A Brave New Podcast

Claire Bolger is the Senior Director of Marketing and Growth at Health2047. In this role, she leads brand, PR, and strategic communications for the firm while advising portfolio companies and corporate partners on growth strategy, commercialization, and innovation.

Prior to joining Health2047, Claire was a consultant for early-stage startups and has worked with corporate clients ranging from Planned Parenthood to Stanford Medicine. As Assistant Vice President of Marketing at EmblemHealth, Claire built and led a department responsible for marketing, PR, market insights, and events across the company's portfolio of health plans and provider practices. Claire holds an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a BA from McGill University.

What you'll learn about in this episode:

• Health2047's mission and approach to investing

• How Health2047's venture studio model differs from traditional venture capital firms

• Claire's approach to go-to-market, starting with audience definition and personas through to specific strategies and tactics - with everything focused on solving actual customer problems

• Why an early stage startup, and especially the brand voice, must sound like the founder so that the authenticity of the brand can carry on through to things like investment pitches.

• How founders can build trust in the healthcare space today

• The importance of defining the brand story for employees

• Claire's one recommendation for founders this quarter: run an AI visibility audit

Additional resources:

• Josh Dougherty on LinkedIn

• Claire Bolger on LinkedIn

• Health2047's website

• A Brave New's website

• Josh Dougherty's speaking site

Nada Pupovac is VP of Marketing Strategy at Animo Sano Psychiatry, where she leads a multidisciplinary marketing team and develops strategies to support the organization's growth, reach, and mission. Her work sits at the intersection of marketing, healthcare, and mental health, with a focus on building ethical, human-centered approaches that connect people with the care and resources they need.

At Animo Sano, Nada works cross-functionally with clinical and operational teams to translate complex mental-health services into clear, accessible, and meaningful communication for patients, clinicians, and the wider community. Her work spans the broader Animo Sano marketing strategy as well as the development of educational and community initiatives, including the Thriving with ADHD podcast, which she hosts and produces, and the Adults with ADHD Meetup – Educational Group for Adults with ADHD, which she facilitates on behalf of Animo Sano Psychiatry.

Through these initiatives, Nada brings together strategic marketing, mental-health education, community building, and storytelling to help make mental-health information and support more accessible. Her perspective offers a practical look at the opportunities and challenges of marketing in the mental-health and healthcare space, while keeping the needs of patients, clinicians, and communities at the center.

What you'll learn about in this episode:

• Why branding in behavioral health goes beyond logos and colors to brand voice and the experience patients have with you
• How Animo Sano builds trust by addressing first-appointment anxiety and refusing to make false guarantees
• Why marketing can't compensate for quality of care, and how word of mouth fueled the practice's early growth
• The four staples of Animo Sano's patient acquisition (organic search, paid ads, word of mouth, and referrals) and how local SEO and paid ads feed each other
• How Animo Sano pairs Collaborative Care partnerships with an independent brand presence to expand access in rural areas
• How a "pet project" ADHD podcast with 25,000+ downloads and a 3,000+ member meetup became patient acquisition channels
• How to get providers comfortable on camera, and why repurposing short-form video to YouTube Shorts made views skyrocket
• Where AI fits in Animo Sano's marketing, why human and medical review still matter, and the early signs of AI fatigue

Additional resources:

• Josh Dougherty on LinkedIn
• Josh Dougherty's speaking site
• Nada Pupovac on LinkedIn
• Animo Sano Psychiatry
• Thriving with ADHD podcast
• Healthy Mind, Happy Soul podcast
• Adults with ADHD – Education Group on Meetup
• A Brave New's Website

Chris Prudhomme is a digital marketing leader with 10+ years of growth, brand, and performance experience. He is currently Head of Marketing at Zivian Health, a B2B healthcare SaaS company that provides compliance infrastructure for organizations deploying advanced practice provider (NP & PA) workforces.

Chris began his career on the agency side as a copywriter and has grown into a hands-on marketing leader with range across content, SEO, paid media, and creative strategy, working in industries from social innovation to hospitality. His focus has increasingly centered on healthcare and workforce management: before Zivian, he led digital marketing at Gifted Healthcare, a national clinical staffing company, where he built the demand engine that drew thousands of clinician applicants a year. Chris now applies a blend of his creative roots and performance rigor to one of healthcare's most complex, trust-driven categories.

