What Makes a Healthtech Story Newsworthy? The Evidence and Outcomes I Look for in Healthcare PR
One of the challenges with healthcare and healthtech PR is that the people closest to a project don’t always realise which parts of it are most interesting.
I’ve sat in plenty of calls where a client has spent ten minutes explaining the technology, the implementation or a new feature before mentioning almost in passing that it has helped reduce hospital admissions, saved thousands of clinical hours or changed the way patients are being cared for.
That’s normally the point where I start asking a lot more questions! It's also one of my favourite parts of the job.
Healthcare PR is full of important stories, but finding them often means getting past what an organisation does and understanding what has actually changed as a result. If you’re a healthtech company working with the NHS, telling me that your platform has been deployed across an integrated care system is useful. Telling me what happened to patients, clinicians and services after it was deployed is considerably more interesting.
Over the years I’ve worked on healthcare stories involving reductions in A&E attendances and hospital admissions, changes in antibiotic prescribing, thousands of hours of staff time saved, significant financial savings and technology being used at scale across NHS organisations. The numbers can be impressive, but good healthcare PR isn't simply about finding the biggest percentage and putting it in a headline.
So what am I actually looking for when I’m trying to find the story?
What makes a healthtech case study newsworthy?
The first thing I want to understand is the problem. What was happening before the technology or service was introduced? Who was affected? Why did something need to change? If we can't explain that clearly, the outcome has very little context.
This is particularly important in healthtech because it’s very easy to begin with the product. The company understandably wants to talk about its technology, but a journalist is much more likely to be interested in the problem it is helping to solve.
Take something like avoidable hospital admissions. The interesting story isn't that a new digital platform has been implemented. It’s that a particular group of patients were repeatedly ending up in hospital, an NHS organisation changed the way it identified or supported them, and fewer people subsequently needed hospital care.
The technology matters, but it sits within the story rather than being the entire story.
Which healthcare outcomes make the strongest PR stories?
There isn't one magic metric. It depends entirely on what the project was designed to achieve, but there are several things I tend to listen for when I'm interviewing a healthcare organisation or NHS customer.
Reductions in A&E attendances and hospital admissions can obviously be powerful. So can reductions in prescribing, shorter waits, earlier interventions, improvements in patient outcomes, increased uptake of a service, better identification of risk, clinical time released and financial savings.
Some of the healthcare case studies I've worked on have produced substantial results. I've worked with NHS organisations where new approaches have been associated with significant reductions in emergency department attendance and admissions, and with programmes able to quantify hundreds of thousands of pounds in avoided bed costs. More recently, I've been working on a Greater Manchester case study involving a GP practice that achieved a 15% reduction in antibiotic prescribing using real-time information.
But I don't automatically assume that the largest number is the headline.
A percentage only becomes meaningful when we understand what it represents. How many patients were involved? Over what period? What was measured? What else was happening at the time? Is the organisation comfortable attributing the change to the intervention, or should we say it contributed to it?
Healthcare PR needs that discipline. A more cautious claim that can be properly evidenced is worth far more than a spectacular one that falls apart when a journalist starts asking questions...
Why does the NHS voice matter so much in healthtech PR?
If you're a healthtech supplier with a successful NHS deployment, one of the most valuable things you can have is an NHS customer willing to talk about it.
A supplier saying its technology has transformed a service is marketing. A clinician, programme lead or NHS executive explaining what changed, what they observed and why it mattered gives the story independent credibility.
That's why, when I'm developing a healthtech case study, I don't only want a quote approving the finished copy. Where possible, I want to speak to the people involved. The best detail often emerges during those conversations: what staff were struggling with beforehand, what surprised them, how colleagues responded, what changed in day-to-day practice and what they would tell another NHS organisation considering the same approach.
Those details are often much more persuasive than yet another carefully polished statement about being “delighted with the partnership”.
One example was a data and technology-led fuel poverty programme in Cheshire and Merseyside that I worked on. The data demonstrated the scale of the problem, but some of the most powerful material came from speaking to one of the lead nurses involved in the programme. She had seen first-hand what fuel poverty meant for vulnerable people and was deeply affected by some of the situations she encountered. Bringing that clinical, human perspective alongside the evidence helped turn what could have been a fairly technical story about data into a much wider story about poverty and health, ultimately securing coverage in Forbes.
They also make the story human. Healthcare technology can become very abstract very quickly. Ultimately, we're talking about people trying to deliver better care to other people. The strongest stories don't lose sight of that.
Should healthtech companies talk about financial savings?
Yes, if they can substantiate them.
Cost is an unavoidable part of the conversation about healthcare. NHS organisations are under enormous financial pressure, so evidence that a project can reduce avoidable activity, release staff capacity or use resources differently can be highly relevant.
I've worked with programmes that have been able to quantify significant savings and hundreds of thousands of staff hours released. Those numbers immediately make people pay attention, but I still want to understand exactly how they were calculated.
Was it a cash-releasing saving or an avoided cost? Is it an estimate? What assumptions sit behind it? Is it better described as capacity released rather than money saved?
Those distinctions may sound rather technical, but they matter. Healthcare journalists know this territory and so do NHS leaders. Credibility is far more important than squeezing the biggest possible number into a press release.
Can a healthtech contract win be newsworthy?
Yes, although not every contract needs a standalone press release.
A significant new NHS customer, expansion into another region, a competitive procurement win or a group of organisations adopting the same technology can all be useful stories, particularly for healthcare, technology and business publications.
