Scaling Up 2026 where healthcare growth goes next

Announcer: Welcome to the Ignite podcast, the only healthcare marketing podcast that digs into the digital strategies and tactics that help you accelerate growth. Each week, Cardinal’s experts explore innovative ways to build your digital presence and attract more patients. Buckle up for another episode of Ignite.

Lauren Leone: Hey everybody, welcome to Ignite. We’re doing an extra special episode for all of our podcast listeners about our upcoming Scaling Up event, October 13th and 14th, back for its fourth year. It’s going to be the best year yet. Fully virtual, free for all of you who are listening that may want to attend. Get two days of deep dive content. We’re going to hear a lot from in-house marketers, what they’re working on, what their focuses are, but also all of the experts here at Cardinal that you are used to hearing on our podcast.

Today, I’ve got Ashley, who is our head of brand marketing here at Cardinal. Ashley is the designer of all things Scaling Up, the program, the speakers. Ashley, you have been heads down in Scaling Up for the last few months. Give us the quick rundown now that we’re three weeks out.

Ashley Petrochenko: Hey, thanks, Lauren. Yes, this is going to be exciting. Scaling Up is my baby. Like I said, my head’s been down. We’ve been just all things Scaling Up the last few months and is really excited to share a little bit about the program. Every year when we set out to design a Scaling Up program, we’re always asking ourselves, what are the challenges that we see healthcare marketers facing today? We’re pulling from conversations with our clients, prospective partners. As well as the conversations that you’re having on the podcast.

The number one themes that we occur are, how do you maintain visibility across messy patient journeys? The funnel does not really exist. It’s a very much convoluted path to find care. People are still using Google, but they’re also turning to social, Reddit, TikTok, and other communities before they ever really type in doctor near me or a specific brand name. How do you maintain that visibility? Especially in an AI landscape, that’ll be another major core theme of the program. Then maintaining that visibility across very complex brand architectures.

I think most of our listeners are coming to us from house of brands where they may have dozens of different brands that they’re managing, dozens of websites. They’re an active M&A. They’re opening DeNovo. How do you do all of marketing within that complexity, especially when you have different tech stacks, different teams? Really designing a program to answer that challenge. Then how do you prove it? I think that is the pressure marketers are under. How do you show your impact? How do you have to show that you’re keeping a appointments and drivint revenue?

Lauren: Ashley, knowing that those are some of the common challenges that we’ve heard this year, and like you said, not necessarily new, although I think some of the AI stuff is going to be a little bit newer or at least more well developed than it was last year when we were very much in information gathering stage. What kind of sessions have we put together in response to those challenges and questions?

Ashley: Scaling Up. We aim to make it fun, as you know. Lauren is the host, the MC. We bring a lot of energy. People don’t want to sit down for boring webinars, so we try to have a lot of variety of the content. We have fireside chats. We have ask-me-anythings, as well as solo presentations coming from healthcare marketers doing the work themselves in-house. We have a lot more solo sessions this year right from marketers. Panels featuring not only Cardinal’s experts, but also marketers in the field. We’re also welcoming some speakers from Google and Meta this year to really tell listeners exactly what’s happening on our platform, what the future looks like, what to expect.

We’re really excited about those formats and the sessions that we’re bringing. A few sessions I’m really excited about is in the measurement attribution space. I think that’s one of the biggest challenges marketers have right now. How do you move past clicks and calls and towards booked appointments? We have a lot of sessions from Rushi Patel is going to really share a practical guide to conversion signal optimization. Last year we had an incrementality 101 session with Alex Camp. I’m really excited about that.

This year we’re upping the ante, bringing another level of sophistication for marketers who are really working in national footprints with lots of moving parts. How do you design a test in that kind of ecosystem? Bryce Hamlin and Tim Ryan from Power Digital are going to be joining us for that one. Another one that we’re really excited about is from Alex Camp and Scott Cameron talking about a two-year project where we have been building the measurement foundation so we can get to a point where we can accurately predict patient growth within a 4.5% margin of error.

