Welcome to the Health Marketing Collective, where strong leadership meets marketing excellence.

On today’s episode, Brian Chee, Senior Director of Content Strategy and Communications at Net Health, joins Sara Payne to dive into the high-stakes challenge of transforming a brand faster than its reputation can keep up. With decades of growth and acquisitions, Net Health evolved into a multifaceted healthcare technology company, yet was still largely seen as a legacy EHR vendor. Brian Chee discusses how shifting this perception took far more than a new logo or message it required uncovering a unifying brand story, aligning a “house of brands” internally, and ensuring their new narrative resonated both with people and the increasingly important AI-driven market landscape.

Our discussion explores the intricacies of brand repositioning in healthcare, why NetHealth prioritized brand narrative ahead of product innovation, and the complexities and rewards of driving internal alignment. Brian also shares how Net Health measures real-world impact tracking not just what customers think, but what AI models “say” about the brand.

Thank you for being part of the Health Marketing Collective, where strong leadership meets marketing excellence. The future of healthcare depends on it.

Key Takeaways:

1. Brand Evolution Must Outpace Market Perceptions: Net Health’s transformation from a legacy EHR provider to an AI-native specialty intelligence company was hindered by outdated external perceptions. Brian Chee emphasizes that true repositioning means finding a story that unites disparate brands and communicates both legacy strengths and new ambitions well before the technology is fully visible to the market (02:09, 06:17).
2. Internal Alignment Is the Hardest and Most Vital Step: Achieving consensus among business units with deep attachment to their own brands was a “six-to-seven month” effort, marked by tension and debate up to the final hour. The turning point: investing significant time in listening tours and honest, sometimes challenging, dialogue to evangelize the bigger vision (12:07, 13:00).
3. Letting Brand Lead Business Innovation: Brian explains why Net Health deliberately moved branding ahead of complete product transformation, using a forward-looking narrative to set market expectations and begin changing conversations with both buyers and the press. An authentic commitment not just finished products was enough to credibly lead the repositioning (06:35, 09:04).
4. Marketing Now Means Changing Human and Machine Narratives: Success isn’t just about shifting market perceptions; it also includes influencing how AI and search engines represent your company. Brian describes how prioritizing earned media and PR has improved share of voice and domain authority, and even begun shifting AI-generated answers about Net Health’s expertise (25:38, 26:04).
5. Storytelling Is the Emotional Engine of Healthcare Marketing: With marketing becoming formulaic, Brian champions a return to authentic, human-centered stories, especially those told by real clients. These narratives become the backbone of brand-building, reinforcing emotional connections both internally and externally. The brand’s new mission, “helping clinicians stay present in moments that matter,” was shaped by stories from the field, not just frameworks or AI output (22:13, 40:01).

Learn more about Net Health here.

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Welcome back to the Health Marketing Collective, where strong leadership meets marketing excellence. I'm your host, SaraPayne. Today we're talking about what happens when a company evolves faster than its reputation. NetHealth had spent decades building and acquiring specialized healthcare technology businesses. But the market still largely understood it as a legacy EHR vendor, a perception that no longer reflected what the company had become or where it was going. Changing that required much more than new messaging or a brand launch. It meant finding the unifying story within a collection of brands, establishing a position that could lead the company forward, and building internal agreement around that position. My guest is Brian Chee, Senior Director of Content Strategy and Communications at NetHealth, where he leads the company's brand narrative, executive communications, and media relations.

Brian helped lead NetHealth's repositioning as an AI-native specialty intelligence company and the launch of Humanify, a brand platform built on the belief that health technology should give clinicians more meaningful moments with patients. He also hosts the Humanify HealthTech podcast, where he explores the practical use of AI to humanize care. We'll talk about the tension involved in allowing a brand to lead the business, why internal alignment was one of the hardest parts of the process, and how Brian and NetHealth are measuring whether its new story is changing what people and LLMs say about the company. Brian, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, I'm excited for this conversation. I know we share a lot of similar philosophies on things related to storytelling, um, and, and positioning and narrative and all those sorts of things. Let's begin with the disconnect that you were trying to solve for here and what had NetHealth become as a business and how did that differ from what the market believed it was?

