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B2B healthcare marketing is how health tech companies win institutional buyers: health systems, pharma companies, payers, employers and private practices. Those buyers sign on evidence and committee consensus, on a budget calendar the vendor does not control, so the most common failure is running demand generation before the proof exists. This guide sequences B2B healthcare marketing strategy by evidence stage, then adjusts each stage for where your product sits: regulated or unregulated, cure or care.
Key takeaways
- Evidence decides who takes the meeting. In a JMIR study of 224 funded digital health startups, 44% had no registered clinical trials or FDA filings, and funding showed no correlation with clinical robustness.
- Every buyer runs its own clock. Health systems averaged 8.0-month buying cycles for traditional IT purchases in 2025 and payers 11.3 months for AI purchases, while private practices often decide in weeks.
- Marketing copy is a regulatory decision. FDA's January 2026 wellness guidance says references to specific diseases in advertising can take a wearable or app out of the wellness category.
- Hospitals buy capacity. With Kaufman Hall's adjusted year-to-date hospital operating margin at 1.3% for 2025, value stated in clinician minutes and beds outsells clinical superiority stated in the abstract.
- The marketing stack is a liability surface. Tracking pixels on health websites have produced eight-figure class settlements, including $12.225 million at Advocate Aurora Health.
This guide draws on the six practitioner interviews behind our report on health tech marketing, on TGS client work with healthcare and life-science companies, and on primary research from regulators and peer-reviewed journals. One interviewee, Marcel Alberti, co-founded HealthSage AI, a TGS client that now operates as Coforix.
[[ADRIAN: CONFIRM THE MARCEL ALBERTI DISCLOSURE ABOVE (HEALTHSAGE AI, NOW COFORIX) AND ITS WORDING]]
What is B2B healthcare marketing?
B2B healthcare marketing is the work of persuading organizations, rather than patients, to adopt a healthcare product. The buyer is a health system, a pharma company, a payer, an employer or a practice, and the decision runs through a group that weighs clinical evidence, security, cost and workflow before anyone signs.
The person who signs is rarely the person who uses the product. A Chief Medical Information Officer can approve a documentation tool without ever opening it, while the nurses and other healthcare professionals who will live with it never see the contract. Marketing has to reach both groups with different arguments.
Buying groups are also wide. Gartner's 2025 survey of 632 B2B buyers found buying groups ranging from 5 to 16 people across as many as four functions. Purchases by healthcare organizations routinely involve multiple stakeholders from clinical, technical and financial roles who answer to nobody in common.
Long sales cycles in the healthcare industry are the mechanical cost of assembling that agreement. Calling them inertia misreads the machinery, and it leads healthcare marketers to fix the wrong problem with more top-of-funnel volume.
The two clocks problem
Health tech sells into two clocks at once. Patients act on urgency, often within days, while institutions decide on budget cycles that run from six months to well over a year. Marketing tuned to the patient's clock stalls on the institution's, and most companies discover the mismatch only after their first institutional pipeline goes quiet.
Nemanja Stamenovic, Head of AI at Empedoc Labs, sees both clocks in a single product. People with migraines will try a prediction app tomorrow. The clinics and wellness platforms serving those same patients run six-to-twelve-month cycles, answer to five stakeholders and have no budget line waiting for a new vendor.
A company selling only to patients can ignore the institutional clock. Any company whose revenue depends on a hospital, a pharma brand team, an insurer or an employer cannot, because that clock sets when money moves.
How does B2B healthcare marketing differ from B2C healthcare marketing?
B2C healthcare marketing reaches patients and consumers who decide alone and quickly, usually on convenience or trust in a brand. B2B healthcare marketing reaches institutions that decide by committee, on evidence and budget. The same company can run both motions, and when it does, each motion needs its own playbook, its own metrics and often its own team.
Hybrid companies feel the gap hardest. When the target audience is a patient, an app store subscription can grow on urgency and volume. The same company hits a wall the moment an employer or wellness platform asks for outcome data from real patients, because downloads and ratings answer a question institutional buyers never asked.
Where does your company sit: regulated or unregulated, cure or care?
Two axes locate a health tech company before any channel decision: whether its claim makes the product a regulated medical device, and whether it sells into acute institutional settings (cure) or private, owner-run settings such as dental and physiotherapy practices (care). Together they decide who buys and how much proof the sale needs.
The cycle figures are directional. The 12–18 month range for acute institutional sales and the weeks-to-months range for care settings come from the practitioners we interviewed. The 6–8 month average for health system IT purchases comes from a 2025 survey of provider technology decision makers by Menlo Ventures and Morning Consult, covered in the buyer section below.
Regulated or unregulated: the claim decides
Regulatory status follows the claim a company makes about its product. Two apps built on the same model can sit in different regimes because one says it predicts risk and the other says it treats a condition. Nemanja Stamenovic, whose migraine product sits deliberately on the wellness side while his team builds toward the clinical side, puts it in one line: "One verb separates a wellness app from a medical device."
The US Food and Drug Administration made that line sharper in January 2026. Its revised general wellness guidance lets some wearables that estimate values such as blood pressure or heart rate variability stay outside device regulation when the outputs are intended solely for wellness. The same guidance says such products are not general wellness products if their labeling, advertising or functionality references specific diseases or diagnostic thresholds.
That puts part of the regulatory position in the hands of whoever writes the landing pages. A campaign that promises to "catch hypertension early" can change what the product legally is, whatever the engineering team intended.
