Resources

HCIC Interview

Paul Matsen, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer of the Cleveland Clinic shares his journey from a non-healthcare background into his role as CMO, emphasizing the importance of digital evolution in healthcare marketing. Paul discusses the significant growth in digital engagement at Cleveland Clinic, from internet overhauls to content marketing strategies that have catapulted the organization to over a billion online sessions annually. With a focus on integrating paid, owned, and earned channels, Paul highlights the Clinic's commitment to becoming a digital-first enterprise. They also discuss leveraging AI for content creation, marketing efficiencies, and the adaptation to global audience needs, as showcased by the Clinic's expansion into the London healthcare market. This podcast offers a glimpse into how a leading healthcare institution embraces technology and content to maintain its authority in the healthcare industry and continuously evolves its marketing strategies to meet the challenges of the digital age.

HCIC Interview

In the second episode of "Live from HCIC 2023," Dan Dunlop, Co-Owner, Principal of Jennings a recent inductee into the Healthcare Internet Hall of Fame, engages in a candid conversation about the transformative power of nurturing cultures within healthcare organizations. As a seasoned healthcare marketer and strategist, Dan underlines the importance of shifting from a traditionally corporate, almost militaristic approach to one that emphasizes care and support, particularly in the context of employee retention and recruitment. He shares personal anecdotes, including his own health scare, to underscore the urgency of this cultural shift. Dan argues for a "language of love" in healthcare, advocating for patient-centered care and authentic communication, which he believes should be the new norm in the industry. This insightful podcast episode not only celebrates Dan's contributions to the field but also challenges health system leaders to reimagine their approach to healthcare delivery and marketing.

HCIC Interview

Selima Khan, a senior healthcare marketing and communications executive, joins Live from HCIC 2024 to spotlight the critical role of marketing leaders as connectors and collaborators. She explores how health systems can better listen to their communities—through data, social insights, and operational channels—and transform that knowledge into meaningful action. From addressing access and mental health to social determinants of health, Selima emphasizes the power of collective problem-solving. This conversation is a masterclass in why marketers must step up as strategic leaders in cross-functional partnerships, especially during times of transformation.

HCIC Interview

In this episode of Live from HCIC 2024, Ben Dillon, CEO of Geonetric, unpacks the evolving complexity of digital experience in healthcare. As health systems grow through mergers and consumer expectations skyrocket, the traditional digital strategies no longer suffice. Ben discusses why websites remain foundational but must now be complemented by personalized tools, AI-powered search, and external brand visibility. He also explores the organizational challenges-politics, governance, and prioritization-that often block progress. If you're wrestling with where to focus your digital strategy next, this episode provides the clarity and strategic grounding you need.

HCIC Interview

Matt Gove, Chief Marketing Officer at QuickMD and former marketing leader at Summit Health and Piedmont Healthcare, joins Live from HCIC 2024 to discuss the explosive growth of direct-to-consumer healthcare. He shares insights on how telehealth is reshaping patient expectations, why health systems need to rethink their digital strategies, and what traditional providers can learn from disruptors in the space. With telehealth adoption accelerating and patients demanding more convenience, this conversation is a wake-up call for healthcare marketers looking to stay ahead of the curve.

HCIC Interview

Telehealth has transformed from an emergency solution to a preferred mode of care, but what comes next? Andy Chang, Chief Marketing Officer at UChicago Medicine, joins Live from HCIC 2024 to discuss the evolving role of virtual care. He unpacks how consumer expectations are reshaping telehealth adoption, the importance of interoperability in digital health, and what health systems must do to compete with direct-to-consumer telehealth providers. If you're navigating the next phase of digital health, Andy's insights will help you rethink your strategy.

HCIC Interview

On Live from HCIC 2024, Laura Lee Jones, CEO of LionShare, discusses the critical role of data in modern healthcare marketing. She explores how health systems can use first-party data to drive consumer engagement, refine marketing strategies, and deliver truly personalized experiences. Laura Lee shares best practices for leveraging CRM and CDP platforms, along with insights on shifting from transactional marketing to long-term consumer relationship management. If you want to future-proof your healthcare marketing strategy, this episode is essential listening.