Yeah, so it was a really interesting challenge, uh, opportunity to be honest with you, because essentially you could fairly say that NetHealth has always been a house of brands instead of a branded house, right? And not only that, but it's been very specialty divided, right? We have specialization in rehab therapy, specialization in wound care, in post-acute. We do various things, various technology solutions in those various parts of the business. So, bringing those all together was a huge undertaking that took a lot of internal conversation and a lot of strategic thinking because each player in our business had a very vested interest in how we were represented, right? You know, the person who leads our analytics function in the sniff space, for example, had a very specific view of what what we should mean to the market, just like the president of our rehab therapy business had a very, very specific view in terms of what that meant, especially in the post-acute space. So, bringing that together was probably the most challenging and also the most rewarding part of this entire journey.

Yeah, because being categorized solely as an EHR company had become strategically limiting. For the organization. Tell us more about that. I mean, this is— you talk about being a house of brands and that, you know, all of these acquisitions that you've made. Dig into that a little bit more in terms of where that challenge was.

Yeah, I mean, most of us, most people know us as Wound Expert and Optima for the most part, right? That's— those are our 2 legacy products, our products that we built the company around. They've been there from the start pretty much. And so, being known as an EHR company, even though we do a lot of other things, was something that we felt acutely. It was an acute pain that we felt very much for a long period of time. How do we tell the NetHealth story without it being associated and tagged to EHRs so strongly? And then, add on to that the fact that We don't want to not be known as an EHR, a specialty EHR company. We want to be known as more than that, but also that, because we provide a very valuable service for specialty care sectors, right? So, we had to find that sort of balancing act. Ultimately, what we came down to was understanding that that we are not an EHR company, that we are an intelligence company.

Hmm.

Because we specialize in knowledge. We have built this company on SMEs. We've built this company on physical therapists, on wound care clinicians, on people who actually have worked in SNFs and who understand the business and really understand the day-to-day use of our products and the value set therein. And that's when we came down to it, That's the thing that differentiated us the most was that idea. We specialize. We don't just specialize in terms of our workflows. We actually specialize in the people who are designing the products. They actually have lived that and walked the walk.

Yeah. Love that. Brilliant. Well, and we'll come back to that a little bit in a little bit in the conversation here. When you and I chatted about this, I thought one of the most interesting aspects of this story was that the brand transformation moved ahead, somewhat ahead of the product transformation, and you felt that it was important to begin changing the market narrative before every element of the product strategy was complete. And why was that?

Because the idea of our product innovation and the transformation that was occurring took a long time. really. And we felt really, really, really passionately felt that we had a story to tell before that, especially in regard to truly 2 things. First, the AI story, right? We knew we were investing in native AI. We knew that we were going to change the way people look at our products because of the work that our team was doing on the technical side. But we also knew The second thing, which was we weren't communicating our brand value correctly. Like I was saying a minute ago, we aren't an EHR company. We're a specialty care tech company.

We're a specialty intelligence company. And that's with or without the product transformation and the AI componentry therein, ultimately, I feel like as though the brand was misaligned in terms of that characterization. We wanted to be known for our specialty might and, and our, our commitment to innovation. The innovation part was long, a long-running show, a long-running effort that is now bearing fruit. The first part, we were already there and we wanted to tell that story.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think a lot of Brands and marketers, healthcare in particular, often find themselves in this position, which is this needing to tell a bit of that forward-looking story while operating in an industry where that credibility piece is really essential. And so it's really about finding that balance of the ambition or sort of that, you know, longer-term view with the proof, right? So how did you decide How far the brand could lead without getting too far ahead of reality?

Yeah. A lot of conversations. It wasn't me, it was our team. It was our cross-functional team of stakeholders. It really came from leadership. You know, our CEO, Ron Books, said, really kind of led the way. He said, we need to refashion and reposition the brand because we're not who we were saying something that's not who we are. And that hurts.