What you'll learn about in this episode:

• How Zivian Health uses brand to make complex regulatory and compliance challenges feel simpler, clearer, and more manageable.
• Why trust is one of the most important differentiators for healthtech brands and how branding helps earn it before the sales conversation begins.
• How to simplify complex healthtech value propositions by focusing on the human emotions behind the problem, not just the technical features.
• How memorable healthtech brands can be distinctive without sacrificing credibility, professionalism, or trust.
• How Zivian Health is positioning itself around the shift in how healthcare organizations build and manage their clinical workforce.
• Why brand building and performance marketing should work together, and how a strong brand can make performance marketing efforts work harder.
• How niche healthtech companies can prioritize the right marketing channels when their total addressable market is highly specialized.
• What healthcare brands need to consider as AI becomes more embedded in healthcare—and why clinical oversight and trust will be critical to responsible adoption.

Additional resources:

• Chris Prudhomme on LinkedIn
• Zivian Health's website
• Josh Dougherty on LinkedIn
• Josh Dougherty's speaking site
• A Brave New's website

As a marketing leader and passionate advocate for earlier cancer detection, Jaime LaMontagne has spent her career helping bring breakthrough medical innovations from idea to impact. She is currently leading the launch of Certitude™, the first blood-based test designed to detect breast cancer—work driven by a simple but powerful belief: detecting cancer earlier can change everything. Jaime has helped introduce some of the most transformative technologies in modern healthcare, including the Micra® leadless pacemaker at Medtronic—a device so small it fits inside the heart—and cancer diagnostics like Cologuard® and Oncotype DX® at Exact Sciences, which reshaped how cancer is screened and treated. Known for building high-performing teams and turning complex science into trusted brands, Jaime thrives at the intersection of innovation and human impact. Nothing motivates her more than helping ensure life-saving technologies reach the people who need them most.

What you'll learn about in this episode:

• How Astrin Biosciences is approaching the challenge of bringing a new diagnostic to the market.
• Why diagnostic brands need to build trust long before a patient needs to use your product.
• How Certitude is being positioned to build awareness and confidence around breast cancer detection.
• Why reaching patients can be just as important as educating physicians to drive diagnostic adoption.
• How to leverage marketing to reframe the cancer testing story around reassurance and peace of mind.
• What it takes to adopt a new diagnostic into an existing clinical workflow, making it clear who orders the test, and what happens next.
• How advocacy groups and AI can help emerging brands build awareness and credibility with communities already invested in the issue.

Additional resources:

• Jaime LaMontagne on LinkedIn
• Astrin Biosciences' website
• Josh Dougherty on LinkedIn
• Josh Dougherty's speaking site
• A Brave New's website

Aeron Povey is Vice President of Marketing at Nasco Healthcare, where she leads global marketing and works across product strategy, commercialization, brand, and business growth.

With a background spanning both marketing and operations, Aeron built her career on the agency side, working across industries and helping organizations solve complex business challenges before joining Nasco Healthcare.

Today, her work is focused on understanding the people Nasco serves and translating those insights into better products, stronger positioning, and meaningful commercial strategies. She is particularly passionate about building real relationships, asking good questions, and creating the kind of trust that gets to what people really think and need.

Outside of work, Aeron can usually be found on a golf course or cheering on her kids from the sidelines.

What you'll learn about in this episode:

• How Nasco Healthcare is evolving their brand from a product-focused approach to a clearer, more customer-centered brand.
• How Nasco Healthcare is helping prepare healthcare professionals for critical moments through education.
• The importance of research before rebranding and how months of listening to customers, teams, and stakeholders shaped Nasco's brand transformation.
• What makes a healthcare brand memorable and the critical roles of substance, personality, and credibility in branding.
• How simplicity, personality, and usability can create more value than adding more features and complexity.
• How customer insights shape positioning from product-focused to customer-focused messaging.
• Why a successful brand shift goes beyond marketing to influence products, commercialization, and organizational change.

Additional resources:

• Aeron Povey on LinkedIn
• Nasco Healthcare's Website
• Josh Dougherty on LinkedIn
• Josh Dougherty's speaking site
• A Brave New's Website

Hillery Smith Shay, MBA is chief marketing and experience officer, senior vice president of communications at Children's Minnesota. Hillery Shay joined Children's Minnesota in 2021, as VP of marketing and communications and is now chief marketing and experience officer, senior vice president of communications. She provides strategic direction for organizational marketing and communications. She is also responsible for defining and building an organization-wide experience strategy. Ms. Shay brings nearly 25 years of leadership experience in health care and mass communication, with a proven track record of success leading national and global public health campaigns and marketing initiatives. Prior to her role at Children's Minnesota, Shay served in leadership roles at Abbott Labs leading professional education, marketing, communications and scientific congress strategy. She also served as a journalist and team leader for more than 10 years at the Associated Press and the Baltimore Sun, including as a photojournalist covering two sitting U.S. presidents as well as the Pentagon on 9/11. Ms. Shay earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Haverford College in Pennsylvania and a master's degree in business administration from Bethel University in Minnesota. She is an active member of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, inc.

