What Other Industries Can Teach Healthcare About Trust and Growth

Patients do not experience healthcare in isolation. Their expectations are shaped by every other part of their lives—from the speed of a fintech transaction to the ease of online shopping and the proactive communication of a hotel—and the digital healthcare experience is lagging behind. Healthcare leaders may be able to glean key insights from other industries, but which lessons are worth borrowing, and where should they draw the line?

In healthcare, patients make decisions that can be emotionally charged, financially consequential and deeply personal, with privacy, clinical judgment and safety influencing every interaction. A tactic that drives conversion in retail can have a very different meaning when applied to someone deciding when and where to seek care. For leaders, the key is to identify what makes other industries’ experiences effective and adapt those principles without losing sight of healthcare’s higher stakes.

Members of the Senior Executive Healthcare Think Tank bring expertise across technology, digital health, systems engineering, telehealth, workforce health and transformation. Their perspectives examine how healthcare can rethink everything from patient navigation and pricing transparency to personalization, communication and data—while also identifying tactics that could undermine patient trust.

“Retail is still far ahead of healthcare in terms of frictionless search and navigation.”

– Jason Foodman, Managing Director at Archetype Growth

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Make Search and Navigation Patient-Centered

Jason Foodman, Managing Director at Archetype Growth, believes retail has mastered one area healthcare still struggles with: helping people find what they need.

“Retail is still far ahead of healthcare in terms of frictionless search and navigation,” Foodman says. “Amazon, for example, is built to enable users to easily search for what they need and find it nearly instantly.”

The problem, he says, is that healthcare websites often mirror the organization’s internal structure instead of the patient’s needs.

“Healthcare digital experiences, on the other hand, often reflect institutional org charts, legacy hierarchies or departmental silos,” he says. “This structure often forces patients to work out the provider’s internal organizational structure to find the care they need.”

That is a useful distinction for marketers: Better navigation is not merely a website enhancement. It can reduce the cognitive burden associated with seeking care.

Foodman draws an equally important boundary around what healthcare should not copy.

“The lesson healthcare should not adopt from retail is the ‘If you liked that, you might also like this’ type of upsell,” he says. “Navigating digital healthcare solutions is confusing enough to patients without adding irrelevant tangents to the mix.”

Put Pricing Clarity Behind the Digital Front Door

Mark Francis, Founder and CEO of CaregiverZone, Inc., argues that healthcare’s much-discussed digital front door solves only part of the problem.

“Healthcare marketers often celebrate their digital front door—yet behind the front door is a confusing, cluttered mess,” Francis says. “What is missing in healthcare marketing is not the elegance of the front door but rather the lack of pricing transparency.”

Consumers can tolerate complexity in the back end of many businesses without necessarily experiencing it personally. In healthcare, the complexity is often transferred directly to the patient.

“While pricing in healthcare is convoluted, this complexity should be owned by the healthcare entity,” Francis says. “The customer—the patient—should not be burdened with this issue.”

Healthcare cannot always provide a single definitive price in the same way retail can, but marketers and operators can explain what is known, what is uncertain and what factors may change the final cost.

“Pricing in healthcare should be as clear as going into Nordstrom to purchase an outfit.”

Borrow Fintech’s Frictionless Onboarding—Not Retail’s FOMO

Mahendran Chinnaiah, Digital Healthcare Architect at a major U.S. healthcare and pharmacy services firm, points to fintech as a model for eliminating unnecessary friction.

“Fintech made opening a bank account instant and digital,” he says. “Healthcare marketing shouldn’t just run ads; it should fix the front door.”

That means connecting marketing promises to functional improvements such as “one-click online scheduling, clear upfront pricing and simple digital intake instead of filling out paper clipboards in a waiting room.”

Healthcare can also learn from retail’s ability to communicate proactively, particularly when communication helps people take action before a problem becomes urgent.

“Leaders can innovate by borrowing retail’s proactive communication—nudging patients toward preventive care before they end up in the ER,” Chinnaiah says.

But he draws a firm line at tactics designed to trigger impulse buying.

“Healthcare isn’t a retail purchase,” he says. “Aggressive upsells, flash discounts or gamified loyalty points cheapen medical care and destroy clinical trust. Trust and privacy matter far more than flashy branding.”

The difference is the patient’s state of mind: “Patients are vulnerable, not impulse shoppers.”

