By John Lavey | Hammock President and COO

At a dinner during a large healthcare conference last week, I sat next to a data scientist and the CEO of a healthcare company. As is often the case when healthcare is the common table topic, we immediately jumped from a casual chat about our current work into a spirited discussion about larger healthcare challenges and what’s required to solve them.

Creating a creative, forward-thinking conference—and facilitating productive conversations during such a conference—involves the same principle of content marketing that would apply to any email newsletter or white paper. Whether 1,000 people attend an event, 100 people read an email or two people share a meal, we all should strive to engage our audiences in problem-solving conversations.

I consider the work we are engaged in—whether on behalf of a supplier with technology that speeds up reimbursement payments or a provider facing patient engagement challenges—as collaborative. Healthcare marketers should consider creative ways to collaborate with healthcare professionals, no matter their role, to solve an immense challenge: to remake our healthcare system to deliver better care more efficiently.

Bottom line for marketers: Helping people understand your part in solving healthcare challenges—and where your work intersects with theirs—is authentic healthcare marketing content.

*Note: Two major healthcare IT conferences are coming to Nashville this fall—Regional HIMSS next week and Distributed:Health in early October. In the upcoming weeks, I’ll share some new data about what healthcare exhibitors and attendees value most.

Photo | Thinkstock

About the new Healthcare Idea Email | As our popular Idea Email has a large number of healthcare marketers who subscribe, it did not surprise us that the No. 1 request we’ve received is to “offer more ideas about healthcare.” So we have. In addition to Idea Email, on other weeks you can receive the Healthcare Idea Email that is focused exclusively on healthcare-related marketing, media and content trends and topics. You can visit the Healthcare Idea Email archive and subscribe for your own copy here.