Doing PR can be complicated, and it can be simple. Some industries have an easier time advertising because their products are understandable by the consumers. Others, though, provide products and services that are far removed from anything consumers can understand, yet they still need to reach out to the public for various reasons. Much of health tech PR falls in the latter category. With the hype of new technologies, however, tech PR firms have found a way to appeal to the public as they broadcast their clients’ very technical and complicated products: Artificial intelligence (AI).
A timely solution for health tech PR
Nothing is as timely as AI is right now in the health tech space. Anyone involved in tech hears about AI on an almost minute-by-minute basis, and that’s because AI will revolutionize everything. The world has become digitized, and with AI, everything we use will be transformed in ways we can’t foresee—that’s why it’s important to stay on top of the trends. As such, it’s important for health tech public relations firms to incorporate AI in outreaches as much as possible, whenever applicable and tasteful. One hears of medical gadgets incorporating AI solutions as well as intelligent software powering hospital systems every Monday and Wednesday, however, so the trick is to find the added value, and communicate it.
Until now, it was very complicated to engage in med tech PR or medical device PR. Who in their right mind wanted to read about these small incremental advancements in technology that is reserved for use by doctors, or the limited segment of a population that is afflicted with a particular disease? This created challenges for the people whose job it is to attract attention to these fields, and showcase that the advancements really are meaningful. Along came AI, opening a venue for health tech PR to reach out to the masses.
Potential downsides
As always, though, there is a downside to med tech PR. This opening also has a tendency to get exploited, and it’s easy to see how. Any kind of techy improvement suddenly gets passed off as AI to create a broader appeal. It’s not an easy thing to define even what intelligence is, so a sufficiently complicated algorithm could plausibly be passed off as artificially intelligent, even though the people in the space would protest the designation vehemently. When professionals talk about artificial intelligence, they are referring to a system that can understand, or learn, by itself. The difference between an algorithm that knows how to calculate the best move in chess, and an algorithm that just learns the rules and “figures out” the best move in chess, is vast. That is the difference between an algorithm that is just excellent and actual artificial intelligence. Medical device PR firms have a tendency to blur that line because AI is simply too sexy to resist. But we can be excited though that the abuse of the term AI is certainly not universal, and the dramatic leaps in health tech will be a lot greater than the small steps of health tech PR.