FDA revised its clinical decision support guidance on the same day. It now intends to exercise enforcement discretion for some software that offers a single recommendation when only one option is clinically appropriate. The lesson from both documents is the same for a marketer: the description of what software does for a clinician is part of the regulatory file, so product copy needs the same review as the product. Once a claim makes the product a device, the cleared claim governs every asset that follows; our guide to medical device marketing follows that chain from intended use to coverage and sales.
Cure or care: two different buyers
Cure covers hospitals and acute systems, largely public in Europe, bought through tenders and value analysis committees over cycles that the practitioners we interviewed put at twelve to eighteen months, and that survey averages put under a year, with clinical evidence and total cost of ownership as the currency. Care covers dentistry, dermatology, aesthetics, physiotherapy and ambulatory surgery. Those settings are private and owner-decided, and they buy more like conventional B2B SaaS customers.
The care side is growing in the US. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services added 560 procedures to the ambulatory surgical center covered procedures list for 2026, which moves clinical volume out of hospitals and into settings with different purchasing behavior. A product sold into both worlds needs two go-to-market motions, since one message with two logos on the case study fits neither buyer.
Who are the decision makers in B2B healthcare?
B2B healthcare has at least six institutional buyers, and each signs for a different reason. Health systems buy safety and returned capacity, and pharma brand teams buy progress against drug targets. Payers buy cost offsets, employers buy fewer and better vendors, practices buy payback and research groups buy publishable results.
The averages for health systems and payers come from Menlo Ventures' 2025 State of AI in Healthcare, a Morning Consult survey of more than 700 executives run in August and September 2025. The pharma and research figures are ranges from the deals of the practitioners we interviewed, not market averages.
Health systems and hospitals
Health system purchases are committee purchases, and the evaluators are rarely the users. Marcel Alberti, who spent a decade at Philips before co-founding a generative AI company for hospitals, sells to two roles in particular. The CMIO asks whether the product is safe, what it does for the end user and whether the business case holds, along with questions about data quality and integration with the electronic health record.
The CIO asks about fit with the hospital's existing digital infrastructure, data security, privacy and scale. Neither role uses the product, so adoption still has to be won with the clinicians and front-office staff who do. The full sequence a hospital purchase passes, from champion to adoption, is mapped gate by gate in our guide to selling to hospitals.
Menlo's survey found average health system buying cycles of 8.0 months for traditional IT and 6.6 months for AI purchases. AI is now moving faster than other technology investments inside health systems, which suggests that products aimed at an acute pain can beat the sector's reputation for slowness.
The clinician who loves your product may not be in the room when it gets approved. In a 2024 survey of value analysis professionals by GHX and AHVAP, 85% reported less than strong physician engagement in the process, so the evidence file has to argue the clinical case on the champion's behalf.
Pharma and biotech: how pharma partnerships get bought
Pharma is the most structurally unusual buyer in health tech. James Eisner, Head of Growth at TGS and previously in growth at Dream, a regulated sleep-study device company, describes a pharma company as "a collection of companies within the company." Entry runs through a digital health team, often organized by therapeutic area, that gatekeeps new technology but holds no budget.
Budget sits with brand and commercial teams organized by drug and by region. In his experience the digital health team has to pitch your product internally, repeatedly and across geographies, because a deal usually makes financial sense only once three or four regions are on board. At Dream, cycles ran from six months for deals of $50,000 to $100,000 up to five years for contracts worth $10 million a year.
Marketing's job in pharma partnerships is to reduce the champion's personal risk. That means peer-reviewed evidence the champion can defend, internal pitch material they can reuse with brand teams and patience with a sequence that cannot be skipped. By James Eisner's count, roughly fifty pharma companies matter globally, so contacting a brand team around the digital health team burns a relationship that will not come back.
Pharma scientists and digital leads respond to content that is technically credible. For Cradle, an AI protein-design company selling to biopharma, TGS paired the CEO's thought leadership with LinkedIn campaigns aimed at scientists and decision makers at leading pharma companies in Europe and the US. The program produced more than 60 high-potential sales interactions per quarter, and 30% of 350-plus webinar sign-ups came from targeted accounts.
Payers and health plans: what payer marketing has to prove
Payer marketing sells to health insurers and plan sponsors, who buy on cost offsets and member outcomes. Payers move slowly and ask for large datasets before committing. Menlo's 2025 survey found payer buying cycles lengthening from 9.4 months for traditional IT to 11.3 months for AI purchases, the opposite of the provider trend.
Payers running value-based care contracts have a clearer reason to buy a product that lowers the total cost of care, and a sharper tool for checking whether it does. Comparative outcome data, ideally published and measured against usual care, is the entry ticket.
Independent assessments, covered in the evidence section below, increasingly set the terms of that conversation before the vendor arrives. A payer who has read an assessor's verdict on your category will ask why your product differs from the average.
Self-insured employers and benefits consultants
Employers move faster than payers and are tired of vendors. In the Business Group on Health's 2027 Employer Health Care Strategy Survey of 127 large employers, 71% said they were using requests for proposal to get lower pricing and 58% said they were eliminating underperforming vendors, against a median projected cost trend of 9.2% before plan changes.
That consolidation pressure changes the pitch. A new point solution has to show outcome data and explain which existing vendor it replaces or makes cheaper, often to a benefits consultant or navigation platform that sits between the vendor and the employer.
Nemanja Stamenovic describes the wall from the vendor side. A wellness platform can love the demo, but its employer client asks where the ROI proof is, and app store metrics do not answer that question.