Design for the Full Journey, Not the Click

Tirumala Ashish Kumar Manne, Principal Cloud Architect at Optum, says healthcare should borrow a lesson from technology that goes beyond a better website or campaign.

“Healthcare marketing should borrow one lesson from technology: Design around the full journey, not a single transaction,” he says. “Patients experience scheduling, access, cost, communication, treatment and recovery as one connected system, even when the organization delivering it does not.”

The temptation, however, is to equate engagement with success.

“What healthcare should not borrow is the obsession with maximizing engagement,” Manne says. “More clicks, messages and consumption do not equal better outcomes.”

Instead, the objective should be “informed action and durable trust.” This requires leaders to treat personalization and automation as tools rather than ends in themselves. 

“Leaders can accelerate innovation by using data, personalization and automation to remove friction while keeping transparency, consent and human accountability at the center.”

Market What Operations Can Actually Deliver

Donna P. Mitchell, CEO of Mitchell Universal Network, LLC, believes healthcare should borrow retail’s discipline around the promise-to-delivery connection.

“Borrow retail’s discipline of never promising what fulfillment cannot deliver,” Mitchell says. “The real advantage is not its marketing. It is that the experience arrives as advertised.”

That distinction becomes especially important when healthcare organizations market “seamless” or “personalized” experiences that collide with fragmented operations.

“Do not borrow the habit of marketing ahead of capability,” Mitchell says. “A retailer can promise first and build second, and the cost of the gap is a refund. In healthcare, staff absorb the gap and pay for it with trust.”

For Mitchell, the solution is operational rather than promotional.

“Leaders accelerate innovation by fixing the operation first and marketing only what it can deliver today,” she says. “Everything else is a promise someone else must keep.”

In other words, marketing should become a forcing function for operational integrity—not a layer of polish placed over broken workflows.

“Leaders must focus on utilizing virtual models to deliver proven safety and clinical precision.”

– Rajani Kumar Sindavalam, Systems Engineering Leader at HCL America Inc.

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Simulate Risk Before It Reaches the Patient

Rajani Kumar Sindavalam, Systems Engineering Leader at HCL America Inc., sees an opportunity to borrow not just marketing techniques but engineering disciplines from industries such as automotive and aerospace.

“Healthcare marketing should borrow Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and simulation modeling from automotive and aerospace to analyze and communicate risk reduction before treatments reach patients,” he says.

Sindavalam sees digital twins as potentially powerful, but warns against technology for technology’s sake.

“While digital twins is a game-changing technology, over-adapting it without a clear purpose causes failure,” he says. “Leaders must focus on utilizing virtual models to deliver proven safety and clinical precision.”

The lesson healthcare should reject comes from a very different consumer industry.

“Healthcare must reject the fast-to-market, iterative attitude of consumer electronics,” he says, where companies can launch rushed updates assuming they can fix failures in the next release.

“In healthcare,” Sindavalam says, “a product failure is catastrophic rather than inconvenient.”

Make Trust the Operating Model

Sriharsha Chavali, Engineering Lead for a leading national dental services organization, reduces the healthcare marketing challenge to one word: trust.

“Trust is the operating model for healthcare,” he says. “It is built not only through messaging, but also through every experience that shapes how patients schedule, register, understand costs and make decisions.”

A 2025 systematic review in npj Digital Medicine found that trust can influence consumers’ use, acceptance and perceived usefulness of digital healthcare, with factors including privacy, data accuracy, human interaction, digital literacy and the quality of the digital intervention.

For Chavali, retail’s useful contribution is friction reduction.

“Borrow from retail where it reduces friction,” he says. “Simplify access, remove unnecessary paperwork, provide clear digital navigation, and use proactive reminders to make care easier to reach.”

But he warns leaders not to use the resulting data simply to optimize conversion.

“In clinical and financial decisions, the goal is not conversion speed—it is understanding, transparency and space for informed choice,” Chavali says.

The result is a broader definition of marketing performance.

“Trust is not a marketing metric alone,” he says. “It is also an operational, technology and policy outcome shaped by the workflows and algorithms behind the experience.”

“The customer is trusting you with their body, not making a purchase.”

– Dorothy Riviere, CEO and Founder of Work Resilience

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Build One View of the Patient

Dorothy Riviere, CEO and Founder of Work Resilience, sees healthcare’s fragmentation as a direct experience problem.

