Why Physicians Ignore Your Content
(and How to Fix It)

Co-authored by Aaron Fritts MD and Bryant Schmitz MSBmE  •  Updated April 28, 2025  

If you’ve spent any amount of time in the pharmaceutical or medical device industry, you know that commercializing new healthcare technology involves far more than developing a great product. To succeed, companies must navigate clinical trials, obtain FDA approval, secure reimbursement pathways, and perhaps most critically—persuade healthcare providers to adopt their solutions.

At its core, adoption of a new healthcare technology hinges on provider education. Not only do physicians need to understand how a new solution works and how to use it, they also need to have a clear picture of how it helps them achieve their goals, whether by making their practice more efficient, improving outcomes, or enhancing patient satisfaction.

Pharmaceutical and medical device marketers excel at highlighting product benefits, but often struggle to translate these benefits into the clinical reality of providers. Capturing physician attention and genuinely engaging them with educational content is a persistent challenge. Physicians are inundated with information, short on time, and tend to approach industry-generated content with inherent skepticism; making them difficult to reach and even more difficult to persuade.

Even the most carefully crafted messaging encounters a fundamental barrier: can industry overcome perceptions of bias, deliver authentic clinical insights, and create content that physicians actually want to engage with?

Too Product-Centric

As a physician-led organization, we have it on good authority that physicians rarely think of patient care as a sequence of individual products or isolated solutions. Instead, they operate within complex clinical environments, interacting daily with countless tools, protocols, and technologies. Yet pharmaceutical and medical device marketers rely heavily on product-centric strategies, emphasizing product specifications through polished animations, highlighting selective clinical data, and focusing heavily on competitive differentiation.

Such product-focused communication certainly has its place, especially when healthcare providers are actively seeking detailed information about a specific solution. However, on its own, it struggles to foster genuine physician interest or adoption because it lacks authentic clinical context. Physicians place tremendous value on the practical insights and experiences shared by their peers, which is why comments like, “Here’s when I prescribe that,” or “This is how it improves my workflow,” resonate so strongly amongst them. These authentic peer endorsements push healthcare providers to re-examine their practice patterns while also providing credibility and real-world applicability that purely promotional content cannot replicate.

Recognizing this, pharmaceutical and medical device companies have long partnered with key opinion leaders (KOLs)—expert clinicians who can bridge the gap between product innovation and everyday clinical practice. But even with KOLs on the roster, companies have a tendency to default to product-heavy narratives, inadvertently failing to embed their solutions within genuine clinical scenarios. Without effectively integrating real physician experiences into their messaging, industry content struggles to achieve meaningful engagement.

Perceived Bias

Having worked with over 80 pharmaceutical and medical device partners, we can say with confidence that industry professionals genuinely aspire to advance healthcare and improve patient outcomes through their products and services. Physicians, for their part, largely share this mission. Yet despite overlapping goals, a disconnect persists: healthcare providers often perceive industry communications as inherently biased, viewing their primary intent as sales-driven rather than patient-centered.

This skepticism emerges from legitimate concerns. Can industry representatives truly provide unbiased assessments of their products or those of their competitors? Even if a company representative attempts objectivity, physicians remain wary, acutely aware that clinical outcomes—and liability—ultimately rest with them.

The perception of bias significantly limits the credibility of industry-generated content, reinforcing the reality that physicians overwhelmingly trust their colleagues’ experiences over messaging crafted by industry.

Lack of Authenticity

Industry employs various approaches to establish clinical credibility—physician-led case studies, product demonstrations, webinars, and symposiums are commonplace in the medical device and pharmaceutical marketing mix. Yet even these efforts often fail to resonate authentically. Physicians frequently describe such content as feeling overly promotional, likening it to infomercials rather than genuine educational experiences.

Several factors drive this issue. Marketing teams are pressured to ‘control the narrative’ and maximize brand exposure, often resulting in overly promotional content saturated with rehearsed product references. Meanwhile, regulatory constraints impose strict limitations, forcing industry content to carefully avoid off-label discussions and sub-optimal descriptions of their products. The presence of lengthy disclaimers further interrupts the audience’s experience, reinforcing the feeling that they are consuming carefully controlled industry messaging rather than authentic peer-driven content.

Inauthenticity significantly limits the engagement potential of industry-created materials. Physicians naturally gravitate toward content that feels genuine, candid, and reflective of everyday clinical realities—qualities difficult for highly regulated, industry-generated materials to achieve.

Limited Physician Attention

Combined, the issues of bias and inauthenticity make it challenging for industry content to build meaningful audiences within the highly competitive modern media landscape. Consider your company’s social media platforms or YouTube presence—do they genuinely attract physician engagement, or are they largely overlooked?

In today's attention economy, capturing physician interest is more challenging than ever. Simply featuring respected KOLs is not enough if the underlying content fails to deliver authentic and unbiased clinical relevance. Physicians increasingly turn to sources they trust, typically peer-driven platforms, leaving industry-generated content at a serious disadvantage.

What’s the Solution?

We’ve expanded on the challenges that industry faces when attempting to create engaging medical content, but the question remains. How can industry overcome perceptions of bias, deliver authentic clinical insights, and create content that physicians actually want to engage with?

Answer: Podcasts

Yes, podcasts have proven to be a uniquely effective medium for physician education, offering long-form, authentic, peer-to-peer conversations between healthcare providers that unpack the real-world nuances of clinical practice. When freed from industry content constraints, physicians can openly discuss how they provide care, explore off-label uses, and share practical guidance with their peers.

Long-form, peer-to-peer discussions have the added benefit of naturally contextualizing pharmaceutical and medical device solutions within real-world scenarios, allowing listeners to clearly understand their applications and benefits. With authentic clinical context, conversations about specific solutions can feel informative and helpful, rather than forced and promotional.

Podcasts are also unique in that their open access, audio first format fits seamlessly into busy physician routines, offering on demand education during commutes, workouts, and downtime. Taken together, these benefits help to explain the growing role of podcasts in continuing medical education, and also highlight why more and more healthcare providers are adopting podcasts as a primary means of learning, improving, and staying up to date.

Ready to engage your target physicians with high-impact medical education? BackTable helps pharmaceutical and medical device companies deliver authentic, peer-to-peer podcasts that connect solutions to real-world clinical practice. Get started with the button below!

About BackTable

BackTable is the podcast network for authentic, on demand, peer-to-peer healthcare education. With 6 shows serving more than 18 medical specialties, BackTable has featured over 1,100 episodes, 900 physician contributors, 80 industry partners, and 3 million podcast plays since its inception in 2017. Curated by physicians, for physicians, BackTable Podcasts focus on practical guidance that physician listeners can apply to their day-to-day practice. Partner with BackTable to be part of the conversation, and push healthcare forward with impactful discussions that reshape and refine how providers deliver care.