Physician practices, clinics and surgery centers
Care-side buyers decide quickly because the person who buys is usually the person who pays. A dental group, a dermatology clinic or an ambulatory surgery center weighs the subscription or device against payback per chair or per procedure. Peer referral, specialty associations and distributors carry more weight here than analyst reports.
The argument is financial and operational, which puts these sales closer to conventional B2B SaaS. Evidence still matters for regulated devices, but the question shifts from whether the product works in a trial population to how fast it pays for itself in a practice like theirs.
Research institutes and academic groups
Research groups are the fastest and most underused route to proof. James Eisner found early-career researchers closing in three to six months at $10,000 to $30,000, or collaborating for free in exchange for data. Larger institutions revert to pharma behavior, with studies, efficacy data and financial justification.
A grant program at Dream showed how far this can go. The company funded two research grants and received roughly two hundred applications, and the 198 applicants who did not win became a warm list of researchers the company could approach with an offer to support their work.
What counts as evidence for healthcare buyers?
B2B healthcare buyers rank evidence in a rough order: peer-reviewed publication first, then a published clinical evaluation, security and quality certifications, named case studies, and finally reputation and peer referral. App store ratings, user counts and the phrase "AI-powered" carry almost no weight, because none of them shows an outcome in a real patient population.
In pharma the top rung is a threshold. "Peer-reviewed, published. That's the must-require for you to even be considered," James Eisner says, because a pharma company will not stand behind a claim of clinical efficacy it cannot defend academically.
Certifications work differently, since they buy the right to begin a sales conversation with an IT team and never the right to win it.
Case studies get read like studies. Dream's customers ran control groups in a conventional sleep laboratory alongside the home device before deciding, and any case study a health tech company publishes will be interrogated by someone with a research background.
Across TGS client work, generic case studies carry less weight every year. Buyers respond to real-world examples and success stories from similar healthcare settings, meaning the same specialty, the same care setting and often the same country.
[[ADRIAN: CONFIRM THE INTERNAL CLAIM ABOVE THAT GENERIC CASE STUDIES CARRY LESS WEIGHT EVERY YEAR]]
Ysabel Camus, Head of Growth at TGS and previously the sole marketer at Fireleaf, a patient data interoperability company, explains why the register differs from other categories: "You can say this is the number one juice brand. You can't say that in the health tech industry because people's lives depend on it." Buyers in the healthcare industry check claims, and an unsupported one costs reputation in a small network.
Why funding does not substitute for evidence
The strongest data point on evidence gaps in the healthcare sector comes from a 2022 analysis by Rock Health and Johns Hopkins researchers, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. It scored 224 US digital health startups focused on prevention, diagnosis or treatment, which together had raised $8.2 billion since 2011, on their registered clinical trials and FDA filings.
The median score was one, 98 companies (44%) scored zero, and the analysis found no correlation between clinical robustness and total funding. The score counts only trials and regulatory filings, which undercounts some forms of operational evidence, but the pattern holds: capital and proof moved independently of each other in this market.
Independent assessors now write the category's defining document
Evidence in health tech is increasingly judged by assessors with no commercial stake. The Peterson Health Technology Institute, launched in 2023 with a $50 million commitment, publishes assessments of digital health categories aimed at the health plans, employers and providers that buy these tools.
Two lessons follow for marketers. A verdict applies to the whole category, including vendors with better data than the average, and the categories that came out well tied the product to an established clinical intervention such as physical therapy or medication management.
In England, the NICE Evidence Standards Framework sorts digital health technologies into tiers by function. System services sit in tier A, and products that inform or drive clinical management, diagnose or treat sit in tier C, with the evidence expected scaling accordingly, so a marketer who knows the tier knows what the buyer's assessor will ask for.
Germany shows what provisional credibility is worth. Of the 74 digital health applications (DiGA) listed for statutory reimbursement between September 2020 and December 2025, only 14 (19%) proved a positive care effect at admission and 16 (22%) had been removed by the end of 2025, according to the GKV-Spitzenverband's 2025 DiGA report.
Provisional listing bought time, and more than a fifth of listed products have since left the directory, several of them for failing to show benefit. The same logic applies to any pilot, trial listing or conditional contract: it defers the evidence question without answering it.
How does B2B healthcare marketing change from stage to stage?
The stage model sorts health tech companies by the proof they hold. Pre-evidence companies build proof, early commercial companies convert it into referenceable customers, and scaling companies turn references into a defensible category position. Each stage changes what marketing spends on, and the quadrant decides how strict the rules inside each stage are.
Stages follow evidence rather than revenue. A company with paying consumer subscribers and no outcome data is pre-evidence for every institutional buyer, and Nemanja Stamenovic's company is exactly that: live, working and paid for by users, and still unable to move a clinic without clinical data.
The matrix is a starting point for a marketing strategy, and it still has to become a strategic plan with owners and dates. The rows tell healthcare companies what to fund this quarter, and the columns tell them how conservative the claims and the proof have to be.
Stage 1: how should a pre-evidence health tech company market itself?
A pre-evidence company should put most of its marketing efforts into producing proof. That means a study plan, a clinical advisor who opens doors, a design-partner site, one referenceable customer and claims kept inside what the evidence supports. Paid campaigns at this stage buy attention that the product cannot yet convert into institutional contracts.
The ratio held across every segment in our interviews, and it explains why so many health tech marketing plans are built backwards. Healthcare marketers design the campaign first and treat the evidence as something to collect later, when every institutional buyer asks for it in the first meeting.