That hurts our multiple. It hurts our— it hurts the inherent value of our company. And it also hurts our sales efforts because people assume we're an EHR company. They're not going to think about other products that we bring to the table and other things that we do that add a lot of value. So, that was part of it, right? Why did we lead? Why did we do that? We did that because I think we had the story to tell and We wanted to begin that transformation. We didn't need to have the products. We didn't need to have everything in place to be able to begin to tell that story. We had the commitment.

I think really, if I go back in time, I think where it really started for— this really started was actually 3 years ago when we kicked off our first NEXT conference in Florida. Because Ron Books, Ron got up on stage and he said to the clients that were at that were there. This is the very first one. It was probably about 200 people were there. And he said, look, we want to listen to what you have to say. We're here to listen to you. We're here to understand what we need to do. We are going through this transformation in terms of our products.

We want to know where we can best serve you. And how can we support you? And so, the input that we got from that moment, from that weekend, was so valuable in terms of understanding how our clients looked at us and how, as a result, the market kind of looks at us. You know, you take away scrunch, you take away all of the measurement that we do. You know, we, like everybody else, we exhaustively measure our brand and our marketing efforts. At the end of the day, what our clients was telling us was, I like you because you specialize and you know what I do. And that's the, that was the genesis of it.

Yeah. What a great North Star and great, great message, great leadership from Ron and, and demonstrating the commitment to the market, right. To continue to evolve and meet their needs and, and became such a great North Star for, for this positioning effort, uh, and for the marketing team. You've mentioned a couple of times internal alignment. And I want, I want to talk about this because I think people will find this part of the conversation extremely relatable. You had told me in our prior conversation that it took 6 to 7 months to build agreement on around the repositioning. And not surprisingly, again, I think this is familiar for a lot of brands. You said, you know, there was a lot of disagreement and tension almost up until the final day, which had to be really stressful for you and your team.

But talk about that and what was it that made that internal alignment process so challenging?

Yeah, everybody sees things differently, right? And everybody has a different perspective in terms of value, especially when you're in a company, a technology company that does different specialties. So, you know, and it really did start probably 7 months before we announced anything or we did anything publicly, maybe even more. Hmm. Because like the first thing we did was we did a listening tour where a group of marketers went to every key stakeholder in the organization, interviewed them, and asked them questions about what the brand meant to them. And that was in itself a very challenging situation because Because not only was their feedback specific to their business unit or specific to their technology, but it was also their ability to speak about the value of the brand. And remember, this is a house of brands. So, to some folks internally, we didn't really so much have a brand as we were a collective of sub-brands or smaller brands. And so, we had to go through that.

talk about it, talk about and evangelize the value of actually changing our perspective, changing that brand perspective. That was the first step. And from there, we were able to read back what our leaders had said to us. And we were able to begin to get to work on building a framework for what our brand message should be. That was another few months of meeting with the same stakeholders. interviewing them, showing them what we were working on, showing them our initial brand framework and our messaging structure, and then getting their feedback and adjusting accordingly. And then the biggest problem, the tension of that was when you had 2 disagreements or 2 fundamentally differing perspectives that you would think would not fit within a cohesive brand framework. That was the, that was probably the most creative and the, and the biggest challenge that the marketing team faced in terms of reconciling that and where we found the most passion, the most passionate arguments, the most, the most passion around what it meant to us.

And we kind of came through that. That was the sort of the very key point.

Yeah. Well, I love the way that you broke all of that down. I think it's incredibly Valuable for folks to hear how you approach that, but also really kudos to you, applaud you and the team for taking the time to do that. I think starting at the point of, you know, a listening tour, if you will, with all the key stakeholders, especially when you have a house of brands. And to your point, you're kind of beginning to have them kind of untether a little bit of that emotional attachment they have to that individual brand. And to your point, getting them to see the value of now re-tethering that to something bigger and above while still honoring the legacy, right, of, of what's there. And, and, you know, for— there are some organizations that might do— they go through this on an N-of-1 basis with an acquisition. Now you're talking about multiples, right, of these brands.

And so, I mean, it's no wonder, right, that it, that it took that long to do all of that. I mean, I heard listening, educating, evangelizing, sharing early directions with folks, taking that back, iterating, and continuing to work through that process.

