Swaay.Health Podcast

The Swaay.Health team is heading to HCIC26 in Orlando. In this video, we share what we are looking forward to at the conference. Brittany shares her interest in sessions exploring the intersection of AI and authentic human voice, as well as finding pragmatic tools marketing teams can use to build genuine brand trust. Colin discusses how he is looking forward to sessions on how generative search and GEO are changing the patient journey, and the tactics marketers are using to defend their budgets.

When generative AI first exploded onto the marketing scene, much of the conversation centered around one question: How can AI help us do what we already do…but faster?

Write the blog faster. Create the social post faster. Summarize the research faster.

But healthcare marketers are starting to move beyond that.

For StudioNorth, Swaay.Health’s 2026 Agency of the Year, the more interesting question has become: What can AI help marketers do that they couldn’t do before?

The shift from efficiency to insight is shaping much of the work happening at the agency today.

StudioNorth has spent the past 18 months exploring how AI can help healthcare marketers better understand their audiences, pressure-test campaigns before they launch, evaluate how brands appear within large language models (LLMs), and even simulate how prospective buyers might respond to marketing experiences.

It’s a significant evolution from where the industry was just a year ago.

“We all probably started with, ‘How can AI help me do X faster?’” shared Caroline DeVore, Executive Director of Strategic Growth and Innovation at StudioNorth. “We’ve evolved as an industry…thinking differently about what AI enables us to do.”

I sat down with Caroline and Lorraine McNeekin, Senior Director of Strategy, Healthcare at StudioNorth, to talk about winning Agency of the Year, how their approach to AI has evolved, what they’re learning from synthetic audiences, and why healthcare marketers may soon need to think very differently about who—or what—is discovering their brands.

Watch the full conversation or listen to the podcast below, then keep reading for some of our biggest takeaways.

Healthcare marketers have spent the past 12–18 months experimenting with AI and learning where it can and can’t help. Now, Lorraine says the industry is moving “from pilot to performance,” with organizations looking for ways to build AI into real workflows and produce measurable value.

And the biggest opportunity may not be doing the same work faster, but using AI to uncover insights marketers simply couldn’t access before.

One of StudioNorth’s most interesting areas of experimentation is synthetic audiences, which can help marketers test messaging, creative, websites, buyer journeys, and even product names before they go to market.

In one client website audit, StudioNorth compared feedback from synthetic audiences with real human participants and found the results were remarkably similar, opening the door to a level of audience testing that previously may have been too expensive or time-consuming for many marketing teams.

Instead of waiting to see what worked after the campaign launches, marketers can start learning and adjusting before they spend the first dollar.

Consumers and buyers are increasingly asking AI tools to research products, compare options, and recommend brands, which means marketers may soon be marketing not only to people, but to the AI agents and LLMs helping those people make decisions.

StudioNorth’s TOM Index (Top of Mind, Top of Model) examines how visible, distinctive, clear, and trustworthy brands appear across major AI models.

As Caroline put it, your target audience is increasingly “not just people. It’s agents. It’s LLMs.” That makes AI visibility, brand consistency, schema, and discoverability an entirely new consideration for healthcare marketers.

Despite all the possibilities AI brings, StudioNorth is intentional about describing itself as AI forward—not AI driven.

Their healthcare experts remain involved in reviewing AI-assisted work, challenging outputs, checking sources, and making sure everything that goes into market is accurate, appropriate, and true to the client’s brand.

“We’re people first. We’re not AI first,” Caroline explained. “We’re people first. We’re AI forward.”

Over the next 12–18 months, Lorraine and Caroline expect AI to play a much bigger role in audience insights, personalization, brand discoverability, and the growth of AI agents that research and compare options on our behalf.

For healthcare marketers, that means the opportunity isn’t simply to use AI to do more, it’s to use it to know more before you act.

Understand your audience earlier. Test your assumptions sooner. See how AI understands your brand. And ultimately, make smarter marketing decisions before you’ve spent your campaign budget.

That evolution is part of what earned StudioNorth its second Agency of the Year recognition, along with an Event of the Year win for its AI-focused event.

