WebMD Ignite Launches Pulse to Help Health Systems Thrive in an AI Efficiency-First Era

New end-to-end growth solution empowers health systems to reach the right consumers and providers, optimize spend and prove ROI as AI reshapes search and expectations.

NEWARK, N.J., Oct. 30, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- WebMD Ignite, the leading full-service growth partner for organizations in the healthcare industry, today announced the launch of Ignite Pulse™, a precision intelligence and activation solution purpose-built to help healthcare marketers succeed in an era of AI disruption and constrained budgets. Leveraging modern performance metrics such as response curves and persuadable-lift analysis, marketers move beyond traditional ROI to guide smarter marketing investments and optimize every dollar.

Search engine AI Overviews (AIOs) dominate health-related queries, driving down click-through rates and negatively impacting traditional search and media strategies. At the same time, reimbursement pressures and policy shifts continue to drain health system revenue, forcing marketers to do more with less. Ignite Pulse provides an integrated, data-driven approach designed to help health systems target smarter, move faster and prove value across the entire patient and healthcare provider (HCP) journey.

"Healthcare marketing is facing a perfect storm of AI disruption, budget scrutiny and rising expectations from patients and providers," said Ann Bilyew, EVP, Health and President, Healthcare Solutions Group at WebMD Ignite. "With Ignite Pulse, we give health systems predictive intelligence, creative precision and turnkey execution together with the largest clinical-grade content corpus in the world to reach the right audiences and demonstrate measurable impact – all within the guardrails of a client's HIPAA and privacy requirements and patient trust."

Purpose-built for healthcare growth
Ignite Pulse combines de-identified condition, conversion, demographic, and health interest data to build predictive segments that reach consumers and HCPs with clinically grounded, performance-optimized campaigns. Key components include:

• Ignite GeoIQ™ – Pinpoints real health demand by market, using catchment modeling and condition-level insights to tailor outreach and minimize wasted spend. Unlike traditional geographic targeting that relies on ZIP codes or service area assumptions, GeoIQ uses machine learning to model where consumers actually seek care, down to condition-specific referral patterns. This helps health systems prioritize the right neighborhoods, allocate resources based on marginal ROI to avoid overspending in low-yield areas and uncover growth opportunities that might otherwise be hidden. For healthcare marketers under increasing budget pressure, GeoIQ allows spend to be allocated based on true demand rather than blunt geography.
• Pulse Segments – Blends clinical and behavioral signals to create audience strategies with higher efficiency, including unmatched scale among U.S. health-focused consumers and consented reach to 3.2 million HCPs. Segments are informed by analysis of de-identified real-world healthcare encounters, WebMD and Medscape interest data, demographic consumer data and claims-verified conditions, making them far more precise than third-party lists or generic demographic models. For example, Ignite Pulse can create audiences that reach people at the most actionable moments after they have exhibited behaviors and indicators of an active orthopedic referral, rather than those that are just casually reading about knee pain. By uniting this level of precision with unmatched reach, Pulse Segments reduce waste, improve conversion and give health systems an edge in engaging both consumers and referring providers.
• Ignite's Media Mix Modeling (MMM) - quantifies the ROI of every marketing channel and prescribes the optimal spend allocation to maximize campaign outcomes. Our proprietary campaign‑fingerprint algorithm applies AI/ML to link model inputs with the most relevant historical campaigns, making outputs quick, accurate, and reliable. The result is actionable, scenario‑based media plans and continuous real-time optimization that reduce wasted spend, increase return on ad spend, and scale performance across channels.

Pulse also provides turnkey activation, performance tracking, and AI-driven optimizations. Health systems can launch full funnel, omnichannel campaigns across both consumer and HCP audiences, with award-winning creative backed by WebMD's clinical credibility and optimized to drive conversions. Additionally, every campaign is continuously benchmarked against audience quality standards, supported with predictive impact analysis and tied directly to ROI and referral outcomes, ensuring that engagement efforts not only reach the right people but also deliver measurable business value.

Built for speed, trust and outcomes
Engineered specifically for health system workflows, Ignite Pulse can work with your HIPAA and Privacy requirements. By processing data in a secure clean room with rigorous privacy controls, it transforms de-identified claims and conversion insights into predictive patterns that drive growth. This enables marketers to confidently launch campaigns faster, prove effectiveness sooner and build trust with patients and clinicians alike.

Early Ignite Pulse adopters are seeing measurable improvements in appointment conversions, service-line growth and ROI. Campaigns powered by Ignite Pulse demonstrate 15% higher spend efficiency compared to third-party segments and up to 25% more relevance through claims-verified condition targeting.

Meeting industry needs
The launch of Pulse reflects WebMD Ignite's broader mission to help health systems address systemic challenges, including declining reimbursement, workforce shortages and the rising cost of digital engagement. Research suggests that AIOs now appear in 84% of healthcare-related searches, a number that's grown by 20% in just a few months, which is decimating clickthrough rates for online search. At the same time, 56% of digital marketing budgets still go to paid search, underscoring the urgency for marketers to diversify media strategies and invest in precision targeting. Pulse helps health systems not only preserve visibility in an AI-first search environment but also stretch marketing budgets further while demonstrating accountable growth.

WebMD Ignite is the only full-service growth partner built exclusively for healthcare, combining managed services, a data and audience library, and a marketing technology platform all in one. By uniting proprietary healthcare data, advanced martech capabilities, creative and strategic expertise, and the industry's most comprehensive and trusted clinically validated health content, WebMD Ignite delivers everything a healthcare provider needs under one roof.

About WebMD Ignite
WebMD Ignite, a division of WebMD and Internet Brands, is the premier growth partner for healthcare organizations. As industry experts, we empower decision-making insights across the entire health journey by integrating our proprietary technology, unrivaled reach, strategic targeting, business intelligence, and vast educational resources. Our solutions are purpose-built to solve healthcare industry challenges to boost acquisition, build loyalty, and ignite action that optimizes health outcomes and operational efficiencies.

About WebMD Health Corp.
WebMD, an Internet Brands company, is at the heart of the digital health revolution that is transforming the healthcare experience for consumers, patients, health care professionals, employers, health plans, and health systems. Through public and private online portals, mobile platforms, and health-focused publications, WebMD delivers leading-edge content and digital services that enable and improve decision-making, support and motivate health actions, streamline and simplify the health care journey, and improve patient care.

The WebMD Health Network includes WebMD Health, Medscape, WebMD Ignite (encompassing Krames, The Wellness Network, and Mercury Healthcare), Jobson Healthcare Information, MediQuality, Frontline, Vitals Consumer Services, Aptus Health, PulsePoint, MedicineNet, eMedicineHealth, RxList, OnHealth, Medscape Education, and other owned WebMD sites. WebMD®, Medscape®, CME Circle®, Medpulse®, eMedicine®, MedicineNet®, theheart.org® and RxList® are among the trademarks of WebMD Health Corp. or its subsidiaries.

SOURCE WebMD Ignite