Yeah. You know, the key, the key point to that was getting responses, getting, getting dialogue, getting argument. As painful as that was sometimes, that was the key. That was the most important thing because we would start a conversation and we wouldn't get much dialogue. It would be, you know, it would be one of those things where that leader was maybe checking the box a little bit. It's a brand thing. It's not pertinent to his pipeline. It's not pertinent to his go-to-market strategy, right? He's about selling, getting into the market, selling to the market, and justifiably so.

Right? Because that's what matters really at the end of the day. But brand helps do that. And once we got through that and we began to get that feedback and that pushback, then we had a conversation. And from the conversation, we were able to begin to understand what their needs were and then draw those threads together.

That's, it's so brilliant. And I want to, I want to emphasize this point because had you not pushed the conversation to that point of tension and getting to the, to the real, real, right, of the conversation. You could have risked that coming out much later post-launch, right, in the nightmare situation, right? By really taking that seriously and respectfully pushing to that point of tension, you are able to fully get at what each of those leaders and/or brands has as their non-negotiables to be able to see it, everything together in the broader context.

Yeah. You know what's funny about that is the emotional part of it, the emotional resonance part of it is where everybody kind of came together, which is really funny, which is really funny and amazing to me. But one of the meetings that we had was with our head of HR, Linda Kritcher. And Linda said to me in the conversation, she said, look, this is all great. This framework is great. The approach you're doing is great. It really makes a lot of sense. But here's the thing.

You have to have something that says all of that, but gets people emotional. Mm-hmm. That gets people to really want to buy in. to really commit, right? On the internal side is so important and externally too. And so, that was the thing. When we began to talk about this in terms of the emotional connection we can make with our clients and with the team, that began to make things more apparent to our business stakeholders. And that's where pathways started to open and people began to get excited.

Yeah, it's really interesting because it's making me think that maybe sometimes we undercount the partnership and collaboration that marketing could and brand could have with HR on this level when, when rolling out something new. I think we often, we often want to credit marketing as being the source of the emotional part of the story and having to sort of sell that internally. But to have another colleague and another leader within another department cross-functionally coming at this and saying, no, this, this is 100%, right, where we need to be focusing from a talent recruitment standpoint, from an employee retention standpoint. You know, we want people to know why they work here, right, what it means, right, and, you know, be the reason why they get out of bed in the morning, or, you know, whatever, whatever the flavor of that expression is. But I—

Totally.

I think that's brilliant. And I, and again, I don't know if we give that enough credit in terms of that opportunity to partner between marketing and brand and HR.

And I think like to add to that, I think it's what's, what's interesting is, is like we assume that marketing is the creative side of everything.

Right. Yep.

That's not, that's not true though, especially when it comes to something like this brand refresh, brand repositioning, we are actually more so the science of it. Because people can say how they feel and you can talk about that emotion, but you've got to be able to connect that to a structure that ultimately sells a product or ultimately conveys the value of a company and a product set, right? And that's the science as far as I'm concerned. And we really netted out at this concept of of putting together those disparate parts of the brand approach, going from sort of not just what the product does, not just what the brand necessarily means, but adding the emotional resonance to that and then putting that together as an actual brand message, a mission statement. And one of the things, one of the great things that we did was we looked at some of the best campaigns ever. We looked at the 1984, um, um, ad from Apple. We looked at Nike, Just Do It, the original one. We looked at the HubSpot inbound, a few others, and we saw this sort of consistent approach to it. And it was, there's an internal barrier or a limiting belief that happens.

That's the tension part of it, right?

Mm-hmm.

You're like in the, in the Just Do It. There's somebody who's older who's committed to running. Then, you have to add to that, what's the product or the service that actually removes that friction and enables action, right? That's the next one. And then, the final one is, how do you feel about that freedom? What's the emotional resonance that comes from going through that narrative or that experience of being Of having friction, being stopped, having a solution, experiencing the solution, and that feeling of freedom, joy, pain, realization, transformation that you get as a result of going through that process. Once we broke that down, we were able to get to like what the technology that we develop actually really means to our end users.

