integrated Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems.

Kontent.ai customer, the University Medical Center Utrecht (UMCU), is an interesting example. UMCU faced challenges with siloed operations, where content was spread across 94 websites, patient portals, print materials, and email outreach. This fragmentation made it difficult to keep content consistent and manage resources effectively, taking valuable time away from innovation and improving patient touchpoints.

But managing content is only part of the prescription for effective patient care online. Once everything is in place, how do you ensure a seamless, personalized experience for the most important stakeholder—the patient?

Challenge #2: The patient experience

The patient experience is more than just an interaction at the doctor’s office—it’s a multi-faceted journey that spans multiple channels, from initial search to post-treatment care. Patients want clear, actionable, and empathetic information, whether they’re booking an appointment or understanding their treatment plan. Healthcare organizations are tasked with creating content that not only informs but also guides patients to the right care at the right time.

Let's check out another case from Kontent.ai: My Mirror needed to deliver an accessible mental telehealth service where patients could easily book sessions, manage appointments, and receive therapy online. This illustrates the wider challenge of improving patient interactions through digital channels. To succeed, healthcare content must be engaging while also meeting strict legal standards (we’ll dive deeper into this in the next section of this article).

Additionally, addressing the cultural and market-specific needs of customers can pose a challenge, as content must be tailored rather than merely translated for different regions. The pandemic has intensified the demand for empathetic and easily accessible content. With the rise of generative AI (genAI), there’s an opportunity to enhance the patient experience by offering personalized support and making complex instructions clearer.

That said, to make the most of these advancements in patient experience, it’s essential to understand the rules that govern digital health services.

Challenge #3: Compliance with HIPAA

HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, plays a critical role in protecting patient privacy and ensuring the security of Personal Health Information (PHI) in the US. For healthcare organizations managing content across digital platforms, HIPAA compliance is essential to maintain trust and safeguard sensitive information.

When it comes to public websites like hospital pages, which guide patients through the journey of finding a doctor or scheduling an appointment, HIPAA becomes particularly relevant. For example, while general information on your “Find a doctor” page and appointment scheduling features may be open to the public, you still need to ensure that no PHI is collected or stored improperly during the process. Once a patient moves beyond public-facing tools—like using a patient portal to access personal health records or detailed medical information—HIPAA regulations become even stricter. 

Even services like geo-location and personalized content on hospital websites, used to provide localized doctor recommendations or care options, must be designed with HIPAA compliance in mind to avoid mishandling patient data. Therefore, it’s crucial for healthcare providers to adopt HIPAA-compliant tools and practices to protect patient privacy at every step.

Challenge #4: Accessibility

For healthcare organizations, making digital content accessible is crucial. Achieving WCAG Level AAA means meeting the highest standards of accessibility, ensuring that everyone, including those with disabilities, can access important health information. While reaching Level AAA might not be practical for every healthcare organization, striving to meet as many of its standards as possible can greatly improve the accessibility of their digital content. Some key requirements include:

• Contrast ratio: Text must have a contrast ratio of at least 7:1 with the background. This helps patients with visual impairments read the content more easily.

• Sign language translation: For pre-recorded videos, healthcare organizations should provide sign language translation. This ensures that individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing can understand the information being presented.
• Extended audio description: Level AAA also requires that pre-recorded videos include extended audio descriptions. These descriptions give additional details about what’s happening visually, making it easier for those who are blind or have low vision to understand the content.

Although not all healthcare organizations can fully achieve Level AAA, working toward these standards helps create a more inclusive environment. By prioritizing accessibility, healthcare providers can ensure that all patients have equal access to vital health information.

Five effective strategies for managing complex healthcare content

Navigating the complex content needs of healthcare organizations requires a thoughtful approach. How can you manage content that spans clinical guidelines, patient resources, and regulatory requirements? And how do you ensure it’s all secure, compliant, and accessible? The right strategies make all the difference.

For example, have you thought about how storing everything in one place might help you maintain consistency across teams? Or how breaking content into smaller, reusable pieces could streamline updates? And what about governance—how can you set clear roles and permissions to keep sensitive information secure?

Let’s take a close look at these strategies and explore how they can simplify content management for your teams and improve the experience for patients.

