Content debt: why health content decays faster than you think

Content is never a one-and-done job.

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As your brand, products and services evolve, your messaging, whether on your website, app or emails, must also change to reflect that. 

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And within the digital health space, it’s crucially important to keep a close eye on your content to ensure that it meets the regulatory standards of your sector and accurately describes the details of your products. 

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Setting up simple review processes and systems can help you stay on top of your content and ensure that users and patients find the right information to help them manage their health.

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What is content debt?

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Simply put, content debt describes content that is in need of a refresh. If your pages are out of date, cannibalise each other or lack clarity, this harms your GEO and SEO visibility. As a result, your content may be recommended to fewer users.

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There are lots of reasons why content debt happens. Your team might not have the capacity to keep up with the volume of updates required to keep your content relevant. In some cases, silos mean that changes to your product pricing, features or availability haven’t been effectively communicated. 

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But most content debt isn't caused by neglect. It happens when content teams are the last to know when something changes.

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For example, your commercial leadership may decide that the pricing for a diagnostic tool needs to be reduced to reflect market changes. But your content team are the last people within your organisation to know this.

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This means that they have to produce messaging that is clinically safe but engaging, schedule and publish it on a tight timeline. All while deprioritising work that was already in flight.

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And in this scenario, it might not be a change to a single page. Price comparison tables, landing pages, emails and informational content might need to be changed while other content reaching the end of its life has been neglected.

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The lack of inclusion results in challenges not only for your internal team, but customers seeking out information related to the health conditions.

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How can a content debt be fixed?

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Health information content is inherently useful and informative. But one of the major challenges it faces is that changes to clinical guidance can affect how long it remains relevant.

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An extreme example was writing content about COVID and how it was to be managed and treated. The rapid pace of change would mean that your content could quickly decay and issue out-of-date advice.

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Although this isn’t a commonplace occurrence, the concept of decaying content is. Here are some easy ways for you to start to address it.

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Establish a review process and stick to it

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An effective review process helps you identify pages that need to be updated or retired.

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There will obviously be pages on your website that are subject to frequent and regular changes. As you complete CRO work on your landing pages, they may quickly take on a different shape from when they were initially published. 

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But for your informational pages, you can establish a more fixed review cycle to help your team manage updates. These reviews should afford your content team enough time to verify claims included, update the content to reflect changes to processes and treatments and allow your clinical and regulatory teams to sign it off.

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This means that you need to have an established and agreed process with all of these teams to ensure that this can happen. And it should be documented in any process documents that you rely on.

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This shouldn’t feel like a misuse of your team’s time or resource. Since your content greatly influences the way your products are perceived by users, ensuring that it is safe, clinically sound and worth reading should be a priority within a mature digital organisation. If your stakeholders need convincing, creating narrative-driven reports can help win them over.

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Introduce risk-based audits

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There will be times when content needs to be updated outside of the review schedule you have set up.

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In the context of digital health, there may be some content that carries a greater degree of risk than others (think back to the COVID example).

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And within your company, you and your team will know areas may have a greater risk of rapid content decay than others.

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A risk-based review cycle can help you pinpoint pages that may need more frequent changes and, therefore, enable your team to prioritise them appropriately. 

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To create a risk-based audit:

• Identify topics or conditions that will have inherent risk (e.g., safeguarding challenges, terminology for marginalised or minority groups, or quickly escalating health crises).
• Establish a scoring system that allows you to define and differentiate low-risk from high-risk content
• Create general guidelines for review times for both low-risk and high-risk content. If your content is low-risk, you may want to review it annually and update your editorial and process documentation to reflect any important changes (like terminology). If it’s high-risk, it may likely have to be more frequent.
• Build out a control system that allows you to apply light reviews to low-risk content and more thorough audits to high-risk content

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During the height of the COVID pandemic, content teams would have to write guidance for quarantining and self-isolation and discuss specific guidance for vulnerable communities. In some cases, they may have also been updating product pages with personal protective equipment and bringing awareness to vaccination services.

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This meant that they were managing an unexpected volume of content that was all subject to change. A risk-based audit would allow them to update the most important pages, retire those that became irrelevant and share the most recent health advice with patients in a controlled manner.

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Risk-based audits won’t apply to every digital health company. But where they do, they can help you build real relationships with your customers. If you are consistently providing accurate health information, using the most correct language to refer to people, groups and identities and showing a commitment to making health spaces as accessible as possible, you humanise your brand. 

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Keep your content team in the loop

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Ultimately, the most effective way to avoid a content debt that impacts your product’s visibility is to build in a trigger so other teams loop content in the moment something changes.

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Every team within your organisation, from customer services to clinical, should communicate important changes to them so that they can be incorporated into your digital estate.

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So when clinical guidance has been updated affecting the way your service can be delivered or when you need customers to place prescription orders ahead of seasonal delivery cut-off points, your content team should be aware of this as early as possible. It gives them the opportunity to manage their workload and prioritise changes to prevent content debt.

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Your content team is one of your most important product stakeholders. If they're using AI tools in their own workflow, they're the ones shaping how your brand is described across every surface, including how AI systems describe you.

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They aren’t just a delivery function to be managed by senior stakeholders. They play a strategic role in your products’ identity. Collaborating with them and giving them the space to own their work should have benefits for your brand awareness as well as the way users engage with products and convert.

Final thoughts

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Even if your current content pages are healthy, the nature of health information means that they will always be subject to change.

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When your content professionals are left out of conversations, it shows up in your content and the way it is managed. Early involvement and clear communication across teams means that they can produce public-facing content that is reliable and clinically safe.

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