Love that. Love that. Love that you went back to other brands and what, what can we borrow from them and, and sort of created this framework, if you will, on how you wanted to approach this. And I, I think there's just so much goodness in, in what you shared that I think others can, can borrow from as well.

Awesome. Yeah, it's, it was a journey for sure, you know, and I think the most, the most passionate part of the, the experience was right towards the very end of it where we felt like we were done. We felt like as though we had a great concept. We had done all of this work. We had built all of the framework. We had built all the campaign rationalizations. We had built things into our conferences. We were ready to really announce to the world at the conference, at the next conference, this one just in April, what our, what our new mission statement was and what our new approach was.

But there was just that one emotional piece that was kind of missing, not all the way there. And so, the most passion and the most sort of the, the, the biggest, I want to, I want to say argument, but the most passionate conversations that we had within marketing and also with the greater group was what that actually meant. And so we were able to go from all of these things that EHRs do for clinicians or are supposed to do and can now do more readily with AI. We came down to the idea that what we're really all about is helping clinicians stay present in those moments that matter. And that ended up being our mission statement and our tagline going into Going into 2026.

Yeah.

And that, I think, you know, when we, we, we tested that with some of our clients in a very sort of understated way, um, we interviewed them on it. And the response to that was, that's exactly right. I don't necessarily want time back to, to get to dinner on time. I do want that. I do want to go, I do want to go and get dinner on time. I don't like pajama time. I do want to have my own life. But I am a practicing clinician.

So, not only do I want that free time, but I also want to be able to talk to my patient eyeball to eyeball and understand what their needs really are and provide care at the top of my license. And that those 2 factors, those 2 things, being able to have your own life, not being completely overwhelmed by the work of healthcare. And also being able to actually do healthcare, those 2 things were what we netted out at in terms of what those moments that matter really mean.

Yeah, I love that. Thank you for sharing that. And I feel like there's so many layers to how you got there that we could continue to unpack, but I do want to pivot a little bit, Brian, because I want to pivot from what you built and how you built it to how you've rolled it out. And you and I talked about how positioning is now requires marketing leaders to not only change the human perceptions, but also the machine understanding of the brand and the company as well. So let's talk about that. I know, I know, from our conversation that you made a decision to prioritize earned media and PR early for 2 reasons, one of which would not be surprising to anybody, but that's to generate awareness. But the second one being to influence search and AI-generated answers. Talk to us and tell us why this was so important to you and the organization.

There's really, there's really 2 reasons to that. One is so practical, you're probably going to laugh. And that is, look, you know, we're known as an EHR company, the level of earned media that we're getting, the level of share, our share of voice is not great, right? Because EHRs, not only have they been around for 20-odd years, but they also have sort of a checkered reputation, right? EHRs have both signal the digitization of healthcare and also represent all of the problems that came from the digitization of healthcare. healthcare. So, there was that, right? That was the idea being, we wanted to tell the press, we wanted to tell third-party, credible third-party organizations that we had a different story to tell and that our value was not just EHRs. So, that was the first most practical one. And the second one was simply what you were saying about AI is, Let's face it, there's a person in the room that is directing people to the solution that they think best meets the needs of that query prompt that people put in, right? I call it the close. There's a closer in the room who's actually talking to people and saying, hey, you should look at this.

Here's your options. We wanted to be able to be known as an AI-native company that specialized, that was a specialty intelligence company, sorry, before we began to really roll out the product set that we had. We felt that marketing in an environment in which people thought we were just doing EHRs was putting us at a disadvantage when it came down to the messaging around our products. So that when our products go to market and they're beginning to now go to market, we could do so on a foundation of, AI-native specialty knowledge. And that's a much stronger position to be in than, oh, it's NetHealth, NetHealth owns Optima, they're an EHR company. But wait, we're an AI— we're a specialty knowledge company, and Optima, by the way, has all of this innovation that includes ambient documentation and chart audit and all these other things that make your life So much better. That's kind of the rationale behind it.

Yeah, totally. So let's talk about some of the results that you've seen. I know you're tracking share of voice data. I know you're monitoring how NetHealth is appearing in AI search results. What are you seeing in terms of that early evidence, um, to suggest that that market narrative is beginning to shift?