Having a single source of truth

From what we’ve heard from our customers, many healthcare organizations find that a centralized content hub really helps keep things consistent and minimizes errors in both public and restricted content. This single source of truth allows healthcare teams to store and manage all digital assets—whether they’re for public-facing websites or restricted patient portals—in one place. This reduces the need to recreate content, ensuring that the latest and most accurate information is always used.

Remember UMCU, whose content was spread across 94 websites? This fragmentation made it difficult to keep content consistent, but they solved this by centralizing their content into a single hub. By using a platform like Kontent.ai, UMCU unified their content management processes, allowing them to easily publish and update information across all touchpoints, including their website and the HiX patient portal.

As Kirsten Goede, Product Owner Digital Experience at UMCU, noted, “The increase in efficiency by using a central source for content is one of the growth measurements we have aimed at.” 

Managing all your content in one place also simplifies content reuse. Research articles, patient education materials, medical guidelines, or any other content can be easily reused across multiple platforms without duplication. A medical technology company that uses Kontent.ai reported this approach has reduced the time it takes to create a new page by 80%–from 30 hours to just 4-6 hours, leading to a 70% increase in content production efficiency.

By creating a single source of truth, healthcare organizations can simplify managing content and make sure it’s consistent across all platforms. But having a central hub is just the first step. The next key is organizing and reusing content in a smart way. That’s where modular content comes in.

Breaking complex information into smaller chunks 

The COPE (Create Once, Publish Everywhere) strategy is built on the idea of using small chunks of content. When you create content in small, reusable chunks, you can easily share it across multiple platforms—whether it’s a website, mobile app, or even informational signs in clinics. This makes it easier to manage content and keeps things running smoothly while delivering clear and consistent information to patients.

This process is often referred to as “content modularity.” In healthcare, this can be especially useful for things like research articles, patient guides, or medical instructions. It allows organizations to structure their content so it can be reused without starting from scratch. A good example of this is when a medical guideline is split into sections like “Overview,”  “Procedure,” and  “Aftercare.” These sections can be reused on a website, in an app, or in printed brochures without needing to recreate them. This saves time and ensures that the same accurate information is shared everywhere.

Now that we’ve explored how modular content can streamline the management and distribution of medical information across various platforms, let’s shift our focus to another crucial aspect of content management: content governance.

Focusing on content governance in healthcare

You might be wondering what content governance is and why it matters. Effective content governance is vital for ensuring that healthcare organizations not only create and reuse content efficiently but also manage it responsibly. To give you a bit more context, focusing on content governance means setting up clear guidelines and controls to maintain consistency and security across all content.

In the healthcare industry, content governance generally involves:

1. Giving teams control over content operations
   A well-defined content governance strategy allows healthcare teams to oversee and manage content creation, review, and approval processes efficiently. This ensures that content is accurate, up to date, and aligned with organizational standards and regulatory requirements.
2. Restricting access to sensitive assets
   Healthcare organizations handle a lot of sensitive information, such as patient records and confidential research data. Effective governance helps control who can access this sensitive content, ensuring that only authorized personnel can view or edit it. This is crucial for maintaining patient privacy and complying with regulations like HIPAA.
3. Enabling easier, real-time collaboration
   Good content governance also facilitates smooth collaboration among team members. By establishing clear guidelines for access and responsibilities, teams can work together more effectively, making real-time updates and adjustments while maintaining a cohesive workflow.

One key benefit of using Kontent.ai as a content hub is the ability to set up specific roles and permissions within the project. When configuring your project, you can define roles and assign permissions that dictate what each team member can do. This ensures that sensitive content is only accessible to authorized users, reducing the risk of compliance violations.

You can further enhance control by organizing content using so-called collections. These allow you to group content based on your business structure, such as by departments, regions, or service lines. Essentially, collections act as boundaries that simplify content management, ensuring it is categorized and accessible according to your organizational needs. For example, a collection could be set up for specific teams or projects, enabling them to manage their own content areas while maintaining consistency and accessibility across the organization.

Adopting a strategic approach to translation and localization

In healthcare, a well-defined translation and localization strategy is crucial for effective communication and enhancing patient engagement. Translation converts text from one language to another, while localization adapts that content to fit cultural and regional nuances. Both processes are vital not just for ensuring understanding but also for aligning with broader organizational goals, such as improving patient satisfaction and health outcomes.

