IPG Health @ SXSW 2025 | Key takeaways for healthcare marketers

Our experts from AREA 23, Rise & Run and Studio Rx share their insights after experiencing the latest cutting-edge ideas and innovations firsthand at SXSW 2025.

Audio Description

Read more from our presenters below:

Delivering human-centered healthcare marketing in the new age of AI

By Serena Fedor, Group Director, Engagement Strategy, Rise & Run

At SXSW, conversations around AI, health misinformation and digital connection highlighted a critical challenge for healthcare marketers: how to build trust in a world where attention is scarce, and technology is outpacing regulation.

Key takeaways:

  • Misinformation is a public health crisis: AI is accelerating misinformation, making trust-building content more urgent than ever. Healthcare marketers must prioritize credible, science-backed information to protect lives.
  • AI isn’t replacing us—but it is changing us: The biggest risk isn’t job loss—it’s skill loss. Over-reliance on automation leads to losing critical skills in strategy, creativity and critical thinking that are essential for healthcare engagement. The best strategies balance AI efficiency with human creativity.
  • Healthcare must shift from reactive to proactive: Patients expect seamless, human-centered experiences that move beyond traditional episodic care. Instead of waiting until they are sick, AI and digital integration should proactively guide them through their health journey—offering personalized, predictive and frictionless care.

Technology will continue to evolve at an exponential pace, but healthcare marketing must remain rooted in human connection. The future belongs to brands that leverage AI to enhance—not replace—human expertise, using predictive insights to deliver care that is proactive, personalized and seamlessly integrated across digital and physical touchpoints.

Advancing intelligent interfaces and systems at the speed of trust

By Andy Titus, Executive Director, Experience Design, Studio Rx

My time at SXSW was an exploration of the rapidly evolving role of digital experience design in a world transformed by AI—one where long-held assumptions are being challenged in exciting new ways, and building trust with customers at every turn has never been more critical.

Key takeaways:

  • Tomorrow's interfaces will reshape instantly to meet user context and need: For designers, AI is much more than a set of tools—it's a new design material that can enable radically adaptive interfaces. Leveraging LLMs, digital products can understand user intent, curate the right information and generate fitting interfaces on the fly, and offer a direct path to the experience they want. Examples showcased included Google’s Bespoke UI and Salesforce’s Generative Canvas.
  • AI needs reliable design systems to shape dynamic experiences: Design systems are collections of components and guidelines that streamline the creation of interfaces and digital touchpoints. They capture detailed decisions in style, interaction and code that solve for unique needs—and AI can leverage this knowledge to generate interfaces within the bounds we carefully set. They’re also essential for modular content strategies, which will increasingly integrate AI.
  • The pace of AI must be checked by our ability to sustain trust with UX: Trust is the foundation of lasting business value, built when customers feel well understood. Intelligence should be pointed at problems worth solving, with attention to the nuances that separate good from great and subconsciously convey care. 

As AI’s potential multiplies, successful healthcare experience design will depend on harnessing data and intelligence for tailored experiences, investing in teams to build and evolve composable design systems and prioritizing trust over speed to keep customer needs at the core.

The confluence of emerging tech and healthcare

By Orlando Willems-Rosas, Associate Director, Product Design, AREA 23

For experience designers, the use of different technology like augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and extended reality (XR), which was presented at SXSW 2025, is not something new. However, this year’s event featured several panels discussing how experience designers are using AI to refine their processes and to help these technologies realize their full potential.

Here are a few key themes from SXSW for healthcare product designers to keep an eye on:

Intuitive interfaces for patients and healthcare professionals

Experience designers don’t just design for one segment of the population. With this in mind, we need optimized user journeys, and these experiences need to have intuitive and effective interfaces for both patients and healthcare professionals. We can achieve this by using LLMs to learn more about users’ needs, interests and behaviors.

Also, by combining psychology, cultural anthropology and neuroscience to design brand stories, designers are building the brands we know and love. During the “Using neuroscience to design the brands we love” session, Dan Greenwald and Paco Underhill mentioned how a more analog approach to LLMs is used to design spaces (stores, event venues and parks). We can use these same principles and also add one more layer—accessibility—when designing innovative products for HCPs and patients.

Identify. Resolve. Iterate.

It’s crucial to address usability, accessibility and digital inclusion aspects starting in the design phase, with the goal of minimizing usability and accessibility issues. Identifying and resolving any challenges users could be facing is key to then redesigning and repeating the design cycle.  

Immersive user experience (UX) through seamless collaboration

We are continuously crafting immersive and impactful user experiences that balance aesthetics and functionality, understanding our audience and identifying the best channels to get the important information about our products dispersed in the most efficient way. This can include presenting study designs and efficacy data to introducing a mechanism of action (MOA) or new dosing patterns. As experience designers we are not working alone; close collaboration with all stakeholders and a strong product designer-developer partnership are the key to deliver robust, high-quality products that are not just aesthetically pleasing, but deliver important content to all our audiences.

Summary

Designing intuitive interfaces for both patients and healthcare professionals requires a user-centered approach, a continuous iterative design process, prioritizing usability, accessibility, digital inclusion and a seamless collaboration between designers and developers. AI is not always on the front-end of the experiences we create, and it doesn’t have to be. In many instances, we use AI to help us optimize processes and in return we will be able to create impactful products that effectively deliver crucial information to our users.

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