Yeah, our share of voice has gone up. I think we're now at about 40%. Versus our competitors. So we're definitely, definitely one first, number one in terms of comparing to our competitors like Meditech and other groups, right? I think that's a key part of it because we're now getting more press, more interested stories. So that press share of voice, for example, Ron Books was on the Healthcare Wrap podcast. We also had bylines from AI Authority and a slew of other publications. You know, we were able to tell a story about our ISO certification for AI governance as a result of that. That was a key story for us.

It got a lot of pickup and a lot of earned mention. So, We saw a direct improvement in our Q2 share of voice numbers, definitely increased overall as a brand and also through our subsets of wound care and rehab therapy. That was big. Nice. Our Humanify podcast that launched late last year is basically, I think the number of views that we're seeing now is about 63,000, 65,000. Wow. We have 11,000 unique viewers every month. The key thing about the podcast is there's, because we're able to talk about the practical use of AI in the healthcare space, we feel that we are attracting founders and CEOs that are doing remarkable things with AI to talk about what they're actually doing, not the buzzwordy AI conversation, but the practical one that actually gets into it.

And as a result, we're beginning to see increased reach and increased exposure to our brand messaging.

Yeah, it's resonating.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Domain Rating is another thing that we mentioned. We're currently way above our competitor average, and that's new for this, for Q2. It took a little while to bed in. It took a little while for us to see results. Sure. But, you know, once we really announced the brand shift and then we began to announce our product changes, we saw a definite shift in our brand awareness. Q2 and moving forward.

Now, here's the thing I didn't mention, and I don't want to mention it because I don't know if I'm very, very comfortable with the metrics yet. That's AI metrics.

Okay.

Like AI overview metrics. We see, we see an uptick, you know, when we look at Scrunch and we look at, we look at sort of our AI visibility numbers, we see consistent growth. We see more citations. We see those things growing. But I'm not necessarily convinced that that really truly measures our share of model. Share of model, I think, means more than just AI visibility, right? Yeah. And I think we're a little— we have a little ways to go in terms of getting to that point where we can confidently measure that and see what the difference is. That's, I think, where we're currently at with the success that we've seen.

Yeah, and I don't think you're alone in that. I think a lot of companies and brands, just based on the, the toolset available, I think there's, um, we did a whole podcast on this with, um, with our friend Vincent Grippy, right, on how that toolset is, is still new and somewhat experimental, and they're not necessarily all measuring the same set of things. And so I think you're being smart, uh, in the way that you're looking at it and essentially looking for evidence, uh, that the trend lines are, are headed in the right direction. Uh, before you are honing in on, on, you know, specific numbers per se and saying, you know, this is, um, what it is and, and how we want to chart that in the upward direction.

I mean, ultimately, you know, this sounds, this might sound a little bit weird. I'm a, I'm a, I'm a big believer in brand. Um, I think the work that we did was amazing, but ultimately at the end of the day, I want people to think of our products as being specialty intelligence products. And that's what the brand is supposed to do. And if I have difficulty measuring with accuracy that brand lift, really, truly, right? In this new world, this new crazy world of ours where we're now talking about splitting share of voice into various ways. And we're looking at, you know, I mean, there's a company called Scrunch, for goodness sakes, that's a valued metrics company now, right? This is sort of fun. If that's where we're at, then ultimately what I want to look at is how the perception of our product is changing and how accepting our ICPs are to that change, right? That gets down to the pipeline. That gets down to our go-to-market.

Yeah. I mean, I was going to ask what we, you know, a year from now, what will tell you that that repositioning has truly taken hold? And I think, you know, you just said it right there.

Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. It's an ongoing story for sure. And I think I'm excited about this next chapter. I feel like as though we're about midway through our brand, complete brand refresh and brand repositioning. And I think we have a lot of work left to do. The work now, I think, is about continuing to convey what moments that matter mean, showing what it means in terms of staff burnout, showing what it means in terms of personal time and practicing on top of your license, like I mentioned. I think that's— I think we can continue to tell that story, but we can also tell that story now very specifically to the various specialties that we play in, right? We can talk directly to a wound care audience about those moments that matter.