Healthcare organizations should view localization as a proactive measure to manage risks associated with miscommunication and non-compliance with local regulations. By ensuring that all materials adhere to regional requirements, providers can mitigate potential legal issues while delivering safe, effective care.

Investing in localization also opens up opportunities for growth in new markets. Tools like DeepL enable quick and accurate translations in over 30 languages, facilitating seamless communication between patients and healthcare professionals. Remember, accessibility should be a core consideration in this process, ensuring that translated content meets the needs of all patients, including those with disabilities.

Localization also involves adapting content for specific software and systems. Services like those provided by Milestone Localization focus on ensuring that complex medical software—such as Electronic Health Records (EHR) and telemedicine platforms—is user-friendly and compliant with local regulations.

A valuable asset in this process is Kontent.ai, which helps ensure consistency across regions while meeting local needs for large-scale healthcare websites, apps, and portals. The content management system also uses AI to facilitate translation. Kontent.ai enables quick, context-aware translations that keep the original tone and intent. This allows healthcare organizations to efficiently connect with new markets by making translations just a few clicks away. 

Creating an omnichannel experience for seamless patient engagement

Rather than relying solely on a website for patient engagement, healthcare organizations need to deliver relevant information across all devices and platforms. For example, a patient might schedule an appointment through a mobile app, receive follow-up information via email, and access materials through a patient portal on their laptop. The experience should feel seamless across these channels, making sure the information is consistent, timely, and tailored to their needs.

Now, let’s circle back to MyMirror that we mentioned above when talking about the patient experience. They needed to deliver a seamless telehealth service to three distinct audiences: patients, psychologists, and GPs. The team decided to build a microservices architecture with Kontent.ai at its heart. This approach enables organizations to create a flexible ecosystem by selecting individual services and tools that best meet their needs. By leveraging microservices, businesses can integrate various functionalities, ensuring a seamless experience across platforms.

So, using their new microservices architecture, they were able to offer 21-hour-a-day access to psychologists and integrate services like Twilio for real-time communication and Cronofy for appointment scheduling—all while ensuring the experience was frictionless and consistent across all platforms. This omnichannel approach helped My Mirror break down geographical, financial, and accessibility barriers, enabling Australians to access mental health services more easily and improve their overall well-being.

As we’ve already mentioned above, content management systems like Kontent.ai make it easier for healthcare organizations to create content once and deliver it everywhere—from mobile apps to websites to chatbots. This ensures that patients can access vital health information when and where they need it, whether they’re at home, on their phone, or in a hospital setting.

By adopting an omnichannel approach, healthcare providers can ensure continuity of care, improve patient engagement, and create a more personalized, convenient experience for each patient throughout their healthcare journey. This includes ensuring that all channels are accessible to individuals with disabilities, allowing them to engage with healthcare content easily.

Key takeaways

Now that we’ve explored the top four challenges healthcare organizations face in content management and discussed strategies to tackle them, let’s wrap up by outlining practical steps you can implement moving forward. Here are some key actions you can take to enhance your content strategy and create a more efficient experience for both patients and teams:

• Create a single source of truth: Implement a HIPAA-compliant content management system like Kontent.ai to easily manage everything from public websites to patient portals.
• Facilitate content reuse through modular content: Breaking down information into smaller, reusable components allows healthcare organizations to ensure consistency, avoid duplication, and save time. Healthcare organizations using Kontent.ai have experienced up to a 70% increase in content production efficiency.
• Focus on content governance: Establish clear guidelines and processes for content creation and management, ensuring quality, compliance, and security while empowering teams to maintain oversight and streamline workflows.
• Prioritize translation and localization: For healthcare organizations looking to reach global markets, leveraging tools like DeepL ensures quick, accurate translation and localization of content, meeting cultural, linguistic, and regulatory needs.
• Adopt an omnichannel approach: Delivering consistent, relevant healthcare information across all devices and platforms—from mobile apps to patient portals—ensures a seamless experience for patients. With solutions like Kontent.ai, healthcare organizations can unify their content delivery, improve patient engagement, and provide personalized care, no matter where or how patients access information.

Are you ready to learn more about how Kontent.ai can help your organization? Schedule a demo with one of our experts today.