The Healthcare Marketing Conversion Gap

Results Roundtable Insights
Written By Catharine Szefcyk

Insights from Causeway Solutions' Results Roundtable on why trust breaks between marketing and care

Key Takeaways

  • Trust breaks in the handoffs, not the campaign.

  • No one owns the whole journey.

  • Siloed metrics miss the journey patients actually live.

  • Access is a strategy input, not a launch-week check.

Trust was mentioned everywhere at this year's spring healthcare marketing conferences. It was the theme of keynote speeches, panel discussions, and hallway conversations. We wanted to explore the topic further during our Results Roundtable held on June 18th, where the conversation spanned patient acquisition, access, experience, and growth. As different perspectives emerged, one question kept surfacing: How do healthcare organizations actually earn trust today?

That discussion led us to an even more important question.

Where does trust actually break?‍ ‍

It usually isn't inside the marketing campaign itself. It breaks in the space between what marketing promises and what the rest of the organization delivers.

We call that space the conversion gap, and it is where healthcare marketing quietly loses much of its impact. A campaign can be well targeted, thoughtfully executed, and genuinely persuasive, yet still fail the moment a patient tries to schedule an appointment, reaches an overwhelmed call center, or receives a confusing bill. The clinical care itself may be outstanding, but trust has already been damaged because the experience fell apart somewhere along the way.

That conversation stayed with us after the Results Roundtable ended, so we went looking for some data behind it. The numbers are difficult to ignore. A 50-state study found that public trust in physicians and hospitals dropped from 71.5 percent in the spring of 2020 to just 40.1 percent by January 2024. The 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer tells a similar story, with only 37 percent of people saying they feel both empowered by and trusting of the healthcare system. The quality of medicine did not suddenly decline. What changed is everything surrounding it. The friction, the delays, and the handoffs patients experience long before they ever see a provider.

One reason this problem persists is that no one truly owns the entire patient experience. The Chief Experience Officer role was created to make patient experience a strategic priority, but in many organizations it became tied more closely to survey scores than business outcomes. When experience could not be directly connected to revenue, budgets shrank and responsibilities narrowed. The result is a patient journey that spans marketing, operations, access, clinical teams, and finance, but belongs completely to none of them. Marketing often inherits that responsibility by default, even if it was never designed to.

The challenge is that most organizations still measure performance in silos. Marketing tracks impressions, clicks, conversions, and attribution. Operations measures provider utilization and appointment fill rates. Clinical teams rely on satisfaction surveys that capture a small slice of the visit but very little of everything that happens before and after it. Every department has metrics that look reasonable on their own. Patients, however, experience one journey, not a collection of departmental scorecards.

Nowhere is that disconnect more obvious than access. It is easy for marketers to think scheduling capacity or call center performance belongs to someone else. In reality, promoting a service patients cannot actually reach does not create growth. It creates a broken promise. The average wait for a new-patient physician appointment across fifteen major metropolitan areas has climbed to 31 days, up 19 percent since 2022 and nearly 50 percent since 2004. Imagine launching a successful campaign for a new provider only to discover the call center was never trained to schedule those appointments. From marketing's perspective, the campaign worked exactly as intended. From the patient's perspective, the organization failed. Despite the growth of digital tools, roughly 65 percent of patients still prefer to schedule appointments by phone, making the call center one of the most important touchpoints in the entire patient journey. Access is not something to verify the week before launch. It has to shape the strategy from the beginning.

Perhaps the most important shift is not adding another metric or another dashboard. It is changing where the conversation happens. Most healthcare organizations have some connection between marketing and patient experience. The real question is how close that relationship is to the work itself. If those conversations only happen during quarterly executive reviews, problems have to become enormous before anyone notices. When teams collaborate earlier and more often, they catch the everyday breakdowns that quietly erode trust before they become major issues.

Closing the conversion gap does not require marketers to generate more impressions or build a cleaner funnel. It requires something more difficult: ownership of the journey beyond the click. That means looking past campaign performance and into the experience patients actually have after they respond. It means measuring the handoffs that have traditionally belonged to someone else.

The question is no longer whether the campaign converts.
It is who owns the handoffs after the click, and whether anyone is watching the entire journey instead of individual pieces of it.

The Causeway Results Roundtable is an ongoing, candid conversation among healthcare marketing leaders. Sessions pause over the summer. If you would like to attend the next one, we would be glad to have you. Sign up to here: causewaysolutions.com/roundtable-signup

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Catharine Szefcyk
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