And if our conversation is any indication, they’re not slowing down.

As Caroline said near the end of our conversation, healthcare shouldn’t be thought of as an AI laggard anymore. Healthcare organizations are leaning forward, experimenting, innovating, and finding responsible ways to put these technologies to work.

Congratulations again to the entire StudioNorth team on being named Swaay.Health’s 2026 Agency of the Year. We can’t wait to see what you discover next.

100 episodes! Can you believe it?

It’s hard to believe, but the Swaay.Health Podcast has officially hit triple digits.

Over the past 100 episodes, we’ve had the chance to sit down with some incredible healthcare marketers, leaders, innovators, and friends. We’ve talked strategy, community, content, careers, AI, conferences, and just about everything in between.

So, for Episode 100, we decided to do something a little different.

Instead of interviewing someone else, John Lynn, Colin Hung, and I turned the microphones on ourselves for what was supposed to be a rapid-fire conversation. Spoiler alert: We weren’t particularly good at the “rapid” part.

We looked back at some of the interviews we’ll never forget, the guests who made us rethink things, and our favorite conference memories. We also got into some bigger healthcare marketing questions including the myths we’d like to bust, old-school marketing tactics making a comeback, how we’re actually using AI, and what we think healthcare marketing could look like in 2030.

And, because it wouldn’t be a Swaay.Health conversation without going a little off-script, we also tackled some of the really important questions: window or aisle seat? Carry-on or checked bag? Early morning keynote or late-night networking?

In the episode, we talk about:

Most importantly, Episode 100 gave us a chance to reflect on what has made this podcast so much fun to create: this community.

The guests who have shared their experiences with us, the listeners who continue to tune in, and the incredible community that has grown around these conversations.

Thank you to everyone who has been part of the first 100 episodes.

Here’s to the next 100!

Check out the full conversation below.

If you’d like to be a guest on our podcast or know someone who would be a great fit, we’d love to hear from you! Reach out to us!

You can subscribe to the Swaay.Health Podcast on any of the following platforms:

Some people build successful careers by focusing on what’s next for themselves. Others make a point of bringing people along with them.

Abdul Rastagar has spent years doing both. As Co-Founder of Sirona Marketing, Abdul has built a career spanning life sciences, healthcare, technology, and marketing. But within the healthcare marketing community, he’s also become known for something that doesn’t necessarily show up on a resume: his willingness to share what he knows, make connections, mentor others, and help people succeed.

It’s that commitment to the community that earned Abdul the 2026 Swaay.Health Distinguished Service Award.

What makes his approach particularly interesting is that it didn’t begin with a grand plan to become a mentor. It started with a simple question: Where could he give his time and knowledge and actually see the impact?

For Abdul, the answer became the marketing community.

Over the years, that decision has led him to create resources for job seekers, share his network, mentor fellow marketers, and directly help dozens of people land new roles.

I sat down with Abdul to talk about giving back, the career lessons he’s learned along the way, why trust is becoming increasingly important in an AI-driven world, and the advice he believes the next generation of healthcare marketers needs to hear.

Watch the full interview or listen to the podcast below, then keep reading for some of our biggest takeaways.

Abdul’s commitment to giving back became especially tangible during the pandemic.

As marketers around him began losing their jobs, he looked for a way to put his own experience and network to use. That led to Up Your Game, a podcast focused on helping marketers navigate job applications and interviews from a marketing perspective.

What started as one way to help quickly grew. Abdul brought CMOs and other leaders into the conversation and ultimately produced more than 100 episodes in a single year.

For Abdul, that’s what giving back looks like: finding the skills, knowledge, or network you already have and using them to create a tangible impact for someone else. As he shared throughout our conversation, “I get excited whenever I see somebody else succeed.” Seeing other people succeed has become its own reward for Abdul.

It’s a simple reminder that contributing to your professional community doesn’t have to mean launching a massive initiative. Sometimes it starts with sharing what you know, making an introduction, or taking the time to help someone who needs it.