HCIC Interview

Val Lopez, VP of Marketing Operations at Baptist Health South Florida, joins Live from HCIC 2024 to break down the realities of implementing personalization in healthcare. From the challenges of HIPAA compliance to the practical use of behavioral signals for one-to-one marketing, Val shares lessons learned from Baptist Health's multi-year personalization journey. He introduces the concept of "tummy time" a crawl-before-you-walk approach to personalization and explains how healthcare organizations can start small and scale their strategies effectively. If you're looking to make personalization a reality in your health system, this episode is packed with actionable insights.

HCIC Interview

Chris Pace, VP of Digital Marketing at Banner Health and a newly inducted member of the Healthcare Internet Hall of Fame, joins Live from HCIC 2024 to challenge the way healthcare organizations think about digital access. He critiques the outdated "digital front door" model, advocating for a more connected, consumer-driven approach that aligns with how people actually seek care. From integrating data seamlessly across call centers, websites, and marketing efforts to leveraging a Customer Data Platform (CDP) for true personalization, Chris shares a bold vision for the future of digital healthcare experiences. If you’re looking for a fresh perspective on digital transformation, this conversation is a must-listen.

HCIC Interview

In this episode of Live from HCIC 2024, Anna Clement, Head of Industry for Sirius XM Media's Healthcare Vertical, dives into the evolving role of audio marketing in healthcare. While consumers spend 31% of their media time with audio, healthcare marketers allocate less than 2% of their budgets to this powerful medium. Anna discusses the opportunities digital audio presents, the shift from traditional radio to hyper-personalized streaming content, and how healthcare organizations can leverage AI-driven targeting and dynamic ad insertions to connect with audiences in a more engaging way. If you've overlooked audio as a marketing channel, this episode will change your perspective.

HCIC Interview

Jenny Bristow is the CEO and founder of Hedy & Hopp, a full-service healthcare marketing agency celebrating its 10th year. In this conversation from HCIC 2025, she talks through what she's hearing across the industry: every healthcare marketing team is being asked to do more with a smaller budget, and the answer isn't a new tool. It's using what's already paid for.

Her biggest focus right now is Epic. Hedy & Hopp became the first marketing agency to send staff to Verona to get certified in Epic platforms, including MyChart. The reason: Epic has built-in messaging, analytics, and patient engagement functionality that most marketing teams aren't touching. She explains how UTM parameters can be pushed into Epic to track campaign conversions through to actual appointments, giving marketers the ROI proof they've struggled to produce.

She also makes the case for rethinking what "marketing" means inside a health system. The conversation has shifted from top-of-funnel acquisition to the full patient journey, and the data to understand that journey, from claims data to persona research, is already accessible to most marketing teams.

On AI, she's direct: Hedy & Hopp uses it to automate manual internal processes, not to write patient-facing content. She expects healthcare marketing to get more human-led, not less, and points out that even ChatGPT has been hiring senior copywriters.

HCIC Interview

Matt Cyr founded Loop AI Agency after years leading digital teams in healthcare and higher ed, then agency strategy. His focus is helping marketers adopt AI in practical, defensible ways. In this conversation from HCIC 2025, he talks through where healthcare marketing actually stands with AI adoption — and why the headline that healthcare is the fastest-adopting regulated industry doesn't tell the full story.

The clinical and research side is moving fast. The marketing side is not. Cyr sees the gap clearly: leaders know AI matters, but the distance between knowing and doing is still wide. The reasons are familiar — shrinking budgets, data privacy concerns in a regulated environment, and a fear of backing the wrong tool. His answer is consistent: start small, solve a real pain point, and treat it as an experiment rather than a commitment.

He points to concrete examples from the conference, including a marketer at Arkansas Children's Hospital who built her own custom AI tool to measure media campaign impact, entirely in-house. That's the model he's pushing — specific, measurable, built around a problem the team already has.