Build the evidence plan before the campaign plan
The evidence plan is the first marketing strategy document a pre-evidence company should write. It starts with market research: which buyer the company will sell to first, which outcome that buyer needs to see, which study or evaluation would show it, and when the result can be published or shared.
Marcel Alberti's company co-developed its product with a hospital and ran a clinical evaluation for two years before commercializing, then published the evaluation. He describes that deferred revenue as the reason adoption works now.
His experience matches the JMIR finding. Funding did not produce evidence on its own, so the companies that outlast independent reviews design studies into the product roadmap from the start.
What a clinical advisor buys you
A clinical advisor changes how the first email is read and helps design the studies that close deals later. "Without a clinician attached, you're a tech guy with an app," Nemanja Stamenovic says, and healthcare professionals do read a clinician's name on a proposal before they read anything else.
His qualification matters as much: "it opens doors, it doesn't close deals. Nobody signs because of an advisor. They sign on evidence, and the advisor's real value is helping you design the studies that produce it."
The requirement scales with clinical proximity. Products that inform, support or replace a clinical decision need clinical credibility attached before anyone engages, while products in billing, administration or infrastructure can be built and sold by purely technical teams, and paying for credibility you do not need is a real cost.
Offer publication instead of product access
Clinicians rarely care about free software, because their careers advance on papers. Nemanja Stamenovic stopped offering clinics free pilots and started offering co-authorship on a clinical case study: "Doctors ignore free tools. They answer to publications." The quality of responses changed immediately.
The diffusion research puts a value on the right investigator. Agha and Molitor, studying 21 new cancer drugs, found that patients in the lead trial investigator's region were initially 36% more likely to receive the new drug, with the advantage converging within four years.
Which key opinion leaders run your study matters as much as whether it happens. A single publication also depreciates, which argues for a pipeline of studies instead of one landmark paper.
Choose the category and the first customer deliberately
Entering an existing category is almost always cheaper than creating one. Marcel Alberti names category selection among the biggest accelerants: "It's easier, of course, if you pick an existing category versus when you're trying to create an entire new category. Which is I think one of the mistakes we also made in the beginning."
Ysabel Camus lived the other side at Fireleaf, whose founders co-authored the FHIR interoperability standard. Creating a category meant defining it, explaining the problem and building the brand at the same time on one budget. If the product fits a category the buyer already recognizes, position it there, even at some cost to differentiation.
The first referenceable customer is worth more than any campaign at this stage. Evidence, referral and case studies all follow from that relationship, so it deserves founder time, a narrowly defined problem and a product that works standalone without waiting for an EHR integration.
Set up a compliant marketing foundation early
The cheapest time to build a compliant marketing stack is before it holds any data. A pre-evidence company should keep claims inside its intended use and keep third-party advertising pixels off pages that discuss conditions. Consent flows should satisfy HIPAA where it applies and state and EU health data rules where it does not, as the compliance section below explains.
When is a company ready for Stage 2?
A company is ready for early commercial work when five conditions hold:
- at least one institutional customer will take a reference call;
- outcome data from real patients or real operations is published or shareable under NDA;
- security documentation is ready for an IT review, for any product touching patient data;
- every public claim has been checked against the intended use;
- a health-economic model states value in the buyer's constraint.
Stage 2: how do you turn early evidence into referenceable customers?
Early commercial companies win by making the first institutional yes cheap for the buyer. That means pilots that ask the institution for almost no staff time, value stated in the resource the buyer lacks, and account-based marketing aimed at a list of buyers small enough to name one by one.
Design pilots where the buyer's effort approaches zero
Capacity-constrained buyers say yes and then do nothing, because every request competes with patient care and a dozen other competing priorities for the same hours. "A clinic director can think your product is great and still have zero staff hours to run anything," Nemanja Stamenovic says.
His team redesigned its pilot so the partner does almost nothing. The app goes to patients free, activation is a single code, and clinicians only have to mention it, while the company carries the recruitment materials and data work.
"Every proposal we send is now built around one question: what's the version of this where the buyer's effort is zero?" He is careful not to claim it converts yet, which is the honest position for any early commercial company.
The same constraint improved his distribution. Instead of integrating with each partner, the team distributes through Apple's offer codes, so no personal data passes between the two companies. "Zero integration, zero PII exchange," he says, and the security review and data processing agreement both leave the critical path.
State value in the buyer's constraint
Hospitals are short of staff and money, so value has to be stated in what they lack. Kaufman Hall's adjusted year-to-date operating margin closed 2025 at 1.3%, and under budget constraints that tight, a product that returns clinician minutes or frees beds speaks to the problem healthcare leaders already rank first. When Marcel Alberti asks healthcare executives about their biggest concern, the answer is staff, with clinicians and nurses burning out under administrative load.
The time-motion literature gives defensible numbers and a boundary. Family physicians in one study spent 5.9 hours of an 11.4-hour workday in the EHR, about 52%, hours that compete directly with patient care. An analysis of roughly 100 million visits found that documentation made up about 24% of physicians' EHR time.
[[ADRIAN: CLICK-CHECK DOI 10.7326/M18-3684 AND SWAP IT IN FOR THE DOCUMENTATION-TIME LINK ABOVE IF IT OPENS]]
A documentation tool therefore addresses about a quarter of the problem, and a CMIO can check that. The credible claim names the quarter precisely and leaves the competitor who claims the whole day to explain the gap.
Procurement is moving the same way. England's value-based procurement guidance for medical technology, published in June 2026, caps whole-life cost at 40% of the scoring weight and gives at least 60% to value domains such as efficiency, patient and staff benefit and social value.