Not every career lesson has to be complicated.

At Sirona Marketing, Abdul and his team have several internal mantras based on lessons learned through their own experiences.

One of them?: “Don’t work for jerks.”

It’s funny, but there’s an important lesson behind it.

Earlier in his career, Abdul was more likely to stay in situations that weren’t working and simply suffer through them. Experience taught him to recognize those situations sooner and be more willing to walk away when someone clearly didn’t have his best interests at heart.

And, as he quickly pointed out during our conversation, there’s an equally important second half to that rule: Don’t be a jerk either.

It’s straightforward career advice, but perhaps some of the most useful.

It’s nearly impossible to have a conversation about healthcare marketing in 2026 without talking about AI.

But for Abdul, one of the biggest changes AI is creating isn’t just increased productivity or automation.

It’s a growing issue of trust.

Consumers are being inundated with more content than ever before. Some is human-created. Some is AI-generated. Some is accurate. Some isn’t. And as the volume increases, audiences are becoming more skeptical about what they see, hear, and believe.

“That changes the job of the marketer,” said Abdul. He believes marketers need to work harder to demonstrate authenticity, credibility, and real expertise. And sometimes the best way to do that has very little to do with technology.

Have conversations. Host roundtables. Sit down for dinner with customers. Visit them in person. Be human.

 That doesn’t mean avoiding AI. Abdul and his team are actively using it. In fact, he introduced me to the thought of thinking of AI tools as “teammates” that can automate work and expand what a team is capable of doing.

But those teammates still need oversight. AI can make mistakes. Outputs need to be checked. Human judgment still matters.

For small healthcare marketing teams in particular, AI can dramatically expand capacity. The opportunity is to use it to make the team stronger without removing the human expertise that makes the work credible in the first place.

“Network more” might be one of the most common pieces of career advice.

It’s also not particularly useful unless someone tells you what that actually means.

Abdul first heard the importance of networking in business school, but he admits it took years before he truly understood its value. Once he became more intentional about building relationships, he saw a significant impact on his career and professional success.

His advice for making networking more actionable is simple: Think about two or three things you want to accomplish over the next five years. Then ask yourself: Who is already where I want to be? Find those people and start reaching out.

They might be former colleagues. They might be mutual connections. They might be complete strangers whose careers you find interesting.

The point isn’t to collect LinkedIn connections. It’s to start conversations and build genuine relationships.

Sometimes those conversations lead to professional opportunities. Sometimes they lead to friendships. Sometimes they simply introduce you to a person, perspective, or experience you wouldn’t have encountered otherwise.

All of them have value.

When I asked Abdul what skills the next generation of healthcare marketers will need over the next decade, AI was inevitably part of his answer.

Marketers will need to know how to use it. But knowing how to use AI may not be what ultimately differentiates them.

Judgment, communication, and creativity will.

Abdul is already seeing this with younger marketers entering the workforce. Learning how to use AI tools is important, but so is knowing when the output is wrong, when something doesn’t sound human, or when an answer simply doesn’t make sense. That requires critical thinking.

The marketers who stand out won’t necessarily be the ones who can generate the most content or build the most AI workflows. They’ll be the ones who know what to do with those capabilities.

They’ll ask better questions. They’ll recognize bad information. They’ll communicate like humans. And they’ll use technology to create things that are genuinely useful.

At the end of our conversation, I asked Abdul what “distinguished” means to him. He laughed at the word itself, saying it sounded a little too lofty.

But his answer captured exactly why he received the Distinguished Service Award in the first place.

For him, it comes down to giving back and passing it forward. Share what you know. Help other people succeed. Make the introduction. Have the conversation. Give someone else the benefit of what you’ve learned.

Careers are built on skills and experience, but they’re also built on people.

And Abdul’s career is a great reminder of just how much impact we can have when we make helping those people part of the work.

Congratulations again to Abdul Rastagar, recipient of the 2026 Swaay.Health Distinguished Service Award.

Learn more about Sirona Marketing here: https://www.sirona.marketing/

When people think about healthcare innovation, marketing isn’t always the first thing that comes to mind.

