The Backstory

Dorian Harriston is the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Morehouse School of Medicine. She has been in the role for about six months now, having previously served in marketing and communications roles at Cedars-Sinai and The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Harriston, as her current position suggests, knows healthcare marketing and communications inside out, having built s...

Is Threads the place to be or, uh, boring and not worth it? The latest loud social media splash is Threads, a direct Twitter – now X – competitor from Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta. It was the fastest social media platform to 100 million users, but since then engagement has dropped precipitously. Which all leads to the question above. More specifically, how much should healthcare provider marketing and c...

Is the marketing funnel dead? That question started bouncing around among those at Jarrard Inc. who have backgrounds and specialize in healthcare marketing. It’s a provocative question, and provocative questions lead to sharp conversations that make for good podcasts. So, we asked two of those experienced healthcare marketers to have that conversation on the record. Pattie Cuen served at UCLA for...

Is it possible for a hospital to turn a small cybersecurity incident into a full-blown crisis based only on the words used and the approach to communicating about the event? What about the opposite – is it possible for a major incident to be mitigated and minimized with little reputational damage…just through effective communication? The answer to these rhetorical questions is, obviously, yes. Tha...

Can technology really augment and streamline healthcare operations and make the work of healthcare workers easier? Can technology help provider organizations actually manage their workforce more effectively? The answer to both of these questions is obviously, “Yes.” And despite significant progress over the past few years, it still seems at times that technology and digital tools complicate and co...

Physician and nurse burnout. It’s an issue that has been studied at an increasing rate over the past few years. It’s a ubiquitous topic in any discussion about challenges facing healthcare today. Addressing it is a moral and operational imperative – caregivers need to be cared for, most importantly for their own health and wellbeing and also for the sustainability of provider organizations. So, ho...

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, Amazon is a sprawling, complex company rife with prominent leaders, disparate initiatives, investments, plans, problems, things that work, things that don’t, with all those discordant messages playing out on the public stage. On the regular. Sound familiar? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Healthcare is playing Moneyball. It's a model that comes from baseball and uses a ruthless focus on analytics to help teams build lean, efficient squads that outperform their higher-spending rivals. But healthcare, like baseball, is science...and art. It’s the powerful combination that creates the care and the experience we all want when we seek care. The pursuit of efficiency can't lead down a ro...

Health systems have enjoyed the benefit of the doubt for a long time. That time may be ending. On one side are those who say, hospitals are “on track for their worst financial year in decades” and “will be forced to take drastic measures to reduce costs…including service line closures if not closing altogether.” On the other are those say “hospitals test the goodwill of Congress” as they endlessly...

Between regulatory hurdles and financial imperatives, getting a hospital merger or acquisition across the line is hard enough. But that’s just the start. A common aim of healthcare mergers is to integrate the organizations involved, yet bringing everyone together is its own jigsaw puzzle. All the pieces are there on the table, but how to bring them together, undergo the difficult change management...

Lee Aase is a digital healthcare pioneer and a social media expert. Now, he's a healthcare entrepreneur as co-founder of HELPCare Clinic, a membership-based direct primary care clinic. His current work is particularly relevant for this conversation because we talk about why there hasn't been an episode of DigitaLee recently: Lee's recent back surgery. We discuss how the referral process went, the...

This week's conversation was prompted by the ongoing discussion in healthcare about what constitutes "Charity Care," as well as President Biden's recent reluctance to define the current economic environment as a recession. The issue in both cases is not that President or hospital executives are wrong about their respective definitions. Instead, it's that definitions don't always feel accurate even...

Relatively recently, CMS, U.S. News & World Report, Lown Institute and, just this week the Joint Commission have signaled that how your organization is addressing health equity will be part of their dashboard for measuring and comparing hospital and health system performance. It’s a big push, long in the making. Energy has been building. According to a survey from the Institute for Healthcare Impr...

Change is hard and, these days, it’s compounding. Big disruptions layered with small pivots have led to a tough environment where “one more thing” is a burden, not an exciting opportunity. In this environment, healthcare executives and hospital board members are challenged with walking a fine line – guiding their organizations through disruption while acknowledging the uncertainty, making decision...

Welcome to DigitaLee, the podcast for healthcare marketers, where we look at the digital news, tools, tips and tricks for effective healthcare communications. This week, David Shifrin and Lee Aase talk about the news that Netflix is cracking on their long-standing policy of going ad free. Then Lee gives an update on the rent versus own debate – and that’s with regards to blogs and social media, no...

Welcome to DigitaLee, the podcast for healthcare marketers, where we look at the digital news, tools, tips and tricks for effective healthcare communications. This week, David Shifrin and Lee Aase look at an article from Fierce Pharma that describes a marketing and ad agency building out a dedicated team to work on diversity in advertising. Then, they check in on the conventional wisdom around way...

Welcome to DigitaLee, the podcast for healthcare marketers, where we look at the digital news, tools, tips and tricks for effective healthcare communications. This week, David Shifrin and Lee Aase are both confused by CVS moving into selling virtual healthcare goods. Once they get past that, they look at provider organizations planting the flag in the metaverse, and then it's the second of our two...

Today we have a full panel discussion with four top healthcare marketing and communications leaders discussing team dynamics and navigating the C-suite. It’s a conversation around how marketing leaders and their teams can use their seat at the table to not just be scribes for their hospital or health system but to serve as strategic leaders and advisors. The team today includes: Susan Alcorn, of c...

Like DigitaLee? Be sure to subscribe to the dedicated DigitaLee feed on Apple Podcasts. This week, we're looking at healthcare cybersecurity, reputation management – should you keep it in-house or outsource? And the first of a two-part miniseries on digital ROI for healthcare providers. We're looking at measuring ROI and how that differs between larger and smaller provider organizations. The story...

Welcome to DigitaLee, the podcast for healthcare marketers, where we look at the digital news, tools, tips and tricks for effective healthcare communications. This week, digital healthcare pioneer and now healthcare entrepreneur Lee Aase and David Shifrin are looking at digital-first healthcare - haven't we been talking about that for years, now? - whether more obscure social media sites like Parl...

This week on DigitaLee: digital healthcare pioneer and now healthcare entrepreneur Lee Aase are looking at three stories that matter for healthcare communications and healthcare marketing: the Spanish language misinformation crisis, Meta / Facebook's recent dive and Apple privacy rules. Be sure to subscribe directly to DigitaLee by searching on whatever platform your listening on now. Learn more a...

The conversation today is a segment of a longer one we recorded this week. In fact, we recorded in person, for the first time with all three of us together. However, considering the rapid devolution of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we’re bringing this segment as a standalone episode. We’re seeing a tension and getting questions from hospitals, health systems, healthcare leaders and marketing pros...

Today we've got a story on how doctors use YouTube to connect with patients and work towards health equity, the value of YouTube as a platform for healthcare providers, and for our tip of the day it's whether hospitals and physician practices should consider using Twitter and LinkedIn polls. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we're covering a story about the use of social media for finding health information, an overview of the audio platform Clubhouse, and considerations for how hospitals, health systems, doctor's offices and health services companies can build a good social media policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For healthcare providers, more and more high stakes moments take place online, or at least have a digital element to them. Because of that, Lee Aase and Jarrard Phillips Cate & Hancock have partnered to help healthcare leaders and marketing and comms pros keep track of what’s happening on the web and make sense of it all. Lee Aase just retired after a 21-year tenure at Mayo Clinic, where he most r...