An earlier NHS pilot at Royal United Hospitals Bath reported a 10-minute reduction in operating time and a £30 lower cost per transnasal endoscopy across 109 procedures. That is the shape of value that procurement teams now score.
The same discipline applies to every claim a health tech company makes. Restate each feature as the resource it returns, measured in a setting the buyer recognizes, and leave the number blank until the evidence fills it.
Health-economic models and total cost of ownership calculators therefore belong in the marketing plan, published early, instead of sitting in a sales folder until late-stage calls. Finance teams and value analysis committees read for those numbers first, and a submission that leads with clinical outcomes alone answers a question they have already moved past.
Run account-based marketing on a list you can name
When a market holds a few hundred potential customers, demand generation and account-based marketing become the same activity. Every campaign aims at accounts you can list, and targeting specific accounts in a hospital usually means targeting the department that will use the product, with its own persona, budget holder and approver.
"If I look at a client we work with, which is often B2B, complex industries, long sales cycles, enterprise deals. They potentially have like a few hundred customers in Europe. Then you could argue that everything you do on the demand gen side actually is ABM."
Technical buyers are reachable this way. In TGS's account-based work for hospital-facing AI companies, one program produced more meetings than the client's sales team could work through, and for Rapid Circle, a Microsoft partner selling cloud and AI services to enterprises, a nine-month program influenced or drove more than ten enterprise deals.
[[ADRIAN: KEEP, CUT OR REWORD THE UNNAMED ABM RESULT ABOVE (IT TRACES TO THE UNPUBLISHED HEALTHSAGE CASE)]]
A list this short still needs tiers. The account-based marketing model reserves one-to-one plays for the few high value accounts whose deal size justifies them, and runs clustered plays for the rest.
Account-based programs in healthcare fail when marketing runs them alone. The sales reps who own the relationships need the engagement data as it arrives, and the champion inside each account needs material built for an internal pitch: a one-page business case, the security documentation and an evidence summary written for a finance reader.
Avoid pilot purgatory
A pilot without agreed success criteria and a purchase path is a free trial with extra paperwork. Before any pilot starts, both sides should agree in writing on the points below.
A pilot that ends three weeks after the annual budget has been locked produces a success story and no contract. Work backward from the budget date when setting the pilot length. For hospital pilots, the selling to hospitals guide sets out what the pilot has to produce for each gate.
When is a company ready for Stage 3?
A company is ready to scale its marketing when four signals appear together: three or more reference sites in similar healthcare settings, account-based programs whose cost per opportunity is falling, prospects asking to speak with existing customers before a first demo, and a sales cycle that has become predictable within a range.
Stage 3: what changes when a health tech company scales?
Scaling companies shift from proving the product works to defending how it compares. Marketing at this stage publishes comparative outcomes before an assessor does, states the commercial benefit plainly and cuts the time assets spend in review. It also audits the data exposure that grew along with the marketing stack.
Say the commercial thing
Health tech companies often hide what they do for the buyer. Dream's proposition was that a hospital or pharma company could get sleep laboratory results at roughly half the cost from patients' own homes. The message still defaulted to improving patient outcomes and patient engagement, because saying the commercial part felt too blunt.
A pharma brand team is measured on whether the drug hits its number. "They care like, can I do this for cheaper or can I sell more of my drug? That's all that matters in the end," James Eisner says.
Keep the patient outcomes, because they are real and expected, then state the commercial result in the same breath.
Publish comparative outcomes before an assessor does
In several categories, the most consequential document about a company was written by someone with no commercial relationship to it. A scaling company should publish its comparative outcomes, against usual care and against named alternatives where possible, before an assessor frames them.
The metric has to be the one that decides survival. Kamran and colleagues, evaluating a widely deployed sepsis model at the University of Michigan across 77,582 hospitalizations, found its discrimination dropped to an AUROC of 0.47 once predictions made after clinicians had recognized sepsis were excluded. Before recognition, 95% of its alerts concerned patients who never developed sepsis during their stay.
Nemanja Stamenovic applies the same test to his own category: "A model that warns you every second day and is wrong half the time gets deleted within a week, whatever its 'accuracy' claims." Buyers who have lived through alert fatigue already ask about false positives, so know your deployed false positive rate and decide whether to publish it before a prospect asks.
Spend trust carefully
Health tech buyers extend trust ahead of proof because they have to, and a vendor that spends it without delivering makes the next vendor's job harder. Olive AI raised $902 million and reached a $4 billion valuation promising hospital administrative savings, then sold its main business units to Waystar and Humata Health and wound down in October 2023.
The narrower lesson for marketing concerns claims at scale. A scaling company runs more campaigns, more sales reps and more partner pages, and every one of them can drift past what the evidence supports unless someone owns the claims register.
Build a position analysts and assessors recognize
At scale, category position starts to come from third parties. KLAS Research, which rates health IT vendors from interviews with provider organizations, reported in 2018 that each point of customer satisfaction raised a vendor's likelihood of being selected by 1.3 percentage points. For health IT, customer experience is a marketing input, because it is what the analyst interviews measure.
How does healthcare marketing compliance shape the marketing stack?
Healthcare marketing compliance comes down to two questions: what your words make your product, and where your website's data goes. Claims decide regulatory status and review burden. Tracking tools, forms and analytics decide whether protected health information or consumer health data leaves your control, which is where recent enforcement and class actions have concentrated.
