Stop Measuring Health Like Shoes: Insights from Our Founder's Newsletter

Healthcare communicators: the metrics you're being evaluated on were designed for someone trying to sell shoes. You deserve a better framework.

Our founder, Lucy Shores Kosturko, PhD, has spent the past month publishing a newsletter series, "Rethinking HealthComm Metrics," on how health organizations should best measure content impact. Here's a recap of the first five posts:

#1: The Measurement Trap

Most healthcare social media dashboards were built for retail brands: where the moment someone sees a post, they can click and buy. Health communication doesn't work that way. This newsletter uses cognitive science research to explain why the metrics we rely on are often measuring the wrong moments entirely.

#2: Not All Impact is Loud

Securing a “like” on a colorectal screening or flu vaccination post isn't the end goal: changing behavior is. This piece draws on the Health Belief Model to explain how passive exposure—someone stopping, reading, and moving on without any visible reaction—is often the mechanism behind actual behavior change. It also surfaces the specific metrics (saves, profile visits, non-follower reach) that capture this kind of quiet impact.

"If someone stops scrolling and spends time on your post and never presses 'like,' did that post fail? Or did it do exactly what it was designed to do? Most dashboards will count that as underperforming. Behavioral science would not."

#3: Reach Velocity > Engagement Rate

Two posts: one with a 1.1% engagement rate, one with 6%. The algorithm keeps distributing the first one day after day. The second flatlines. This edition explains why reach velocity (how a post's reach grows over time) is a more meaningful signal for health content than engagement, in determining whether your content is actually landing.

#4: Comparing Apples to Oranges: Measuring Content by Purpose

A flu shot education post will never "win" if it's being benchmarked against a therapy dog video. This post introduces a 2-step framework for tagging content by purpose and benchmarking within like-purpose cohorts. That way, you're centered on comparable data, measuring the right asset against the right standard.

#5: Aligned for Impact: Deriving KPIs Around Attention

This newsletter introduces Social Cascade's Sustained Attention Rate (SAR) metric, which was built specifically for healthcare marketers and measures how many people who saw a post actually stopped long enough to meaningfully consume it. The methodology is grounded in the reality that health communication outcomes (i.e., a vaccine is scheduled, screening is mentioned at a well visit) usually happen long after the initial scroll.

"The real call to action in health communication is often much quieter: Stop. Consume. Let this sink in. Move on. Remember later. What we’re really asking for here is sustained attention."

Subscribe for updates on the series: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/rethinking-healthcomm-metrics-7435736452451160066/