Mm-hmm. And in terms of not just healing, but also regulations, that part of our company is really hit hard with regulations and changing rules that are impacting what our end user, what our clinicians need to do. You know, on the rehab therapy space, they are suffering from a high level of burnout and people leaving the field. What does our technology do to help those therapists, those clinicians stay, feel more empowered, and feel like as though they're making a difference, which is what healthcare professionals want. Yeah. And I think our products can now tell that story around making— meeting those moments. That's awesome to me. And that's where I think it means more To, um, to our, our, our audience.

For sure. And I love that you're realistic about the timeline of all of this, right? Like the, the, it, it doesn't end at launch. This, you have to, you have to live the brand and live the commitment of the brand and the value proposition in the day-to-day. And the commitment to storytelling was something that I wanted to get into around this, because I think you're totally spot on in it. There's an interesting thing I want to bring into the conversation here because it came up in our in our our prep call, and you framed I'm going to come back to storytelling. But you framed it as that marketing has become increasingly formulaic, particularly around lead generation and pipeline development, while storytelling is where the real magic happens. And you just started to talk about that. So let's let's talk about.

What do you think gets lost when we focus too much on the formula? And then we can talk a little bit more about the value of storytelling as well.

Yeah, no, I think some formulas do a great job of focusing a story. Some formulas, some frameworks, a framework is a formula essentially, and we use the framework for our brand work really effectively. We used a formula to kind of get to the emotional resonance of what that really means and break down into the end user's perspective, the clinician's perspective. I think formulas are valuable in that way. But what I think happens more and more is we lose that extra step. We lose the whole point of those formulas, which is to get to the real storytelling that takes place.

Mm-hmm.

That's not something that you can That's not something that you can really have AI do for you. You can't just automate that sort of approach. You've got to feel it. You've gotta be able to tell the story. I mean, that's the— I've always said, and I believe so deeply that the best marketers, the best example of this is your very own clients. Your very own people who are using your product and using your technology because they have stories to tell. And the stories that they tell are real. And that's storytelling, right? That's where it actually means something.

So, we look at storytelling at NetHealth from the perspective of a human-told story. I think that's even the way AI is going with it too. I'm not unique in saying that. If you think about the whole issue with watermarks and the point of that, I think the point of that is to stay human, my friends, to stay human, to tell stories and to make that have value to people.

Yeah.

Yeah. Go, sorry, go ahead.

No, you go, you go.

So, I remember talking to one of our clients. This is the best example of the power of storytelling, right? And I was interviewing her for a testimonial about our Redoc product. And she, you know, she was talking to me about it and, you know, we got into a really good conversation, a really good flow. And she said, you know, the best way that I can explain this is what happened the other day. She said, I was, I was, um, I was at work, you know, she's the director of, um, outpatient clinics. And, um, I was at work and this guy walks up and, um, I thought he was upset. And, um, he said, you know, I will always come to this clinic because you know my name and you know who I am.

Hmm.

And she said, you know, We have a lot of patients. I couldn't possibly know who he was. But the fact of the matter is, is that your technology tells everybody who he is, what his— what his, um, what he's healing from, and, and what we're doing.

Wow.

And that personalizes the care. And she said, you know, that's why I'm doing the work that I'm doing, because that guy He will always come back. He will always feel wanted and he'll feel like as though he's at the center of the care. And that was just, that's a story. You don't get that unless you really talk to somebody and you tell those stories and you live it, right? That's the most important thing that I think marketing can do.

Totally agree. And that story was the epitome of moments that matter. I mean, as patients, we've all had the complete opposite of that experience dozens of times. And so, you know, in our own healthcare journey across our life, and unbelievable and totally relatable, but also unbelievable that we could have that level of an emotional response for someone knowing us, right? Like, in theory, that should be table stakes, but it's not.

Yeah.

Right. And so like you telling that, I could feel his emotion, her emotion, your emotion. Why? Because we've all been there.