Claims and intended use
Every public claim either stays inside the product's intended use or quietly changes it. Regulatory compliance for marketing claims in the US runs through FDA's device definitions and its wellness and decision support policies, and for cleared devices through the intended use on the clearance itself (see medical device marketing). In the EU the Medical Device Regulation ties claims to the intended purpose in the technical file, and the regulation has already reshaped portfolios.
In the European Commission's second availability survey, with data to October 2024, 78 of 161 responding medical device manufacturers (48%) said they had stopped producing, marketing or supplying some devices to the EU market since 2021. A marketing plan built around a portfolio that has lost part of its legal basis is a common and expensive problem.
Tracking pixels, analytics and the HHS bulletin
Tracking technology has become a live source of healthcare marketing liability. The US Department of Health and Human Services issued a bulletin on online tracking technologies in December 2022 and revised it in March 2024.
In June 2024 a federal court in American Hospital Association v. Becerra vacated the part covering unauthenticated public pages, and HHS dropped its appeal that August.
For healthcare organizations covered by HIPAA, the guidance on patient portals and logged-in apps still stands, and private litigation did not wait for regulators. Advocate Aurora Health settled a pixel class action for $12.225 million, with final approval in July 2024, and Novant Health settled for $6.6 million the same year. Sutter Health agreed to $21.5 million in 2025, and Wellstar Health System proposed a $4.25 million settlement in July 2026.
A Meta pixel or a Google Analytics tag on a symptom page or a portal login can send health context and user behavior to an advertising platform. Most health tech marketing stacks were assembled before anyone treated that as a legal exposure, so the audit belongs on the marketing team's list as well as legal's.
Health data outside HIPAA
HIPAA compliance covers only covered entities and their business associates, and many health apps are neither. The Federal Trade Commission's amended Health Breach Notification Rule, effective July 29, 2024, applies to health apps and similar technologies outside HIPAA and treats an unauthorized disclosure as a breach.
The FTC had already acted. GoodRx agreed to pay a $1.5 million civil penalty in February 2023 in the first case under the rule, and a month later BetterHelp agreed to pay $7.8 million for consumer refunds over sharing health data for advertising.
States added their own rules. Washington's My Health My Data Act, in force since March 31, 2024, requires consent to collect consumer health data and separate consent to share it, and it gives consumers a private right of action. Nevada and Connecticut have similar laws enforced by their attorneys general.
In the EU, Article 9 of the GDPR treats data concerning health as a special category whose processing is prohibited unless explicit consent or another listed condition applies. For marketing, that covers intent signals such as a visit to a condition page tied to an identifiable person.
Review latency is a compliance cost too
Compliance reviews slow campaigns, and the delay compounds across a program. At the regulated end every asset passes medical, legal and regulatory review in sequence, and even unregulated companies often wait for data or engineering teams to validate content before it goes live.
Measure the days each standard asset spends in review. Anything beyond a few weeks is a process to redesign, and most compliance concerns get resolved faster when reviewers see a claims register instead of each asset cold.
Which channels work for B2B healthcare marketing?
Channel choice in B2B healthcare marketing follows the target audience's professional identity. Technical and administrative buyers, such as CMIOs, CIOs and pharma digital health teams, are reachable on LinkedIn and through account-based programs. Practicing clinicians are reached through specialty associations, their meetings and journals, and colleagues they already trust.
LinkedIn and account-based programs for technical buyers
CMIOs, in Marcel Alberti's description, are doctors who spend roughly half their working time on technology, and CIOs are technologists by definition. "They're all on LinkedIn," he says of his buyers.
His conclusion is useful for anyone worried about reach: "You also don't need to target everyone. Our audience is there."
Pharma digital health teams and brand teams are reachable on the same platform, and the message should be segmented by team. Direct approaches and meeting invitations go to the digital health team, while brand teams get awareness only until the digital health team brings you in.
Associations, meetings and peers for practicing clinicians
Many clinicians stay off LinkedIn on purpose. "A lot of them try to purposely stay off of it. Because sometimes you don't want your patients being able to figure out who you are, where you came from, how to find you, in case things go wrong," James Eisner says.
Absence from LinkedIn is a professional safety decision for many doctors, and no budget corrects for a buyer who is not on the platform.
Healthcare professionals gather in specialty associations, closed industry forums and annual meetings, and every specialty has its own. Doctors do use professional networks built for them: Doximity reports that more than 85% of US physicians are members. Association sponsorship often includes access to the membership mailing list, which is usually the asset worth paying for.
Peers carry the decision. A 2018 PLOS One study of 11,958 Pennsylvania physicians found that adoption by peers, especially those who shared patients, strongly influenced whether a physician adopted a new drug. The healthcare community in each country is small, so a clinician willing to take a call from a peer does more than any campaign.
Events: acceleration for deals already moving
Industry events were the highest-rated channel across our interviews, with one qualification about what they now do. Ysabel Camus found at Fireleaf that "you had to be there if you wanted to be known in the industry," because healthcare conferences such as HIMSS in the US or DMEA in Germany are where industry conversations happen and where the field shares knowledge with itself.
Lead generation has moved to cheaper digital channels. What the room delivers is acceleration of deals already in motion and podium time for your clinical voices, so the return from industry events sits in the account work before the event and the follow-up after it.
Early-stage founders face a trap here. Nemanja Stamenovic left one startup conference with seven or eight interested contacts and found that only one was a real opportunity: "The rest were consultants and agencies selling services to founders." Count only the contacts who could buy.
