Kaiser Permanente (KP) is the largest not-for-profit health maintenance organization (HMO) in the United States. In operation for more than 75 years, KP runs 39 hospitals and more than 700 medical offices, with over 300,000 personnel, including more than 87,000 physicians and nurses.
When Prose initially connected with KP in 2021, there was no prior working relationship or referral. KP rarely brings on additional agency vendors beyond their agency of record, Accenture, and some US government vendors. That said, given the deep healthcare expertise within Prose’s network, KP was open to speaking with us and exploring Prose as a potential solution.
Over the course of about eight months, which included an intense trial engagement and numerous vetting steps – jokingly described by an internal KP employee as a “Byzantine, Kafkaesque process” (!) – we worked with a key KP stakeholder to get buy-in and gain the trust of skeptical employees.
After we won their support, we began planning how we could specifically support KP at scale. Today, in 2023, we continue to work closely with the organization as a key partner.
The impetus for KP originally agreeing to speak with Prose was the need to create a resource similar to WebMD. Specifically, KP wanted to build headless healthcare-focused content that would help educate its members about managing a variety of conditions and areas, including Diabetes, Maternity, Mental Health, Cancer Care, and Cardiac Health. To create a mobile app experience that would genuinely help people understand how to better care for their health, and discover content highly relevant to their specific concerns, KP needed more nimble resources to meet the volume required – hundreds and even thousands of pieces.
Though the marketing team had the resources to create content internally, several obstacles stood in their way.
First, the team was too overwhelmed with ongoing projects to distribute resources across other product groups. Additionally, the digital department’s urgent need for headless content to use across its mobile experiences could not be met; while KP’s internal team was made up of talented writers, they were not physicians themselves, and therefore they could not create content centered around medical advice or diagnoses, which requires input from qualified medical professionals.
To build the complex content package KP required, we had to convince discerning KP stakeholders that our medical experts had the knowledge and expertise to provide real help at scale, that our writers could learn KP’s editorial voice and brand standards, and that Prose would apply these highly exacting preferences across a wide variety of content while ensuring unimpeachable medical accuracy. Other requirements included adding relevant tags for KP’s internal taxonomy, selecting relevant ICD-10 codes for each article based on the topic, and delivering content within a structured template that could easily be uploaded to KP’s CMS, which would in turn populate its various digital assets.
Though we’d already passed an initial litmus test with a few completed medical articles, we still needed to prove that we could successfully carry out all of these tasks on a larger scale. To do so, we set up a contract for writing up to 60,000 words, with the understanding that upon successful completion, we’d expand the agreement for an additional 300,000 words of content.
When we reached the 60,000-word milestone, KP used our track record to get the contract extension approved in a timely way, and we moved on to building out KP’s library with helpful, medically accurate content.
Today, Prose has become KP’s go-to editorial agency partner providing accessible, world-class health content.
To service KP’s needs, we expanded our team from the trial to include a number of additional writers and editors with clinical backgrounds, all with either MD or RN qualifications and field experience. This experience not only helped them explain medical concepts accurately, but allowed us to match KP’s brand style and tone, which is an approachable, physician-to-patient voice that is trustworthy, nonjudgmental, and easy to understand.
Additionally, with the breadth and flexibility of our network, Prose is consistently able to expand and contract our resources based on KP’s needs from month to month.
As an organization, KP has extremely high standards, with an almost zero-tolerance policy for mistakes. As such, we secured proven writers for the account with experience at major hospitals such as Mount Sinai, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and New York Presbyterian hospitals, as well as experience writing for major brands such as Mayo Clinic. To go even further, we built a dedicated team of veteran editors – all with MDs, one of whom is also a chief editor at WebMD – who would rigorously oversee the content creation process and ensure we met all of KP’s standards.
With such a large team, it was also important to have a manager at Prose whom KP could work with as their main point of contact, rather than individually contacting specific writers and editors. We set up KP with executive-level account oversight, and meetings for status reports, updates, and feedback occur on a weekly basis. In a sign of the trust Prose has earned, KP even gave our team members dedicated email addresses and personal logins, which are normally reserved for full-time employees.
Today, the partnership between KP and Prose is efficient and effective, giving KP an easy way to quickly produce a large volume of expert-level content at scale, thereby providing immense value to their members. Along with improving the utility of their mobile apps, the content also helps boost KP’s SEO authority across a number of conditions.
Previously, KP was so bogged down by content requests that there wasn’t enough time in the day to create the content they needed. Prose has freed up their organization to focus on other important priorities.
We realize it’s no small thing to trust an outside organization to provide medical and health-related content for members, and we are proud that our serious, comprehensive, and physician-driven approach to content creation has earned KP’s confidence.