But sometimes the biggest breakthroughs happen because someone asks a simple question: “Would someone outside this industry actually understand this?”

That’s the perspective Sadie Andersen brings to her role as Marketing & Communications Coordinator at The Sequoia Project and it’s one of the many reasons she was recognized as one of Swaay.Health’s 2026 Marketing Rising Stars.

Sadie didn’t begin her career in healthcare. In fact, it was working with caregivers and experiencing the healthcare system herself that opened her eyes to just how difficult something as fundamental as accessing medical records can be. Those experiences ultimately led her to healthcare marketing, where she now helps communicate some of the industry’s most complex topics in ways people can actually understand.

“I had an easier time seeing the gaps because I wasn’t native to the industry,” Sadie shared during our conversation. “There were areas where I could say, ‘I don’t know what that word means,’ and realize a lot of other people probably didn’t either.”

That outside perspective has become one of her greatest strengths.

Sadie’s story is a great reminder that some of the strongest marketing ideas come from curiosity, fresh perspective, and a willingness to ask the questions others may overlook.

We sat down with Sadie to talk about her path into healthcare marketing, what winning the Marketing Rising Star Award means to her, how she approaches communicating complex topics, and the lessons she’s learned early in her career.

Watch the full conversation or listen to the podcast below, then keep reading for some of our biggest takeaways.

Healthcare is full of acronyms, technical language, and highly specialized topics. For organizations working in interoperability and health information exchange, that complexity can quickly become a communication barrier.

Rather than adding to the jargon, Sadie focuses on removing it. Her approach is straightforward: break complicated ideas into smaller pieces, tell stories, use visuals whenever possible, and never lose sight of the people behind the technology. If the content doesn’t feel interesting or human, she believes it’s probably time to rethink it.

It’s advice every healthcare marketer can benefit from. Because the goal isn’t simply to explain technology, it’s to help people understand why it matters.

One of the qualities highlighted throughout Sadie’s award nomination wasn’t a campaign or a metric.

It was a mindset. She’s known for saying: “You didn’t ask this, but I thought it would be helpful.”

That simple philosophy has helped her identify opportunities, launch new projects, and create resources that benefit her entire organization. Having previously worked in startup environments, she developed the habit of spotting gaps and stepping forward to solve them instead of waiting to be asked.

That initiative also extended beyond creating content.

Sadie developed an editorial strategy that brought greater consistency to The Sequoia Project’s communications, then spent time educating staff and members on how they could amplify the organization’s message through LinkedIn and other channels. She emphasizes that even small actions: liking, commenting, or resharing a post, can have an outsized impact when an entire community participates.

I asked Sadie what skill matters most for marketers entering the profession today, and her answer isn’t writing, design, or analytics.

It’s adaptability.

Marketing plans change. Industries evolve. Priorities shift.

The marketers who succeed are the ones who can pivot, stay resilient, and keep moving forward even when the original plan no longer applies. She also credits supportive colleagues and mentors as one of the biggest contributors to her own growth, reminding us that great careers are rarely built alone.

The Marketing Rising Star Award recognizes emerging professionals who are already making a meaningful impact on their organizations and the broader healthcare marketing community.

After speaking with Sadie, it’s easy to understand why she was selected.

Her curiosity, willingness to lead, and ability to make complex healthcare topics accessible are qualities our industry needs more of and they’re exactly what makes the future of healthcare marketing so exciting.

Congratulations again to Sadie Andersen, we can’t wait to see what comes next.

Interested in the work Sadie and The Sequoia Project are doing? Join them at the 2026 Sequoia Project & Carequality Annual Meeting on October 28–29 in Texas.

The EHR market is crowded with cautious messaging. Standing out requires a distinct edge, not just a list of product features. Swaay.Health sat down with Ryan Pfister, Director of Brand Strategy and Marketing at Juno Health, to explore the strategy behind their edgy rebrand. You will discover how his team anchors their core messaging in raw customer frustration to safely separate their brand from the pack. We also discuss how to adjust your messaging for risk-averse buyers and secure executive approval for bold campaigns.