Search, when the category already has a name
Search captures demand that already has language and cannot manufacture a category nobody knows to look for. "SEO was an uphill battle for them because there was such low awareness about FHIR itself that there was just not a lot of search volume around it," Ysabel Camus says of Fireleaf.
The diagnostic question is whether your target audience has a phrase for the problem you solve. If it does, search and well-built landing pages are among the most durable organic channels a B2B health tech company has, and the relevant keywords will mirror how buyers describe the problem. If the phrase is yours alone, the budget belongs elsewhere until the market catches up.
Patients behave differently, which matters for hybrid companies. In a 2022 national survey, 58.5% of US adults said they had used the internet to look for health or medical information in the past year, so consumer content reaches a broader audience through search even where institutional search demand barely exists.
Content healthcare buyers trust
Healthcare buyers trust content that shows the work behind a claim. In the 2025 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, 64% of hidden decision makers agreed that thought leadership is a more trustworthy basis for judging capabilities than marketing materials and product sheets.
A health tech content strategy follows from the buying group, because relevant content for one stakeholder is rarely relevant for the next. Plan assets per role, with publication summaries written for non-clinical readers, case studies with the data left in, and commentary from named clinicians on emerging trends and industry trends in their specialty.
Two quieter channels round out the mix. Cold email to named decision makers returned roughly 10% response rates for both Nemanja Stamenovic and James Eisner, and specialist trade press carries weight in national markets. In James Eisner's experience, open platforms such as Reddit and X did little for regulated audiences anywhere in the healthcare space.
Long cycles also need lead nurturing that reaches multiple stakeholders over months. Marketing automation tools help when they sequence proof by role, and they hurt when they push the same nurture track at a clinician, a CIO and a finance lead.
How do you measure B2B healthcare marketing over long sales cycles?
Measure B2B healthcare marketing with leading indicators matched to the company's stage, and hold marketing and sales to one shared pipeline number. Closed revenue arrives too late to steer a program whose sales cycles run six to eighteen months, so the early signals have to be defined before any campaign launches.
Budget timing belongs in the measurement plan. For larger healthcare deals, next-year budgets are often decided in the fourth quarter, frequently in November for medical and healthcare buyers, which makes the last quarter a time to move existing opportunities through the sales funnel instead of filling the top of it.
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Performance data from ad platforms and conversion rates on web forms matter less in B2B healthcare sales than in volume B2B, because a few accounts decide the year. Track engagement by account and by role, and treat qualified leads as a checkpoint on the way to an opportunity, never as the goal.
Why health tech marketing gets under-resourced
Marketing in health tech is often treated as the team that prints the event flyers. Ysabel Camus rarely saw marketing professionals work closely with sales in the sector, and Marcel Alberti found the same gap inside a Philips business unit that turned over a billion euros with five or six marketers: "Even for Philips, we had a disconnect between sales and marketing."
A ten-person health IT company and a billion-euro business line arrived at the same arrangement, which suggests company size is not the cause. The same organizational pattern shows up in manufacturing marketing, though health tech's credibility bar blocks many of the borrowed SaaS tactics that work there.
The fix starts with strategic alignment on one number. Once marketing and sales share a pipeline figure, marketing goals stop being measured in impressions, and sales and marketing alignment becomes a weekly operating habit instead of an annual offsite. The same shared number is what earns marketing efforts a seat in budget conversations.
How does B2B healthcare marketing differ between the US and Europe?
The US sells into large private systems through committees, group purchasing and payer contracts, with privacy split across HIPAA, the FTC and state laws. Europe sells into public systems through tenders and national assessment bodies under GDPR, fragmented by country and region. Evidence travels between the two, while procurement, claims and channels usually have to be rebuilt.
European public contracts are awarded on the most economically advantageous tender under Directive 2014/24/EU, judged on price or cost, including life-cycle costing, and possibly on the best price-quality ratio. England's value-based procurement guidance and the NHS Digital Technology Assessment Criteria, revised in February 2026 with a quarter fewer questions, add national layers on top.
Assessment is becoming European too. The EU Health Technology Assessment Regulation has applied since January 12, 2025, and the first selections of high-risk medical devices for joint clinical assessment are planned for 2026. Germany's DiGA route offers a 12-month provisional listing, extendable to 24, while the evidence is gathered.
Europe's markets bring unique challenges of their own, starting with size. "If you think of it in the Netherlands, it's just six universities where all doctors go to," Marcel Alberti says. "So everyone knows everyone." Payment terms differ too: Spanish public health services took an average of 66 days to pay medtech suppliers at the end of 2024, according to Fenin, the Spanish medtech industry association.
Treat each new country as a new buyer map with its own procurement rules, assessors and privacy regime. Budget for the 12 to 24 months that market expansion usually needs to show traction, and write a separate marketing strategy for each market instead of translating the home-market one.
Where this breaks down
The evidence-first sequence is the right default for institutional sales, and it has real limits. It moves too slowly for low-risk workflow tools whose adoption outruns the literature, it misreads consumer and cash-pay motions, and it can turn into a justification for caution that buyers themselves are abandoning. Each case below brings unique challenges, and each is a reason to bend the model rather than drop it.
- Low-risk workflow tools can outrun their evidence. Within 10 weeks of enabling ambient AI scribes in October 2023, The Permanente Medical Group saw 3,442 physicians use them across 303,266 encounters, and by the end of 2024, 7,260 physicians had used them in 2.58 million encounters. A 2025 evaluation of 13 publications found documentation time savings of 0.7 to 2.1 minutes per encounter, mostly among self-selected users.
