For healthcare companies, reputation matters beyond the bottom line. It materially affects people's lives and livelihoods. An organization's reception in the market impacts whether a new therapy reaches patients who need it. It shapes clinical trial enrollment. It influences policy decisions that dictate access and affordability. It has the power to stifle or propel innovation.
Despite the short time in which reputations can be ruined, they take a long time to build. Moreover, they must be resilient regardless of evolving regulatory landscapes or even unpredictable industry shakeups. When a healthcare organization makes the wrong PR move in the midst of change — especially high-stakes moments — it tends to stick in the minds of patients, providers, payers, and the press. This is why healthcare organizations must build their reputation on a marketing framework that will help them stand even in the face of the most consequential events.
Here’s how we approach it at Highwire Health.
The ABCDE Model
A framework like our ABCDE model keeps your priorities at the center, preparing you to define milestones, proactively mitigate issues, and keep earning stakeholder trust along the way.
Audience: We start by identifying exactly who needs to trust the organization: patients, caregivers, providers, payers, regulators, investors, media, and policymakers. Before we say a word, we work to understand what the audience cares about, what shapes their perceptions, and what questions they need answered.
Behavior: Next, we define the specific action or shift in perception we need from each audience. That might be a regulator’s confidence, a patient or provider’s willingness to try or prescribe a new care option, or an investor’s decision to commit capital. Naming the behavior keeps the strategy focused on outcomes, not just outputs.
Content: With audiences and desired behaviors defined, we build the narrative, messaging and proof points that speak directly to what will move each audience toward that behavior and need. The strongest content in healthcare is grounded in evidence, data, and human impact. It must be clear about what's known, what isn’t, and why it matters.
Delivery: We then activate that content across the channels where each audience actually engages, spanning paid, earned, shared, and owned, so the message reaches people where they are rather than where it’s most convenient to publish.
Evaluation: Finally, we measure whether the strategy actually changed perception and behavior, then refine the approach based on what the data shows. That includes monitoring reputation in real time using tools like our AI visibility platform, AcroAnswers, which helps organizations understand how they're represented as more stakeholders turn to AI for answers.
We don’t apply this framework once and move on. We run it as a continuous cycle because the forces impacting reputation keep changing. Therefore, our approach to building and maintaining reputation must evolve, too.
Patient and Provider Trust at the Heart of the Strategy
The ABCDE model, or any healthcare reputation framework, is only effective when audiences trust is of the utmost priority. When communications and marketing firms build strategies without this focus, they forget the most important stakeholders and reduce healthcare-specific PR efforts to general marketing plans. At Highwire, prioritizing audience insights informs every client interaction. If you want to know more about how we’re using the ABCDE model at Highwire, you can contact us here.
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