I’m super excited about Camp’s been doing great work, so I think that’s going to be a really exciting one for people to see what’s actually possible when you get that measurement foundation in place.

Lauren: I’m super excited about that, Ashley, because we’ve been talking about MMM and advanced measurement for a while now, but so many of the solutions out there, especially the out-of-the-box solutions, they’re just not built for healthcare. You get in, you think, okay, it all sounds really great on paper. I’m going to plug all this information in. They’re built to operate off of statistical significance that healthcare just doesn’t have volume of conversions, or we know that there are walled gardens in our world that other industries don’t have to fight against.

To have a solution like this that we’ve been working on that actually works and brings to the healthcare industry, I’m really excited to see the use cases and to, frankly, get more people signed up and wanting to use it. That’s something I would love to see more of next year.

Ashley: Great. I think listeners and attendees are going to walk away with a lot of real practical examples. We have sessions coming from a few different organizations, AEG Vision, really talking about not focusing just on individual locations, but how do you grow the portfolio as a whole versus individual practices. That’s going to be a fun conversation. Action Behavior Centers is back again and talking about they’ve been building that measurement foundation for the last couple of years. Amy Welsh is joining us again and really talking about what that enables for the next step for 2027.

Forward thinking after you get your ducks in a row, the integrations in place, the tech installed, what does that really enable? That’s going to be a great conversation.

Lauren: I think hearing a group that spent the entire last year just getting their measurement foundation, that speaks volumes to the way the industry is moving and the fact that this is not just an overnight thing. I think it’s going to be really important to hear the continuation of some of the stories that we’ve heard in years past, not that one group solved all their problems in 12 months and then never had to revisit these things.

Ashley: I think that’s why I like Scaling Pp so much. I feel like a lot of marketers are living in silos. They’re by themselves and they’re beating themselves up. I don’t have my measurement in place. I don’t have the solution figured out. There’s this pressure to solve it overnight, but it does take time. To hear from marketers just like you and hearing that story of how long it took them to figure out the solution, what it took, how did they gain buy-in, I think that’s really encouraging. You’re not alone out there. That’s why we made Scaling Up. You’re not alone. We’re here to help and these other marketers are here to help you too.

Lauren: Yes, absolutely. Speaking of, the segue there, Ashley, into some of the solutions that we want to put forth going into 2027 that will also be part of the journey, not all be all solutions. We’re going to be launching two new solutions, Pulse and NextSpot. Can you tell everybody what those are? What do those names mean?

Ashley: Pulse is going to be making its debut at Scaling Up. It is Cardinal’s healthcare AI growth operating system. This is really trying to solve the problem that we mentioned about measurement and reporting and trying to understand what is working when you have disconnected technology stacks, when you have CRMs, EHRs, you have call tracking, you’re living in spreadsheets, and all the data lives everywhere. Cardinal is bringing it together in one platform so that users have a daily read on what’s working, what’s not working.

They can ask and query questions that they need to answer for planning purposes. It’s really this one-stop shop that is going to help our clients answer the questions, keeping them up at night so that they know where to invest and where to grow next year.

Lauren: Actually, I think all of that sounds like a dream that every marketer is like, oh, let me wave my magic wand. I think we’re going to be actually showing everyone under the hood. We’re going to be doing a live demo of what it looks like in the real environment, really with the goal being of how do I use AI and agentic thinking to sit on top of and enhance what the marketers are capable of, but also to fill the gaps where the marketers cannot. This is all about AI plus human working together to do the things that we have not been able to do in this industry in the past.

One thing I’m really excited about is that we’re going to do a free growth diagnostic for everybody that attends Scaling Up. Then we’re going to be doing some deeper pulse onboarding for some of our Cardinal clients with AI. Every time you use it gets smarter. We’re going to be getting some of our clients on it to start evolving what it can be next year as well. Constantly changing. Anybody that wants to do the growth diagnostic as a product of joining Scaling Up and then wants to continue looking at it into next year, we’ll be doing an early access, first few months free, and then rolling into 2027 with that fully onboarded for them.