For many healthcare marketing teams, social media can feel like a constant battle against changing algorithms, shrinking attention spans, and pressure to produce more content.

But for the team at Optimum Healthcare IT, LinkedIn has become much more than another marketing channel. It’s a business development engine, a thought leadership platform, and one of the primary ways they educate healthcare organizations while showcasing the expertise of their team.  

That approach has helped Optimum grow its LinkedIn community to more than 220,000 followers and recently earned the team the 2026 Swaay.Health Award for Best Use of Social Media.

I recently got to sit down with Larry Kaiser, Chief Marketing Officer, and Dani Patterson, Director of Marketing Operations and Events at Optimum Healthcare IT to get a behind the scenes look at how they transformed the company’s social presence over the past decade and why their strategy is about far more than simply posting more often.

Here are a just a few of the biggest lessons from the conversation.

Rather than treating LinkedIn as a place to simply promote services, Optimum focuses on answering the questions healthcare leaders are already asking.

Whether it’s advice on an EHR implementation, cloud strategy, ServiceNow, or another healthcare IT challenge, their content is designed to give the audience something useful. Blog posts become infographics. Whitepapers become checklists. Subject matter experts share lessons learned from real-world experience.

As Larry explained, “We’re really just taking our experience across the industry and presenting it in a way that makes sense.”

The goal is to create the kind of content someone can actually use, something they can save, share with their team, or put into practice.

Dani describes it as giving people “tools in their toolbox” that they can pull out when they need them. And increasingly, that educational approach has another benefit: it aligns with the way people are searching for answers through ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and other AI-powered platforms.

One of the biggest mistakes marketers can make is spending hours creating a great piece of content, sharing it once, and moving on.

Optimum takes a very different approach: A single blog post might generate six or more social posts, each highlighting a different idea, question, takeaway, or audience. Podcasts can generate weeks of content. Existing whitepapers can be transformed into entirely new campaigns. Dani describes the strategy as “reduce, reuse, recycle,” explaining, “We usually put something out there 8, 9, 10, 12 times in totally different formats.”

That doesn’t mean copying and pasting the same LinkedIn post over and over. It means finding new ways into the same valuable content so it has multiple opportunities to reach the right people.

For Dani, the repurposing also happens while the content is still fresh. When she creates the initial social post for a blog, she often creates four, five, or six additional posts at the same time and immediately adds them to the content calendar.

Optimum’s strategy also extends far beyond its corporate LinkedIn page.

The marketing team actively works with employees and subject matter experts to help build their individual presence on LinkedIn—particularly around major industry events. As Dani put it, “People perform better than a faceless organization.”

Ahead of large healthcare IT conferences, the team begins planning months in advance, identifying subject matter experts who can contribute to the conversation and helping them create content for their individual networks. Instead of simply telling employees to post, the marketing team helps develop the messaging and strategy alongside them.

That approach gives Optimum access to something its corporate following alone can’t provide: highly relevant audiences that its experts have already spent years building relationships with. It’s also helping position those employees as recognizable thought leaders in their areas of expertise.

Of course, hearing that Optimum sometimes posts once or even several times a day can be intimidating for marketers working on smaller teams. Dani readily admits that maintaining that cadence requires planning.

Optimum generally plans its social content at least one month ahead and, when possible, two or three months in advance. But that calendar isn’t meant to lock the team into a rigid plan. Their philosophy is simple: fluidity over flexibility. As Dani explains, “You may have a goal to post every day. You may have a goal to post twice a week. Whatever that goal is, it’s okay if you miss something.”

The important part is continuing to work toward consistency while leaving enough room to respond to what’s happening in the industry.

For Larry, the results have reinforced the importance of simply staying visible. “When we started posting every single day, that’s really when our growth shot straight up because we’re staying in front of people.”

Perhaps the most important takeaway from Optimum’s story is that there wasn’t one viral post or campaign that suddenly changed everything.

