3 inspiring William Osler quotes for healthcare digital marketers

Sir William Osler (1849 – 1919) was a Canadian physician and one of the four founding professors of Johns Hopkins Hospital. Osler created the first residency program for specialty training of physicians, and he was the first to bring medical students out of the lecture hall for bedside clinical training. He has frequently been described as the "Father of Modern Medicine".

A prolific writer (and incidentally, an inveterate prankster!), a number of Osler's quotes make sense even today when viewed from the perspective healthcare digital marketers. Here's a sampling of a few.

"It’s more important to know what type of patient has the disease than what type of disease a patient has."

In other words, take the time and effort to know your target audience well. Different kinds of people have radically different approaches to their own healthcare. It is only when you understand what type of patient you are dealing with that you can provide them with the kind of regimen advice that they are likely to follow. Even patients with the same disease may fall into very different digital marketing segments.

"Listen to your patient, he is telling you the diagnosis."

What people say they do and what they actually do are very different things. You can learn more about the digital habits of your target audience by observing their usage and behavior patterns than any number of thoughtfully-designed questionnaires could ever tell you. Patients are people too and healthcare may very well be the 2nd most searched term on the Internet. When you understand how your audience behaves, you can easily reach out to them with the right message, on the right channel at the right time.

"He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all."

Marketing is the management process through which goods and services move from concept to the customer. To excel at Healthcare Digital Marketing, you don't need to be an expert in healthcare. Or even marketing. However, you need to intuitively understand how user behavior is continually changing. How do they use the web? What do they do on their mobiles? How are they tracking their health with wearables? How are they managing their own care with medical devices? In short - what are they doing, where and how frequently? That will point you in the right direction and add value to your efforts.