• How Children's Minnesota faced and overcame a significant branding challenge after shortening their name, leading to market confusion with other similarly named experts in their market.
• How adding "The Kid Experts" to the Children's Minnesota brand was implemented to create clear differentiation and clarify their identity in the market.
• The steps that Children's Minnesota took to safeguard their brand identity.
• How the repositioning strategy resulted in measurable improvements in brand perception, evidenced by a significant increase in their NRC Health image and reputation score over a three-year period.
• The crucial role of consistent implementation of the "The Kid Experts" branding across all touchpoints, including physical hospital and clinic spaces, for reinforcing the new brand identity.
• How the "Raise Them Up" campaign emerged from community trauma and served as a powerful example of a brand connecting with its audience through hope and advocacy for children.
• How Children's Minnesota demonstrated a commitment to inclusive branding by intentionally reaching diverse communities in their service area through translated materials and tailored outreach efforts.
• About the tangible results of the "Raise Them Up" campaign in engaging diverse communities, including increased clinic visits requiring translation and higher conversion rates for targeted advertising.
• About the importance of a long-term perspective in brand building, showcasing the multi-year effort to reposition and strengthen the Children's Minnesota brand.

• Hillery Smith Shay on LinkedIn
• Children's Minnesota's Website
• Josh Dougherty on LinkedIn
• Josh Dougherty's speaking site
• A Brave New's Website

Jennifer Lazarz is Director of Marketing at Medical Informatics Corp. (MIC), where she now runs the company's entire marketing function as a sole practitioner. Her work spans brand strategy, demand generation, content, and go-to-market execution for the Sickbay Clinical Platform, an FDA-cleared patient monitoring solution used by health systems nationwide.

Since joining MIC in 2022, Jennifer has grown the company's digital footprint from a minimal presence into a full content and demand engine, driving a 6x increase in website traffic and a 400% increase in content output through an integrated strategy spanning thought leadership, video, and social media. She works closely with sales leadership on pipeline strategy and is currently building new structures for marketing-attributed opportunity tracking. She also led the branding and positioning work behind MIC's shift toward the Sickbay name, along with the company's 2024 website relaunch and a full rebuild of its marketing technology stack.

Jennifer's path into healthcare marketing is anything but linear. She spent years as a professional opera singer before building a destination marketing organization from the ground up as Tourism & Marketing Manager for the City of Gallup, NM, managing a $1.8 million budget and serving as the city's Public Information Officer during COVID-19. That background in building brand and audience trust from scratch now shapes how she approaches marketing in a highly regulated, relationship-driven industry like healthcare technology.

She holds a Master of Music from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and a Bachelor of Arts from Augustana College. Jennifer serves as Treasurer of the American Marketing Association's Colorado chapter, she enjoys needle felting (or as she calls it "Stabby craft") and spending time with her two mischievous miniature schnauzers.

What you'll learn about in this episode:

• How Sickbay transitioned from Medical Informatics Crop to a customer recognized brand while maintaining trust and market credibility.
• Why connecting with people, not just the products, is the foundation of effective B2B healthcare marketing.
• How Sickbay tailors its messaging across clinical teams, healthcare executives, researchers, and channel partners.
• Why treating brand, product, and performance as interconnected rather than separate entities creates a stronger marketing strategy.
• Practical approaches to proving marketing ROI, including ways to understand AI search visibility and content performance.
• How AI is accelerating content creation, research, and analysis while reinforcing the importance of human expertise and authentic storytelling.
• Why Sickbay's long term vision is to be recognized as a trusted partner that helps healthcare organizations improve virtual care, telemetry, and data driven decision making.

Additional resources:

• Jennifer Lazarz's LinkedIn
• Sickbay's website
• Josh Dougherty on LinkedIn
• Josh Dougherty's speaking site
• A Brave New's Website

Geoffrey Schiavon is a marketing leader with more than 15 years of international experience driving growth through B2B2C business models across ecommerce and health tech. His expertise spans performance marketing, customer engagement, strategic partnerships, and go-to-market strategy, helping businesses build lasting relationships and drive sustainable revenue growth.

Before joining dacadoo as Head of Marketing & Client Success, Geoffrey spent nine years at Webloyalty, where he held a variety of marketing leadership roles, partnering with leading retailers and ecommerce businesses across Europe to deliver scalable customer acquisition and retention programs.

Today, Geoffrey helps insurers, banks, and retailers leverage AI, behavioral science, and gamification to create engaging digital health experiences that improve customer wellbeing and business outcomes.

Outside of work, Geoffrey is a licensed private pilot and enjoys exploring the intersection of technology, precision, and lifelong learning.