When Larry joined the company in 2016, the company had just over 4,000 LinkedIn followers. Roughly two years later, that number had doubled to 8,000.

The growth accelerated as the organization invested in more content, earned executive buy-in, involved more subject matter experts, and continually adjusted its strategy.

Today, the company has more than 220,000 LinkedIn followers, a LinkedIn newsletter with approximately 70,000 subscribers, and an average engagement rate Kaiser says is significantly higher than broader LinkedIn benchmarks.

But Kaiser is quick to emphasize that their success took time. “It’s not going to happen overnight. It’s a process.” The team kept experimenting, adjusting, and learning until they discovered what worked for their company and their audiences. And that may ultimately be the most useful lesson for other healthcare marketers.

There isn’t one LinkedIn playbook every organization needs to follow. Know your audience. Create genuinely useful content. Give that content more than one opportunity to succeed. Empower the people inside your organization. Stay consistent, but stay fluid.

And most importantly, give the strategy time to work.

Learn more about Optimum Healthcare IT.

Taking your healthcare brand into a new country is never as simple as recycling your domestic marketing playbook. If you try to enter Australia without understanding its hybrid funding models and regional care challenges, your brand will fall flat. Swaay.Health sat down with Peter Birch, Host of Talking HealthTech, at the HIC conference in Sydney to break down the realities of the Australian digital health ecosystem. Birch shares essential advice for foreign vendors, details how national interoperability initiatives like Sparked are uniting the industry, and reveals what it has been like producing more than 620 podcast episodes. You will learn why local presence matters and how to position your company for success in Australia.

Making the leap from an in-house marketing leader to a fractional executive is a big decision, especially in today’s healthcare landscape. For Alex Ferraro, founder of ABF Marketing and Swaay.Health’s 2026 Community Member of the Year, the move was fueled by a desire to help more organizations avoid common marketing pitfalls while building something of her own. “Fractional means flexible,” Alex explains. “It allows me to meet my clients where they’re at.” Rather than simply acting as an advisor, she combines strategy with hands-on execution to help healthcare organizations invest in the right marketing initiatives at the right stage of growth.

In our conversation, Alex shares the lessons she’s learned from launching her own business, the importance of building genuine relationships, and the mindset shifts that have helped her grow both personally and professionally. Here are three takeaways that stood out to me before you dive into the full interview.

Takeaways from Our Conversation

If there was one theme woven throughout our conversation, it was this: community is one of the most valuable investments you can make in your career.

Alex shares how mentors, former colleagues, and the broader Swaay.Health community gave her the confidence to launch her own business, and how one relationship from a job she didn’t get eventually led to one of her very first clients. “You never know who someone knows or can connect you to,” she says. “It just comes down to being a good human being.” It’s a reminder that meaningful relationships aren’t built around transactions, they’re built on trust, generosity, and consistently showing up for others.

Alex offered practical advice for marketers navigating career changes, entrepreneurship, or personal growth. Running a business, she explains, means wearing two hats: delivering great work for clients while also managing everything that comes with being a business owner. From pricing and processes to staying focused on priorities, success requires discipline.

One lesson that really resonated with me and one that shifted Alex’s mindset as well—came from a recent productivity book she had been reading (Procrastination Proof). One question stuck with her: “What can you get done in the next hour?” Rather than getting overwhelmed by a never-ending to-do list, she focuses on the next manageable step. It’s something I’ve been trying to implement too, and I honestly find it helps. Breaking big projects into smaller, actionable chunks makes it much easier to get started and once you get started, the momentum usually follows.

Whether you’re considering launching your own business, growing your personal brand, or simply looking to build stronger professional relationships, this conversation is packed with thoughtful insights and practical advice you can put into action today.

Want to learn more about ABF Marketing or connect with Alex? Visit ABF Marketing to learn more about her fractional marketing services and how she helps healthcare organizations grow.

Bringing two agencies together usually results in operational chaos. The leadership team at KNB Communications and Roketto prioritized cultural alignment and employee job security over sudden workflow changes when merging to create Sovyn. Discover their secret to a smooth merger + rebrand.