“The average physician’s practice spends 13 hours a week just on prior authorization paperwork, 39 requests a week on average, according to the AMA’s 2024 survey,” she says. “That fragmentation shows up in every patient touchpoint too.”

Riviere argues that technology can help by creating continuity across touchpoints.

“Borrow this from tech and retail: a single customer profile that follows the person everywhere, so every touchpoint already knows their story,” she says.

But the same data infrastructure can become harmful if its purpose shifts from reducing friction to increasing pressure.

“Do not borrow the instinct to use that data to sell harder or manufacture urgency,” Riviere says. “The same unified view should reduce repetition and confusion, not increase pressure.”

Her final distinction captures the essence of healthcare’s difference: “The customer is trusting you with their body, not making a purchase.”

Balance Convenience With Clinical Integrity

Vikas Gupta, Technical Manager at HCL America Inc., says healthcare can learn from industries that have made convenience and personalization part of the everyday customer experience.

“Healthcare marketing can learn a lot from retail and hospitality, especially their focus on creating simple, personalized and seamless experiences,” Gupta says. “Patients increasingly expect the same level of convenience they receive in other parts of their lives.”

That expectation is not likely to disappear. The challenge is deciding where convenience ends and clinical responsibility begins.

“What healthcare should not borrow is the mindset of treating people solely as consumers,” he says. “Healthcare decisions are often emotional, complex and high stakes, making trust and empathy essential.”

Gupta’s recommendation is not to reject consumer-oriented innovation but to balance it.

“Leaders can accelerate innovation by adopting best practices from technology, retail and financial services,” he says, while emphasizing the need to balance “convenience and personalization with patient trust, clinical integrity and better outcomes.”

Communicate Clearly and Proactively

Asaad Hakeem of SARC MedIQ Inc., looks to hospitality for a lesson in reducing anxiety.

“Healthcare should borrow customer journey design from hospitality,” he says. “Clear communication, proactive updates, and personalized experiences reduce anxiety and build trust.”

A delayed update, unexplained next step or ambiguous instruction can create uncertainty at precisely the wrong moment.

Hakeem’s boundary is consumer technology’s philosophy regarding speed.

“It shouldn’t borrow the ‘move fast and iterate later’ mindset from consumer tech,” he says. “Healthcare demands evidence, safety and clinical validation because every decision can directly affect patient outcomes.”

That makes hospitality’s communication discipline useful—but only when it is paired with healthcare’s much higher bar for safety and validation.

Putting Cross-Industry Lessons Into Practice

• Design digital experiences around patient intent, not org charts. Better navigation can remove a major source of patient friction.
• Make pricing transparency part of the patient experience. Healthcare organizations should own the complexity of pricing rather than forcing patients to decipher it.
• Fix the digital front door before advertising it. Borrow fintech’s frictionless onboarding while rejecting retail-style FOMO tactics.
• Measure the entire journey, not engagement alone. Connect scheduling, access, cost, communication, treatment and recovery.
• Make marketing accountable to operational reality. Fix the operation first and market only what can be delivered.
• Use simulation and lifecycle thinking to reduce risk. Automotive and aerospace engineering disciplines are models for validating safety before deployment.
• Treat trust as an enterprise outcome. Trust is shaped by operations, technology and policy—not marketing language alone.
• Create a unified view of the patient without weaponizing the data. Use personalization to eliminate repetition and confusion rather than manufacture urgency.
• Borrow convenience without reducing patients to consumers. Healthcare should adopt seamless experiences while preserving empathy, clinical integrity and outcomes.
• Communicate like hospitality while validating like healthcare. Combine proactive communication with evidence, safety and clinical validation.

The Bottom Line

Healthcare does not need to become more like retail, hospitality or fintech. It needs to become better at understanding what those industries have learned about people: how to reduce friction, communicate clearly, personalize experiences and make complex journeys easier to navigate. The opportunity is to borrow those principles—not blindly copy the tactics—and adapt them to a setting where trust, privacy and clinical judgment matter.

That distinction is the real leadership challenge. In healthcare, success is not simply more clicks, faster conversions or higher engagement. It is helping patients make informed decisions, access care more easily and feel confident in the experience. The best cross-industry innovations will not make healthcare feel like shopping; they will make it feel more clear, connected and human.