- Consumer and cash-pay motions run on the patient's clock. A company selling direct to patients meets institutional evidence gates later, while its privacy exposure arrives sooner.
- The flagship evidence studies measure a narrow kind of proof. The JMIR robustness score counts registered trials and FDA filings only, so it undercounts the operational and real-world evidence that care-delivery companies produce.
- Caution can become an excuse. Marcel Alberti argues that caution in the healthcare industry "slows down a lot of good innovation," and that regulation is "also often used as an excuse to slow things down." Treat regulatory requirements as fixed and institutional hesitation as movable, because evidence, referral and a lower personal risk for the buyer all move it.
- Evidence programs cost runway. A company with twelve months of cash cannot always fund a two-year evaluation, and the honest alternative is a design-partner arrangement that produces operational evidence first, with a clinical study planned for the next funding round.
- An agency cannot produce your evidence. TGS works alongside clinical and regulatory teams on positioning, channels and pipeline, while clinical studies, regulatory submissions and legal review belong with specialists.
For care-side tools that relieve an acute burden, operational evidence and utilization data can carry the first sale. Report utilization alongside deployment, because a buyer who has watched a rollout stall knows the difference between a tool that is enabled and a tool that is used.
What to do next
Decide your stage by the proof you hold, then apply the rules of your quadrant, because the same tactic can be right for a scaling care-side company and wasteful for a pre-evidence clinical AI vendor. The conditions below map the most common starting points to the first move worth funding this quarter.
- If you have no outcome data yet, write the evidence plan before the campaign plan, attach a clinical advisor for access and offer co-authorship instead of free access.
- If you have early results but no reference site, design a zero-effort pilot tied to the buyer's budget date, and publish the health-economic model.
- If you sell to pharma, enter through the digital health team, build their internal pitch for them and never go around them to a brand team.
- If you sell to payers or employers, publish comparative outcome data and explain which existing vendor you replace.
- If your product informs a clinical decision, review every public claim against intended use before it runs.
- If your marketing stack predates your privacy review, audit pixels and analytics tags on condition pages, booking flows and portals before the next campaign.
Frequently asked questions
Are hospitals B2B or B2C?
Hospitals are both. They deliver care to patients and market services to them, which is B2C provider marketing, and they buy technology, devices and services from vendors, which makes them B2B buyers. For a health tech company the hospital is almost always a B2B customer that decides through committees, security review and budget cycles.
Is pharma marketing B2B or B2C?
Pharma marketing covers three motions. Direct-to-consumer advertising reaches patients, and marketing to prescribers reaches healthcare professionals under strict promotional rules. When pharma buys technology from a health tech vendor, the relationship is B2B: a digital health team evaluates the product, while brand teams organized by drug and region hold the budget.
What is an example of B2B marketing in healthcare?
A clinical AI company running an account-based program aimed at CMIOs and CIOs at forty named health systems is a typical example. So is a biotech software firm reaching pharma scientists through LinkedIn thought leadership and webinars, or a practice management vendor selling to dental groups through a specialty association and peer referral.
What are the 5 P's of healthcare marketing?
No authoritative standard exists. Agencies use two versions: the classic four Ps of product, price, place and promotion plus people, or a stakeholder list of patients, physicians, payers, policymakers and professionals. For B2B health tech the stakeholder version is more useful, because each group is a different target audience needing different proof.
What is the rule of 7 in B2B marketing?
The rule of 7 says a buyer needs about seven exposures to a message before acting. It is a folk heuristic popularized in marketing books, not a measured result, and advertising research has argued that as few as three exposures can be enough. In B2B healthcare, which stakeholder sees which proof matters more than the count.
How long is the B2B healthcare sales cycle?
It depends on the buyer. A 2025 Menlo Ventures survey found average health system buying cycles of 8.0 months for traditional IT and 6.6 months for AI, with payers at 11.3 months for AI. Pharma deals run from six months to five years, while private practices often decide within weeks.
How much should a health tech company spend on marketing?
No reliable benchmark exists for healthcare companies specifically. Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey of 401 CMOs across industries put average marketing budgets at 7.8% of company revenue. Stage matters more than a percentage: pre-evidence companies should fund studies and advisors first, and scaling companies can fund account-based programs and events.
Can a wellness app make health claims without FDA clearance?
It can make general wellness claims, such as supporting sleep or fitness. Under FDA's January 2026 guidance, a product that estimates physiologic values stops being a general wellness product if its labeling, advertising or functionality references specific diseases or diagnostic thresholds. The wording of the claim decides the regulatory status.
Does HIPAA apply to a health tech company's marketing?
HIPAA applies when the company is a covered entity, such as healthcare providers and health plans, or a business associate handling protected health information for one. Many consumer health apps fall outside HIPAA and are covered instead by the FTC's Health Breach Notification Rule and state laws such as Washington's My Health My Data Act.
Does a health tech startup need a clinical advisor?
A startup needs one if its product informs, supports or replaces a clinical decision, because clinicians engage with a team that has a clinician attached. An advisor opens doors but does not close deals. Products in billing, administration or infrastructure can be sold by technical teams without one.
The data behind this article
This guide builds on our report on health tech marketing, based on six practitioner interviews conducted in 2026 across regulated devices, pharma, hospital AI, health IT, biotech and a consumer health subscription business crossing into institutional sales. The interview findings were checked against data from regulators, independent assessors and peer-reviewed journals, and every figure cited here links to its primary source.