Again, though, I want to know what the contract tells us beyond the fact that somebody has bought something. Does it demonstrate increasing demand for a particular approach? Is the technology moving into a new area of care? Is an existing customer expanding its use? Are several NHS organisations collaborating in a new way?
Contract announcements are also useful pieces in a much bigger picture. One new customer might be a short news story. A succession of wins over 12 months might give us a completely different story about growth, adoption or a changing market.
PR becomes much more effective when those individual announcements are connected rather than treated as unrelated events.
What if you don't have new research, results or a contract to announce?
You don't need a new case study every month to have something worthwhile to say.
Some of my work involves helping healthcare organisations and their experts contribute to conversations that are already happening. That might mean responding to a developing health story, offering expert commentary to a journalist or writing a thought-leadership piece about an issue the organisation understands particularly well.
I've been doing exactly that recently around premenstrual dysphoric disorder, or PMDD. Rather than simply talking about the launch of a professional education programme, we've been looking at the wider media conversation: what is being reported about PMDD, which questions journalists and patients are asking, where there may be misunderstanding and where credible clinical or educational expertise can add something useful.
The important word there is useful.
Reactive PR shouldn't mean finding a trending health story and desperately trying to attach your company to it. I want to know whether the organisation has genuine expertise, whether its spokesperson can add something that isn't already being said and whether contributing would help the journalist and their audience understand the issue better.
Sometimes the right answer is not to comment at all.
What makes a good healthcare thought-leadership article?
The same principle applies to thought leadership. Having 'thought leader' in somebody's LinkedIn biography doesn't make them one, and neither does publishing an article containing five predictions everybody else in the industry could have written.
The strongest healthcare thought leadership usually comes from experience. What are clinicians repeatedly struggling with? What has your organisation learned from implementing something across several NHS sites? What are people getting wrong about a particular issue? What does the data tell you that isn't being discussed enough? What would you change?
I also think specificity matters enormously. 'Digital transformation will improve healthcare' tells us very little. Explaining why a particular part of an NHS workflow is failing, what you've seen happen in practice and what could realistically improve it gives people something worth reading.
You don't have to reveal confidential information or criticise customers to have an opinion. You do need to say something.
How do you turn complicated healthcare work into a story people will read?
This is probably one of the most important parts of healthcare PR.
Healthtech businesses inevitably develop their own language. NHS organisations have plenty of it too. Put the two together and you can end up with a technically accurate description that almost nobody outside the project wants to read.
My test is whether I can explain the story to somebody intelligent who knows nothing about the project without losing what makes it important.
That doesn't mean dumbing down healthcare. It means being clear.
If a piece of technology helps clinicians identify deteriorating patients earlier, say that. If sharing information means somebody doesn't have to tell their story five times to five different services, explain it. If a new approach means fewer frail patients are being taken to A&E unnecessarily, that's something people understand.
Once we've established that, we can explain how the technology helped make it possible.
What do journalists need from a healthcare story?
Good evidence helps enormously, but journalists also need access to people.
A strong healthcare story will ideally have somebody who can explain the wider issue, somebody close to the implementation and, where appropriate and possible, a patient perspective. It needs accurate data, clear explanations and spokespeople who are comfortable answering questions rather than simply repeating an approved corporate message.
Timing matters too. A fantastic piece of research that takes three months to approve can miss its moment entirely. If an organisation wants to become part of the wider healthcare conversation, it needs a sensible process for agreeing commentary and making experts available while the subject is still news.
That doesn't mean sacrificing governance or accuracy for speed. Particularly in health communications, getting it right matters. It means doing some of the preparation before the journalist calls.
Does online healthcare PR have value beyond publication day?
Very much so!
We tend to celebrate coverage when it appears, particularly when it's in a publication a client has wanted to reach for a long time. But one of the biggest changes in PR over my career has been the lifespan of that coverage.
A good online article doesn't disappear when tomorrow's newspaper arrives. It can remain searchable for years. It can be found by a prospective NHS customer researching a supplier, shared by the sales team, linked to from a website, resurfaced on social media and referenced in future coverage.
Increasingly, people are also using AI tools to research companies, technologies and healthcare topics. Nobody can guarantee that a particular media article will result in a company being mentioned by ChatGPT or another AI system, and I wouldn't trust a PR or SEO company that claimed otherwise. What organisations can do is make sure there is a substantial body of accurate, credible information about their work available online, including independent coverage from respected publications.
That makes sustained PR much more valuable than chasing a burst of publicity and then disappearing for six months. Over time, case studies, expert commentary, interviews, features and news coverage build a much fuller picture of an organisation, its people and the work it is doing.
So what makes a healthcare story worth telling?
For me, it usually comes back to a few fairly simple questions. What was the problem? What changed? What evidence do we have? Who benefited? Can we prove it? And why should somebody outside the organisation care?
If you can answer those questions, there's a good chance there's a story.
And if you can't answer them yet, that doesn't necessarily mean there isn't one. Some of the best healthcare stories I've worked on have emerged from conversations where the client initially thought they had very little to say. Once you start asking about patients, clinicians, outcomes and what has actually changed on the ground, the interesting part often appears.
That's a large part of what I do.
Bell Health Communications provides PR and communications support for healthcare, healthtech and NHS-facing organisations. I work with businesses to uncover strong stories, turn evidence and outcomes into clear communications, develop case studies and thought leadership, and secure meaningful media coverage. If you know your organisation is doing good work but you're not quite sure how to tell the story, I'd be very happy to have a conversation.
Comments