Patient Clarity Is Growth Strategy

Jason Wolf, President and CEO of The Beryl Institute, opened his session with six years of consumer data: 6,600+ respondents, 13 countries, unwavering consistency. Patients do not judge their health system on the lobby, the parking, or the food. They judge it on how they are treated and whether they are understood.

What Matters Most to Patients

At the bottom: a new building (52.3%), on-demand amenities (53.8%), good food (67.1%), convenient parking (66.1%). Health systems heavily invest in these areas. Patients, consistently, don't invest back.

The specific things patients rank highest tell the health literacy story directly:

What Patients Want Most From Their Experience

"Communicate clearly in a way I can understand" appeared in the top two items in 10 of 13 countries. Across cultures, languages, and healthcare systems, patients want the same thing. And it is the same thing health literacy advocates have been asking for.

Wolf made the connection explicit. After a positive patient experience, 59% tell another person. 52% continue with the same provider. After a negative one, 16% do not go back. 15% find someone else.

The numbers make the case for what clarity is worth.

Patrick Soto (ab+a advertising) and Francis Forte (Nicklaus Children's Health System) pushed the frame further. By the time a family walks through your front door, they have already had a full experience with you. Every search, every click, every scheduling interaction happened before anyone set foot in your building, and all of it counted.

The session offered a practical, useful tool that illustrated health literacy in practice: what the team called "digital micro moments" — content tied to emotional triggers at each point in the patient journey.

• "Don't forget to check in."  →  "Looking forward to your visit."
• "Here are your discharge documents."  →  "Let's get you ready to go home."
• "Your visit is complete."  →  "We're here for you."

Same function. Completely different human experience. Both are automated. Only one builds loyalty. This is not clever copywriting. It is a decision about whether to treat patients as people in the middle of something hard, or as tasks to complete.

Research presented by Kristy Roldan (MDRG) and Alan Shoebridge (Providence Health) surfaced a structurally significant finding in a survey of leaders in ten health systems. It held a key health literacy dimension.

Between December 2021 and early last year, something shifted. A growing majority of patients now believe health systems are in the business of making money, not caring for them. Meanwhile, a surprising data point: health insurers are rising in perceived patient trust.

These trends don't necessarily expose something lost or earned. They expose patient confusion. When people stop understanding a system, they stop being able to evaluate it. That is a health literacy problem with direct business consequences.

And on AI, the finding was consistent: "They do trust AI to help [in healthcare], but not in the absence of a clinician." Patients accept what they understand, when a human is still clearly in the room.

The healthcare marketer's job is not to produce more content. It is to ensure that the experiences happening inside the organization are worth the stories patients will tell about them, and then to amplify those stories. Experience drives story. Story drives choice and loyalty. Choice and loyalty drive growth.

The metrics that matter are not impressions and clicks. They are the days between intent and appointment, the language in a pre-visit text, the seam between a digital handoff and a human one. These are where trust is built or lost.

And trust, as Alan Shoebridge put it, is the prerequisite for the entire business model. Without it, you only have transactions. You cannot build a lifetime health relationship on a transaction.

At The Grovery, we work at the intersection of healthcare strategy and content. Health Literacy Month is not a calendar event for us. It is the argument at the center of the work.

Plain language is a patient empowerment choice. It is also a business decision. We have seen this firsthand in Bristol Myers Squibb's Universal Patient Language framework that turns complex clinical science into information patients can use and act on. The SHSMD Connections 2026 data confirms what that work has shown us: when patients understand, they trust. When they trust, they return. When they return, they bring others.

The question for healthcare marketing teams this October is not whether to post about Health Literacy Month. It is whether the experiences and communications your organization delivers every day are making it easier for patients to understand, decide, and feel your care.