Hospitals & Health Systems
Hospital marketing agency for brand, service lines and recruitment
For marketing leaders who answer to executives, service lines and HR.
Talk to a Hospital Marketing ExpertWhat we do
Parallel Path is a hospital marketing agency for health systems across the United States. We work across system brand, service-line growth and workforce recruitment, and inside the compliance review and internal teams that health system marketing runs through.
What we hear
Health systems are built in layers. Marketing has to move through every one of them.
These are the four things that come up every time.
Marketing
System leadership
Service lines
Shared services
Hospitals and ambulatory sites
Capacity
You get a capacity answer from a team you don’t manage.
Web strategy, development, analytics, local and content each run their own quarter. The roadmap moves at the pace of whichever team has the least room.
Reporting
You tell the same result three different ways.
Executives read a system scorecard. Service-line leaders want their own line in it. HR measures recruitment in applicants, which sits on neither. Same work, three reports, and no single tool that produces all three.
Budget
The budget is fixed and the scope keeps growing.
When those two don’t meet, you cut the strategic work first, because the executional support still has to happen.
Compliance
Marketing review runs on a process built for patient consent.
Legal applies a process designed for patient information to a school visit or a landing page. Someone then finds the version that protects privacy without stopping the work.
Who we work with
Built for systems, not single locations.
Hospital marketing at scale breaks in ways single practice marketing does not.
A practice
1 location. 1 local market.
A system we work with
12 hospitals. 200 ambulatory sites. 52 counties.
Regional nonprofit health systems
System brand and local service-line demand pull in opposite directions.
Integrated delivery networks
Provider and payer under one roof, so marketing sells care and coverage at once.
Academic medical centers
Research reputation, clinical volume and philanthropy compete for the same attention.
Children’s and pediatric hospitals
The parent decides.
Specialty and rehabilitation hospitals
Narrow clinical focus, referral geography that ignores state lines.
Hospital foundations
Donor audiences don’t behave like patient audiences, and one media plan won’t reach both.
What we do
How our four practices translate to hospital marketing.
A few of the ways each one applies inside a health system.
Strategy + Insights
- Healthcare service line demand analysis
- Market share and competitive read, line by line
- Patient journey mapping across referral, search and self-scheduling
Creative & Content
- Healthcare service line campaigns
- Content governance and compliance review
- Employer brand and recruitment creative
Marketing & Media
- Performance media built to service-line targets
- Healthcare SEO
- Answer engine optimization
Data & Analytics
- Attribution design across brand, volume and recruitment
- Service-line dashboards
- Shared measurement frameworks
What you get
No two health systems are the same.
We don’t start from zero.
Cross-client pattern recognition.
We run media, analytics, creative and strategy for clients across every corner of healthcare and wellness. What we learn on one account comes with us to yours.
Agency of record, or a single channel.
Some health systems hand us all of it. Some hand us paid search. Neither one asks you to rebuild how your team already works.
Hands on the dials, every day.
Bids, budgets, search queries, creative rotation, and the content work behind SEO and GEO. Every campaign, every service line.
Digital infrastructure that satisfies marketing and legal.
Tracking built around what you are trying to measure, on pages that meet the privacy rules your compliance team enforces. Integrations that hold up through a platform migration.
Proof
Hospital marketing results.
Partners since 2021
OhioHealth
Paid search and organic search for a not-for-profit health system.
56x
greater search visibility, branded and non-branded
40%
more paid search traffic, at a lower cost per click
88%
improvement in click-through rate
87%
increase in digital-driven conversions
Three-year engagement
The Kids Mental Health Foundation
National awareness and audience growth for the foundation powered by Nationwide Children’s Hospital.
217M
impressions
73K
new Instagram and Facebook followers
45K
new eCommunity leads
August 2025
A central Pennsylvania health system
A website and content audit that brought the site to HIPAA compliance, run with the system’s legal and owned-content teams.
10
eHealthcare Leadership Awards, listed below.
Want numbers like these against your service lines?
Talk to a Hospital Marketing ExpertWho you work with
“The healthcare marketers I work with already know what’s in their way (and it’s a lot). They’re the ones asked to tie activity to revenue and be HIPAA compliant. They’re the ones asked to manage budgets across siloed business units and make sure every stakeholder is happy. They don’t have time for the news, they need a partner working to see around the next corner.
While a lot of our value comes from working in healthcare, a similar amount comes from the experience we bring with non-healthcare clients, the specifics of channels they are just testing, creative types that actually create engagement. We bring innovative ideas and formats (in a HIPAA compliant fashion) to an industry built around safety.”
Said by
Role
Vice President of Client Experience and Integrated Strategy, Parallel Path
Experience
Almost twenty years leading marketing strategy teams.
Recognition
Our work within healthcare has consistently been recognized.
eHealthcare Leadership Awards
Best Digital Marketing Campaign
3x
2 Platinum · 1 Gold
Best Integrated Marketing Campaign
2x
2 Platinum
Best Search Engine Marketing Campaign
2x
1 Gold · 1 Silver
Best Rich Media
2x
2 Platinum
Best Digital Marketing ROI and Outcomes
1x
1 Gold
From recruitment campaigns to patient video series, and everything in between.
Common questions
Questions we get from health systems.
What is a healthcare service line?
A clinical business unit built around a condition or specialty. Cardiology, orthopedics, oncology. Systems budget, staff and market by service line, so growing one can put real pressure on another’s capacity.
What is a physician liaison, and how does marketing support referral growth?
A physician liaison is a health system employee who visits referring providers out in the community. Marketing gives them the data to know who is worth visiting and the materials to leave behind.
What does a hospital marketing agency do?
A hospital marketing agency runs marketing for health systems across brand, service-line growth and recruitment. For a system, most of the job is getting that work done inside compliance review, procurement and whatever internal teams already own pieces of it.
How do you market a hospital?
Start where there is capacity to take more patients. Look at demand line by line, build campaigns per line, weight media to the markets each site actually serves, and measure brand and direct response separately.
How do you measure hospital marketing results at the system level?
You need one set of definitions everyone reports against. Without that, executives are looking at awareness, service lines are looking at volume, HR is looking at applicants, and nobody can put the three together. Whatever you build has to work inside your compliance team’s privacy rules.
What is brand awareness in healthcare, and does it drive volume?
Brand awareness is whether people in your market think of you when they need care. It does drive volume, just not directly. People who know your name search for it, and branded search converts better and costs less than anything else you buy.
How does healthcare recruitment marketing differ from patient marketing?
You are talking to clinicians, and you are counting applications instead of appointments. Some roles you recruit nationally, some locally. The results land with HR, which usually reports somewhere neither marketing nor the service lines can see.
What is healthcare consumerism, and how does it change hospital marketing?
Patients shop now. They compare cost, reviews, wait times and how easy you are to get to before they pick. Most of that happens online and before they ever call, so the answers on your site carry more weight than they used to.
How do you structure hospital content for AI discoverability?
Answer the question in the first sentence, in plain text on the page. Not in an accordion, not in a tab, not inside an image. Then mark it up so an engine knows what it is looking at. More on our holistic search strategy.
How do you increase patient referrals?
Make it easy to send you a patient and easy for that patient to actually show up. Current provider directories, referral pages that work, liaison time spent on your highest-volume referrers, and a loop back to the referring office after the visit.
Do you work with physician groups or single locations?
Yes. Specialty healthcare marketing covers practices and physician groups. Multi-location marketing covers brands growing market by market. The one exception is a single-location provider on its own, unless it is part of a health system.
