Empathy in Healthcare Marketing and Telehealth: Closing the Gap

Healthcare teams often say the patient is at the heart of everything they do – yet clinician empathy tends to decline over a career, and the emotional distance between HCP, marketer and patient is often widest in telehealth. Empathy in healthcare marketing and telehealth means helping people genuinely feel what patients experience, not just know about it. 

Key takeaways 

• Clinician empathy declines significantly from the third year of medical school onward. 

• A hot–cold empathy gap makes it hard for anyone who isn’t in pain to imagine a patient’s experience. 

• Let people feel it, don’t just tell them about it – the idea works in pharma marketing and aged care alike. 

Why Does Empathy Matter in Healthcare Marketing and Telehealth? 

Because clinician empathy tends to erode over the course of a career, and that gap can, at times, lead to sub-optimal care. A longitudinal study at Jefferson Medical College found empathy scores held steady through the first two years of medical school, then declined significantly from the third year onward². A broader systematic review found the same pattern, most pronounced as clinicians enter full-time practice⁴. 

Being a clinician is a tough job, and it’s understandable that people disconnect to prevent emotional overload. In telehealth, where interactions happen through a screen, that emotional distance can grow even wider. 

Why Is It So Hard to Imagine a Patient’s Pain? 

Behavioural scientists call it a hot–cold empathy gap: people in a calm, pain-free state consistently underestimate how intense someone else’s pain, fear or breathlessness is³. It’s hard to imagine living with Parkinson’s or migraine when you’ve never experienced anything close to it. Emotion plays a big part in healthcare decisions, as we explore in moments of truth and irrational decisions. 

What Is Tele-Empathy, and How Is It Different From Telehealth? 

Tele-empathy uses technology to transmit a patient’s symptoms so that a healthy person can feel a close approximation of them; telehealth is the remote delivery of healthcare. The lesson for telehealth: technology can close emotional distance as well as physical distance. 

One example is SymPulse, developed by Klick Labs, which uses recorded muscle-activity data from real Parkinson’s patients so a caregiver, clinician or family member can feel the patient’s tremors in real time⁵. 

Watch: a Parkinson’s patient uses SymPulse to transmit his tremors to a family member. 

Parkinson’s patient Jim Smerdon uses the SymPulse™ Tele-Empathy Device to wirelessly transmit his tremors to his identical twin brother Pat for the first time. 

Does Feeling a Patient’s Symptoms Build Empathy? Three Examples 

Yes – simulating the patient experience has been used to build empathy with caregivers, consumers and care workers. 

Example 1: SymPulse for Parkinson’s. Beyond empathy, tools like this can show how symptoms ease with the right medication⁵. 

Example 2: The Migraine Experience. In 2016, GSK’s Excedrin brand released an augmented and virtual reality migraine simulator letting non-sufferers experience the light sensitivity, visual disturbance and pain of a migraine⁶. It drew roughly 19 million views and three Cannes Lions Health awards. 

Watch: a migraine sufferer’s mother tries Excedrin’s migraine simulator. 

Elisabeth is a longtime migraine sufferer – her mother, Catherine, tries Excedrin’s migraine simulator to feel what her daughter experiences. 

Example 3: Aged simulation suit in Australia. Researchers at the University of Sydney developed a suit of straps, weights and braces that reproduce the physical experience of ageing. Adelaide’s ACH Group used it to train around 800 aged-care workers in compassion and person-centred care¹. 

Want your campaign or telehealth service to feel more human? DeltaMV’s Healthcare Behavioural Strategy team can help. 

How to Build Empathy Into Healthcare Marketing and Telehealth: 4 Steps 

1. Start from the lived experience – what patients feel day to day, not just their clinical profile. 

2. Let people feel it. Simulations, video and first-person stories close the empathy gap better than statistics. 

3. Show the impact of treatment – how symptoms ease with the right medication. 

4. Design empathy into the channel. See why human insight is key to pharma omnichannel success and why AI in healthcare strategy still needs a human lens. 

What Are the Limitations of Empathy Simulations? 

• They approximate, not replicate the full lived experience. 

• Reach isn’t behaviour change: views and awards show engagement, not changes in care. 

Frequently Asked Questions 

What is tele-empathy? 

Technology that transmits a patient’s symptoms – such as Parkinson’s tremors – so a healthy person can feel a close approximation of them. 

Is tele-empathy the same as telehealth? 

No. Telehealth is the remote delivery of care; tele-empathy helps people feel what patients feel. 

Next Steps: Bring Empathy Into Your Healthcare Marketing and Telehealth Strategy 

As healthcare marketers, we say the patient is at the heart of everything we do so often that it can become cliché. Tools like these are a tangible reminder of what that means in practice. DeltaMV’s “Make it Emotional” lever moves a team’s thinking past a features-and-data pitch to the real emotional stakes behind a patient’s or physician’s decision. 

Want to build genuine emotional resonance into your next healthcare marketing or telehealth initiative? Get in touch with DeltaMV’s Healthcare Behavioural Strategy team. 

References 

1. Bennett, P., Burns, R., Champion, S., & Gordon, S. (2022). Effectiveness of an aged simulation training suit to support development of compassion and person-centred care in the aged-care workforce. Australasian Journal on Ageing, 41(2), 314–324. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajag.13057 

2. Hojat, M., Vergare, M. J., Maxwell, K., Brainard, G., Herrine, S. K., Isenberg, G. A., Veloski, J., & Gonnella, J. S. (2009). The devil is in the third year: A longitudinal study of erosion of empathy in medical school. Academic Medicine, 84(9), 1182–1191. https://journals.lww.com/academicmedicine/fulltext/2009/09000/the_devil_is_in_the_third_year__a_longitudinal.12.aspx 

3. Loewenstein, G. (2005). Hot-cold empathy gaps and medical decision making. Health Psychology, 24(4, Suppl.), S49–S56. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16045419/ 

4. Neumann, M., Edelhäuser, F., Tauschel, D., Fischer, M. R., Wirtz, M., Woopen, C., Haramati, A., & Scheffer, C. (2011). Empathy decline and its reasons: A systematic review of studies with medical students and residents. Academic Medicine, 86(8), 996–1009. https://journals.lww.com/academicmedicine/fulltext/2011/08000/empathy_decline_and_its_reasons__a_systematic.24.aspx 

5. Palanica, A., Thommandram, A., & Fossat, Y. (2018). Eliciting clinical empathy via transmission of patient-specific symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. Cogent Psychology, 5(1), Article 1526459. https://doi.org/10.1080/23311908.2018.1526459 

6. PR Newswire. (2016). Excedrin unveils “The Migraine Experience” – world’s first augmented reality migraine simulator designed to foster empathy for migraine sufferers [Press release]. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/excedrin-unveils-the-migraine-experience–worlds-first-augmented-reality-migraine-simulator-designed-to-foster-empathy-for-migraine-sufferers-300246852.html