Best in Health Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

A health-only ballot in a state full of general best-of contests

Most readers-choice programs in South Carolina cast a wide net: Best of Charleston, Charleston Magazine's Best Of and the Columbia ballots from Columbia Metropolitan and Free Times all let readers vote on restaurants, shops and services of every kind. The Best in Health Awards takes the opposite approach. Run by HealthLink South Carolina, published as HealthLinks SC, it honors one vertical only: health, medical and wellness providers serving the state.

That focus shapes everything about the ballot. Its categories name acupuncturists, audiologists, dental practices, endodontists, ENT doctors, exercise programs, eye centers, GI specialists, martial arts programs, nurses, nursing schools, oncologists and optometrists, among a roster running well past a hundred in total. A nominee is a clinic, a practice or a provider, not a barbecue joint or a boutiques. The publication behind it is itself health-focused, carrying a Charleston, SC physicians copyright line and operating from Northcutt Blvd in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.

The host is also different. Where many state ballots run on national contest platforms, this one lives on the publication's own domain at healthlinkssc.com, with the previous-winners page serving as the program's permanent address. For a practice deciding where to invest outreach effort, that contrast matters: this ballot reaches exactly the audience that already reads health content, and nothing else.

Eight editions and an October window

The program's confirmed history runs from 2019 through 2026, eight editions without a gap, which places it among the longer-running health readers-choice ballots in the state. The publication's own winners pages carry lists for each of those years, and the 2026 cycle is described by HealthLinks SC as its most engaged-with iteration, drawing nearly 15,000 votes across its full category roster.

The clearest dated window comes from the 2021 contest: voting began October 1, 2020 and closed October 31, 2020, a full-month October window. That single confirmed cycle is the strongest evidence for when the ballot typically runs, and the publication thanks more than 5,500 readers for participating in that cycle's coverage. Day-level dates for later editions, and whether the window has shifted, are not printed on the previous-winners page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

What the winners pages also do not print is the rules layer: HealthLinks SC leaves the per-supporter ceiling, any daily-return policy and the eligibility terms off the page that carries the winners lists. A supporter planning a sustained push, or a practice weighing how its community can participate, therefore has to read those terms from the live ballot for the running year rather than from the program's historical pages.

How a supporter votes in the current cycle

Voting happens on the publication's own domain, which makes the sequence short. A supporter opens the Best in Health section of healthlinkssc.com, where the previous-winners page sits alongside the running year's ballot. From there the ballot presents its category roster, each entry naming South Carolina health providers, and the supporter selects the provider they want to recognize and submits the choice. No nomination fee and no purchase are part of casting a reader vote.

Because the host is the publication itself rather than a national contest platform, there is no third-party login wall between the reader and the ballot in the way platform-hosted contests often have. Whether the current cycle asks for an email, caps repeat visits or allows daily returns is not stated on the winners page, so the cycle's own terms must be read from the live ballot before planning repeat participation.

The October window is the practical deadline to plan around. The one confirmed cycle, the 2021 contest, ran the whole month of October 2020, opening on the first and closing on the thirty-first. A practice that wants its patients to participate should treat the start of October as the moment its outreach begins, and the end of the month as the hard stop, unless the live ballot for the running year prints different dates.

How this ballot sits beside its South Carolina neighbours

South Carolina carries a dense set of readers-choice programs, and the Best in Health Awards is the only one of them devoted entirely to health. Its closest structural neighbour is the Best of South Carolina Awards, a statewide general ballot, but that program spreads across every retail and service category while HealthLinks SC keeps its whole category roster inside medicine and wellness. The Charleston and Columbia ballots are city-scoped; this one covers the whole state under a single health-focused masthead.

The performing-arts side of the market is represented by the BroadwayWorld South Carolina Awards, which shares nothing with this program except the readers-choice mechanic. That contrast is the useful one for a nominee: a Charleston ENT practice, a Mount Pleasant wellness clinic or a statewide nursing school competes here against other health providers for an audience that arrived specifically to read about health, not against the full spread of local businesses.

It also means the outreach playbook differs. A general best-of nominee can pull votes from a broad customer base; a Best in Health nominee is asking patients, and the publication's health-reading audience, to recognize clinical care. The eight-year run from 2019 through 2026 gives the ballot an established winners archive, so a provider considering entry can see exactly who has won each category before, something the shorter-lived programs in the state cannot offer.

Strengthening support in a health readers-choice ballot

Because this ballot is a public vote on the publication's own domain, the support a practice can build is ordinary community mobilization: tell patients they are nominated, name the category, point them at the live ballot, and repeat the ask through the October window that the confirmed 2021 cycle established. A dental practice in Charleston and a statewide audiology group will run the same play at different scale, but both depend on the ballot's own dates, which should be read from the running year's page rather than assumed from 2020.

HealthLinks SC prints no ceiling on repeat votes and no eligibility terms on its winners page, so a practice should not build a plan on a voting frequency it cannot verify. What the organizer's structure does reward is breadth: with a roster this wide, a clinic can be recognized in several categories, and each one is a separate ask to the same patient base. Outreach methods that travel across readers-choice ballots generally, including timing and reminder cadence, are laid out in our guide to getting more votes online, and the organizer's published terms always decide what outside help is acceptable.