What you'll learn about in this episode:

• Why trust is the foundation of healthcare branding and how it shapes customer interactions.
• How dacadoo differentiates itself through personalization, engagement, and a holistic approach to health.
• How messaging evolves to address the unique needs of insurers, employers, retailers, and healthcare organizations.
• Balancing brand, product, and performance marketing, including how these functions work together to drive growth and measure success.
• Why retailers are an important growth opportunity and how wellness is creating a new customer engagement.
• How AI is improving efficiency and influencing the future of marketing.

Additional resources:

• Geoffrey Schiavon on LinkedIn
• dacadoo newsletter on LinkedIn
• dacadoo's website
• Josh Dougherty on LinkedIn
• Josh Dougherty's speaking site
• A Brave New's website

Ashley Buehnerkemper is Director of Marketing at VitalSkin Dermatology, where she has led marketing and brand strategy since the company's inception in 2019, growing the platform from its earliest locations to more than 40 today. Her role spans far beyond traditional marketing: as a member of VitalSkin's executive leadership team, she owns the martech stack, performance reporting, and brand governance across a fast-growing, multi-brand dermatology group, with a particular focus on driving tight alignment between marketing and operations.

Before joining VitalSkin, Ashley spent 11 years at Heartland Dental, the largest dental support organization in the country, where she rose from managing marketing for a handful of offices to leading corporate communications and brand management across a network of 800+ locations and $1B+ in annual revenue. There she led a multi-million-dollar corporate rebranding initiative and built the systems that fueled acquisition growth, learning firsthand that marketing only works when it's built in true partnership with operations.

At VitalSkin, that philosophy has shaped her approach to scaling a company built through partnership with strong regional dermatology practices, each with its own identity and community roots. Ashley is known for pairing data-driven rigor with an insistence on keeping the patient experience personal, never letting scale come at the cost of the local relationships that make each practice trusted in its market.

She lives in Effingham, Illinois, with her husband Jay and their two daughters.

What you'll learn about in this episode:

• How VitalSkin manages multiple local and regional brands while maintaining consistency and a local presence.
• VitalSkin's strategy for supporting numerous clinics effectively, including the use of standardized MarTech stacks and templated resources.
• Why collaboration across teams like marketing and operations is essential to delivering a seamless patient experience.
• Best practices for selecting agencies and vendors that can support long term growth.
• How AI is streamlining operations while leaving creativity and storytelling to people.
• How patient feedback, online reviews, and local search strengthen both reputation and brand, including strategies for gathering and maintaining them.
• How playbooks, templates, and local ownership create consistency across a growing network of practices.

Additional resources:

• Ashley Buehnerkemper on LinkedIn
• VitalSkin's website
• Josh Dougherty on LinkedIn
• Josh Dougherty's speaking site
• A Brave New's website

Kristi Annes is a healthcare marketing executive with more than 15 years of experience building brands and driving growth at some of the most influential companies in health IT.

Kristi currently serves as VP of Marketing Strategy at IMO Health, a private equity-backed leader in clinical intelligence and data solutions, where she has spent nearly a decade defining how the company shows up in the market. When IMO Health acquired Melax Tech, she led the marketing integration — unifying teams, technology, and execution to deliver impact from day one.

Her path to that role ran through one of health IT's most notable transactions: the IBM acquisition of Merge Healthcare. As Director of Performance Marketing at Merge, Kristi was retained post-acquisition to lead segment marketing inside IBM Watson Health, guiding a specialized healthcare brand through the demands of integrating into one of the world's largest technology organizations.

Earlier in her career, Kristi held marketing leadership roles at the American Hospital Association, where she helped launch AHA SmartMarket, and began her career in brand and creative strategy at Shaker Recruitment Advertising. Kristi holds a Bachelor of Science in Marketing from Illinois State University.

What you'll learn about in this episode:

• How IMO Health keeps its mission focused on improving patient and clinician experiences while developing AI-ready solutions.
• How Kristi defines branding beyond logos and visuals, and why emotional connection and trust are essential in B2B healthcare.
• Why enterprise healthcare buyers make decisions emotionally, and how brands that deliver clarity, reliability, and human centered messaging stand out in complex markets.
• How collaboration between brand, content, product, and performance marketing teams create cohesive campaigns, leading to stronger business impact.
• How Kristi's team approaches attribution, pipeline generation, and ROI during the complexities of long healthcare buying cycles.
• How interactive virtual experiences, research-driven surveys, and creative engagement are outperforming webinars and generating meaningful conversations with prospective customers.
• Practical ways AI is helping marketing teams automate reporting, content creation, and operational tasks.
• Why future marketing leaders will oversee both people and AI agents, balancing automation with strategy, ethics, and relationship-building.

Additional resources:

• Kristi Annes on LinkedIn
• IMO Health's website
• Josh Dougherty on LinkedIn
• Josh Dougherty's speaking site
• A Brave New's website