Trust doesn’t travel through channels.
It travels through people

The numbers tell a difficult story: Point.1 confirms a shift in the balance of power. Only 19% of clinicians trust pharma-branded touchpoints, while 86% trust peer-to-peer content. It’s a new reality for medical communication, where trust isn’t built through broadcasting messages. It’s earned through participation in credible conversations.

For decades, healthcare communications operated like airport announcements: carefully scripted, information-heavy and largely one way. Today, the most effective healthcare media strategies use paid and owned media to amplify trusted conversations already happening in earned media. To reach clinician and patient communities alike, we must stop trying to own the dialogue and start earning our place within it.

Health information exists inside a noisy, emotional and human ecosystem. People don’t just receive information, they encounter it on TikTok at 11pm, in Reddit threads and WhatsApp groups. They screenshot it, remix it, share it and compare it to their own lived experience. Information is no longer consumed passively.

For healthcare and pharma, this shift can feel like a loss of control. In reality, it’s an opportunity to build trust and improve health literacy. In a world of fragmented attention, influence is not merely a marketing channel, it’s the bridge between clinical data and human understanding

Clinical jargon shares a postcode with wellness trends, anecdotes, algorithm-fed recommendations and wildly confident opinions from strangers who may or may not have googled them five minutes ago. It all lands in the same scroll. Credibility is harder to pin down than ever – even for the most well informed.

That is where health literacy becomes important. It’s not about giving people more information. It is about helping them interpret it, recognise credible sources and ask better questions. Social media can be remarkably effective at this when we stop treating it as a noticeboard.

We see it when a diabetes nurse explains what a diagnosis might actually feel like in everyday life, or when a consultant makes complex science understandable through a short, platform-native video. These creators are not replacing medical expertise, they are making it easier to understand.

At Havas Lynx, we think about social through the lens of influence ecosystems rather than channels. We see HCP expertise, content creators, patient voices, paid amplification and community behaviour as interdependent forces. That’s exactly why we built the Health Hive – to map and activate complex relationships, ensuring we drive meaningful engagement rather than treating them as separate, disconnected tactics.

The strongest healthcare campaigns consider influence, community behaviour and platform dynamics from the beginning. That means understanding who we want to influence, who they trust and where those conversations happen.

It also means being more honest about what success looks like. Sometimes the real value isn’t impressions, it’s people feeling less confused. Patients knowing what question to ask their doctor. Accurate information travelling further because someone trusted enough to share it. That’s Health Influence.

Influence rarely happens in a single post. Trust is built through repeated, credible interactions over time.

Pharma has good reasons to be cautious; medical and legal review can be complex and internal governance was not built for a world where a post can travel around the world before breakfast. But compliance should not become a synonym for silence. The organisations making progress aren’t ignoring regulation, they’re designing better systems around it, involving medical and regulatory teams earlier, building flexible content frameworks and working with creators who understand regulated environments.

When the goal is to improve understanding, rather than promote a product, it can also involve unbranded education. The point is not to remove the risk, it’s to understand it well enough to participate responsibly.

If credible healthcare voices leave the room, the room doesn’t stay quiet. Someone else fills it. Healthcare organisations don’t need to dominate the conversation, but they do need to be part of it.

The organisations shaping the next era of healthcare communications won’t be producing the most content or chasing every platform. They will be asking: ‘How can we help when people are trying to understand their health?’

Done well, social media becomes part of the infrastructure: a place where complexity is translated, uncertainty can be spoken about and expertise sits alongside lived experience.

Health information has never been more accessible, more confusing, or more emotionally loaded. The answer is not to speak louder. It is to become the voice people trust when the noise gets too loud. That’s where genuine health influence begins.

Got a health influence challenge you’re wrestling with? Talk to Sian at sian.ediss@havas.com.

Sian Ediss-Johnson is Head of Health Influence at Havas Lynx