The name Loop AI is deliberate. Cyr's core belief is that AI only delivers value when humans stay in the loop. As tools get faster and more capable, he sees the organizations that have been experimenting — even imperfectly — pulling ahead of those still waiting for certainty that isn't coming.

HCIC Interview

Pam Landis is SVP of Digital Engagement at Hackensack Meridian Health, where her team owns the full digital patient journey: acquisition, activation, access, and adoption. She started in 1995, when her boss asked her to figure out the World Wide Web and the department server lived in her cubicle. In this conversation from HCIC 2025, she talks through what three decades in healthcare technology has taught her about leadership, women in tech, and what to look for when you're building a team.

Her hiring philosophy is direct: she wants people who are intensely curious and relentlessly competent. She tells the story of a woman she met through her son's school who had been out of the paid workforce for 19 years. Landis gave her a six-month freelance project. She finished it in six weeks. Landis hired her. The point: you can teach technology. You can't teach how to solve problems.

On AI, she credits a line from Mona Bassett of Intermountain Health that stopped her mid-session: AI is an enabler, not a strategy. Landis sees it playing out most clearly in patient access, where AI-powered voice agents handle routine scheduling so that contact center staff can move from schedulers to care navigators.

Her advice to anyone new to the industry: respect the work that came before you. The organizations you're walking into have been serving patients for decades. Learn that first, then be the person who helps them get ready for what's next.

HCIC Interview

Sandra Mackey is Chief Marketing Officer at Bon Secours Mercy Health, one of the largest Catholic health systems in the US, with operations across Ireland, Peru, South Sudan and the Philippines. In this conversation from HCIC 2025, recorded before the conference opened, she talks through 30 years in healthcare marketing, what a decade outside the industry taught her about consumer engagement, and what she thinks young professionals need to hear right now.

Her sharpest reframe is on language. She doesn't like "patient-centered" because it positions the patient as a passive recipient. She prefers patient-led, the idea that patients are already making decisions and health systems need to walk alongside them, not direct them. That shift, she argues, is the most significant cultural change she's seen in three decades.

She also pushes back on the safe road. Her advice to early-career marketers: be bold, bring the big ideas, and don't treat failure as something to avoid. Her view is that if you're not failing, you're not stretching, and if you're not stretching, you're not learning anything your organization doesn't already know.

The conversation closes on the John A. Eudes Award, which Mackey received at HCIC 2025, one of the industry's most recognized honors in healthcare marketing. She describes what it means to have her name alongside someone she considers a true pioneer, and what she thinks honoring that legacy actually requires: pushing boundaries, asking hard questions, and being unapologetically passionate about the people your organization serves.

HCIC Interview

Stephanie Wierwille is EVP of Strategy and Innovation at BPD, a healthcare marketing and communications firm. She came to healthcare eight years ago after building her career in retail, travel and technology. In this conversation from HCIC 2025, she introduces a framework her team has developed working with hospitals and health systems on AI literacy: the Edison-Einstein divide.

The Edison approach is incremental. Take something that exists, make it faster, cheaper, more scalable. That's where most healthcare marketing teams are right now, using AI to write emails, produce content, and clean up data. Wierwille isn't dismissing that. She's arguing it's not enough.

The Einstein approach starts with a different question. Instead of how do we do this better, it asks what could we do that has never been done before. Her example: after a diagnosis, a patient walks out of a short appointment with their mind racing, then spends hours searching for answers online. What if, instead, AI delivered a fully personalized experience, trained on health education data, calibrated to that patient's language, frame of mind and social determinants of health? Not a better FAQ page. Something that didn't exist before.

She's practical about the gap between the vision and what's buildable today. Her team runs sessions that bring operations, strategy and physician liaisons into the same room, map the boldest version of the idea, then work backwards to what's actually doable in 90 days. The dream comes first. The constraints come second. The 90-day step is what moves it forward.

Her session at HCIC 2025, Rethink, Rebuild, Reinvent, ran that exercise live, with a custom GPT trained to help teams dream big and then scope down. The point, she says, is that dreaming is 80% of the work. Silicon Valley does it every day. Healthcare needs to start.