Why Do People in Healthcare Write Like That?
Short answer: lawyers.
In my day job, I often pitch myself as a “specialist in highly regulated industries” like banking and insurance. It’s my job to toe the line between “things that sound like a real person would say them” and “things that won’t get us sued.”
Sometimes this balancing act results in silly situations, like the bank whose lawyers wouldn’t let their marketing team say that the goal of investing is to make more money, because sometimes when you invest, you lose money. Other times, the rules make perfect sense when you understand the industry well—which most of the customers don’t.
Take healthcare, for instance. Not only is there an imbalance in medical knowledge between doctors and patients; everything about American health insurance and billing is a big black box to nearly everyone involved, including the hospital that’s charging you.
As a writer working in healthcare right now, I can tell you this is a lose-lose situation. But I do have some insider intel.
So if you’ve ever looked closely at a hospital’s website, a letter from your insurance company or a telehealth ad and thought, “What on earth are they talking about?” here’s what’s going on.
We can’t say “doctor” anymore
There’s a shortage of doctors in the US right now for both COVID-related and non-COVID-related reasons (the aging population requires more care, essentially, thanks Boomers). Since it takes a long time to train more doctors, in the meantime, someone else has been helping out.
The industry term for these folks is “advanced practice providers” (or APPs): a variety of medical professionals including nurse practitioners, registered nurses, and physician assistants. APPs can do a lot of the same things doctors can, from physical exams to writing prescriptions, and since it’s a lot faster to become one—only two years of grad school vs. four of med school plus three in residency for doctors—they’re a very useful resource for filling in care gaps right now.
But they didn’t go to med school, they don’t have medical doctorates, and legally, they are not doctors. If you’re a healthcare system or business that uses APPs to serve patients, your lawyers will not let you make blanket claims about the “doctors” patients will see. Nor will the APPs themselves; in my experience they’re quite sensitive to being mislabeled as doctors professionally.
Where does that leave us? Using unfriendly terms like “clinician” or “medical provider,” or convoluted phrasing like “doctors, nurses and mental health professionals” to try to convey the whole category of doctor+.
As a writer who has to abide by these rules, it’s my hope that as more people start seeing APPs as their regular healthcare providers, they’ll get used to the new verbiage. I could be deluding myself, though.
We can’t guarantee we take your insurance
Look, no one understands the American health insurance system, and that includes healthcare practices. Even the big hospital systems who accept pretty much every form of insurance still have random little exceptions which are extremely difficult if not impossible to list out.
As a result, medical offices and businesses often can’t confirm they take your insurance at all until they collect your individual plan information and run it through their system. Unless and until they do that, you’ll most likely see language like “major insurers accepted” and “reach out to your insurance provider to confirm your coverage.”
Of course, insurance websites are also notorious for those coverage details being out of date, so that might not get you anywhere.
I’m sorry. Support universal healthcare.
We definitely can’t tell you that you’ll get better
This one feels like it should be common sense, right? Not all diseases are curable. While the goal of healthcare is to make you feel better, it doesn’t always work, and that fact doesn’t automatically turn unsuccessful medical interventions into malpractice.
Unfortunately, we’re a country that loves suing people for anything and everything, and thus healthcare marketers are not allowed to make promises we can’t keep. That’s why you’ll see tons of fluffy language around “supporting your health” or “managing your chronic conditions.”
“Chronic conditions” is another industry term I hate, by the way, because lots of people who it technically applies to don’t think of themselves as having a medical condition at all. But we need a word that groups experiences as disparate as high blood pressure, cancer, long COVID, and depression into one bucket, with the common theme that we don’t know if we can cure you so we’re just going to try to keep you from getting any worse.
We can’t act like we know anything about you, even though we absolutely do
My good old friend HIPAA now rears its ugly head. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 is a federal law that prevents the healthcare providers and insurers who have your personal health information from misusing it.
There are some limited exceptions where they’re allowed to share your information—including with law enforcement, in case you were wondering about that news story going around last month about pharmacies sharing records with the police without a warrant—but for the most part HIPAA keeps your data pretty safe. Believe me, I’ve had to take enough legally mandated trainings on it to know.
And yes, the idea of a health system that knows your whole medical record using that information to market more products and services to you feels kind of icky, right? On the other hand, trying to comply with HIPAA in healthcare marketing can also lead you into weird situations where you can’t acknowledge having information about the patient that you absolutely do have, and the patient knows it—like a letter I received from my health insurance yesterday letting me know that if I’m over 45, a colonoscopy might be a good idea, when they obviously know exactly how old I am (spoiler alert: not anywhere near 45).
I’ve had to write emails about pediatric care that couldn’t acknowledge if the recipient had a child, or about your doctor (excuse me, medical provider) that couldn’t even include that you have a provider! This is honestly why most of the time, all you get is an alert saying there’s a message for you waiting in a secure portal that you have to log in to, so we don’t have to play these games.
When that’s not the case, though, you end up reading copy that feels weirdly generic and inhuman. That’s actually on purpose, because anything more personal would be an invasion of your privacy.
Funny how that works, isn’t it?
And there you have it: medical copywriting in a nutshell. Have you read any healthcare marketing lately that was particularly weird? I’d love to hear about it.