Yeah,

we've all been there. We've all been in the moments that don't matter, right? Like, because I have to retell my story and I have to, right, advocate for myself and all of that. And it's just, I mean, it's brilliant. It's brilliant. It's beautiful. But the other point that you're making here is that as marketers, as communicators, as storytellers, we have to prioritize the constant search for the stories.

Yeah.

Because they don't exist in AI. They don't exist even necessarily with our executives or even sometimes our internal SMEs, you know, the engineers, the scientists, whoever those titles are, we've got to get out there. We've got to do our own listening session with our customers. We've got to, right? And there's a tremendous amount of value in that. And I think one of the hardest things for any brand an organization is to prioritize that work and that effort, especially when, you know, the business case for storytelling may not be immediate or easily attributed. What's your— what is your take on how you keep the organization motivated to invest that time and energy? To go find those stories and tell those stories when, you know, we're not looking at the same set of data that we might be looking at when we launch a lead gen campaign.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. For my whole career, it's been sort of a, please believe me, please believe me.

100%. Yeah.

I mean, you know, really believe me. I, you know, I know you'll like it when you see it. You'll like it Yeah. So that's like, yeah, that's an ongoing thing, right? It is always about that belief and trust in the story. And it's hard to quantify. It's hard to put a black and white number on it. But when you do, you have to take those moments and build on them internally. that's the key part.

And in fact, I think, like, with the whole brand exercise around, you know, building technology for the moments that matter was actually because we reverse-engineered the story essentially, right? We said, okay, well, what's the actual story here? The story is those moments where you're sitting with a clinician and the clinician's got their head down and they're typing, right? That's not a moment that matters to a patient. Right. Let's talk about what really matters is that interaction. And so, we essentially reverse-engineered that and led with the story, which I think is, which I think is really funny. Because yes, you're right, right? It's really hard to sell through this idea that you want to sit with somebody for an hour and talk to them and then come back with a story that is going to really knit together what the meaning of something is, right? Because that's expense and resource, resources and all the rest. And I guess the only answer that I have is Is first, yes, leadership that trusts you is vital and valuable. They've got to trust that your instinct and your intuition is on and that you'll deliver what the brand and the product needs. That's key.

And then the other thing ironically is I actually think that AI is making this sell easier.

Mm-hmm.

Because if you think, like, if I interview somebody and I get the transcript, the amount of stories, marketing perspectives, learning opportunities that the entire organization can benefit from, from looking at that story more strategically is so valuable. It's like gold. Think about one 1-hour transcript of me talking to a to a client about how Wound Expert works and them educating me on what they do. Yeah. The stuff that comes out of that through anecdotes and from actual examples will actually give a go-to-market marketing team a lot of information that they can use to drive leads. And it'll also educate your sales teams. It'll educate your CSM, your your client success managers, and the rest. Because, because it's really coming from the actual source.

Yeah. Well stated. I think this is going to be a great place to wrap the conversation today. We ran a little long, but I'm not mad at it because there's just so much goodness here. And frankly, we could go on for another 20 minutes. But I want to thank you because I think you clearly have shown An example of that you have built trust inside of the organization. They do trust what you're building here. And, you know, it certainly hasn't been without its challenges.

And I appreciate your candor about the challenges you faced throughout this brand transformation process. And I know that there's a lot that marketing leaders can take from hearing your story.

Thank you. It's been a pleasure. It really has been. And I hope it's of value and I appreciate your questions. You really, Really insightful and great questions that really brought out the story. Thank you.

Absolutely. Where can listeners learn more about Net Health and Humanify and your work?

Yeah, so go to Humanify HealthTech Podcast. It's on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, everywhere you go for your podcasts. Just search it up and you'll see the most recent episode. Um, you can also go to nethelp.com and check out our new brand messaging and, um, what we're, what we're doing. It's all there in our resources section. Um, it's on our front page. Um, we're, um, we're, um, we're really trying to push that message out more and more every day.

Wonderful. Thank you, Brian, for joining me.

Thank you.

And to everyone listening, don't forget to subscribe to future episodes. Thank you for being part of the Health Marketing Collective, where strong leadership meets marketing excellence, because the future of healthcare depends on it. We'll see you next time.