The Information Tornado Hits Healthcare
A Rare Dose of Good News: Viral Heart in Healthcare
Employees from AdventHealth lit up the internet with a video about Sheila, a 62-year-old environmental services team member surprised with a bridal shower by her hospital coworkers. Her tearful, authentic reaction garnered over 6 million views and counting, with big brands like Hilton, Delta, and Tarte jumped in to gift her a New York City honeymoon. This is what healthcare brands should be doing—showing the humans behind the scrubs. It’s not a marketing stunt; it’s brand authenticity in motion.
Mayo Clinic x NVIDIA: When Pathology Meets Power
Mayo Clinic just announced a partnership with Nvidia to build an AI “supercomputer” that will accelerate disease diagnosis through digital pathology. It’s not Mayo Clinic’s first AI rodeo—remember the IBM Watson partnership back in 2011? That fizzled. This one? We’re hopeful, but innovation only scales if it accounts for diverse patient data. This can’t be another case of innovation for the privileged few.
Gut Check: The Poppi Lawsuit (and Big Soda Hypocrisy)
Poppi’s gut-health soda claims just cost them $9 million. Why? They promised a “healthy gut” in their tagline—without the science to back it up. Here’s the kicker: This kind of health-washing is rampant across food and beverage. Cheerios says it’s heart-healthy and Twizzlers brags it’s fat-free. Healthcare brands are held to a higher standard, and they should be. But this lawsuit isn’t about one brand; it’s about a much bigger trust problem across consumer health narratives.
Mount Olympus: When Medical Trust Collapses
The New York Times dropped an article declaring the “collapse of central medical authority.” A doctor’s offhand comment—“We recommend the vaccine”—left her asking, “Who is we?” That “we” used to mean trusted institutions like the CDC, NIH, and FDA. Not anymore. Today, medical guidance feels like it’s spinning in a tornado. It’s conflicted, politicized, and eroding trust on every side. When trust vanishes, people stop listening to doctors and start following influencers, algorithms, and gut instinct (pun very much intended). This is the “information tornado”—a storm of misinformation, distrust, and competing truth claims that’s reshaping the doctor-patient relationship.
Join our upcoming webinar, The Future of the Health System Chief Marketing Officer, to learn how to measure marketing performance, align metrics with organizational goals, and present impactful data to the C-suite. Register here.
Read the transcript