Ashley: Make sure that you guys attend that session. It’s only available to people who show up live to that session at Scaling Up. We hope to see you there. One of the agents within Pulse that we’re really excited about is Next Spot. Listeners know that solving the capacity alignment challenge with the media investment planning is hard. Sometimes you can’t get the data from your operational teams. Maybe they give it to you every two months. It’s really hard to get that data. This is something that we hear from listeners. This is something we hear from our clients and prospects.

This is a solution that we have heard the market say loud and clear that they want. We’re going to have it as part of the Pulse suite, but we’re also developing a standalone product that attendees will have early access to. It’s free. This is a tool that the healthcare industry needs, and we’re happy to provide it. Make sure you attend that session. We’re going to be walking through how it works and showing a case study of how we’re taking that data, lining it with the investment strategy, and using that to improve performance.

Lauren: Awesome. Super excited. Then, Ashley, one of the big additions to this year’s programming is we’re going to be bringing in some of the big guns from Meta and Google themselves to tell us about what is going on with their specific platforms, their algorithms, how the best of the best organizations are using them to win more patients. Tell us a little bit about the addition of both a speaker from Meta and a speaker from Google to the program.

Ashley: Yes, we’re really excited to welcome. these speakers, especially, the healthcare journey is evolving, like we discussed already. It’s not this linear path. How do you maintain visibility? These speakers are really going to speak to what trends they’re observing. How is consumer behavior evolving? How do you stay visible? They’ll speak to recent changes on the platform, as well as what’s coming up on the roadmap in the future at Meta and Google, and giving their recommendations and advice on what healthcare organizations need to do to reach people at all stages of their care journey.

Lauren: Awesome.

Ashley: I have [crosstalk]. If you had one question for Meta or Google, what would it be? The question that every prospect I speak to asks is, how do I get the performance [unintelligible 00:10:41] 2021? Those good old days. No, I’m just kidding. Everybody wants it, but it’s never going to happen.

Lauren: Actually, one thing I’d be curious to ask these speakers from the platforms themselves would be, the confidence on Last Click is waning. It’s there, and it’s a good measure. There’s so many other ways to think about measurement nowadays. Within the healthcare landscape, specifically, how do each of these platforms think about the evolution of measurement and optimization? How do they think about organizations using CAPI or offline conversions to bring in signals, and how should those signals be working together and thought about not just that instant gratification that everybody wants, but that everyone wants that easy click. Dollar in, dollar out.

Yes, I think that’ll be part of the conversation, and that’s going to be kicking off the conference on day two. I’m really looking forward to that fireside chat. Lauren, maybe thinking about the program, what session do you think you’re looking forward to the most?

Lauren: Yes, I am super excited this year. There’s a lot, but we have got a solo session with Chad Hacker from Glockos, as well as two of the Cardinal team members, Lisa Fisher and Rick Burchfield. It is the first client that we brought on under the power and Cardinal digital end-to-end commerce solution that we set out to build when we partnered with Power Digital at the end of last year. I’m really excited to get on with Chad and hear how that has been going, to hear how we’re tackling retail/consumer health with the regulatory landscape and the traditional healthcare angle of it, how we’re really addressing the patient journey, influencer, media buying at scale.

There’s so much going on with Glockos and how they’re growing and changing. Looking to break the industry for good and to be along that journey with them. I’m really excited for Chad to speak and talk about that journey over the last 12 months.

Ashley: Great. I’m excited too. I think they have some big things in the works right now that we can’t speak to, but to hear about it at Scaling Up in just a few weeks is going to be a really good session.

Lauren: All right, Ashley, and then I have to flip the exact same question back onto you. Which session are you most excited for?

Ashley: I’ve been speaking with all of our speakers and I am really excited for the three women joining us for this panel on how do you maintain engagement from the first touch all the way to building an advocate. We have Akilah Martin from Verbal Beginnings, Chelsea Lockhart from Sutter Health, and Jessie Feist from Spring Fertility. These are coming from very different organizations, but they are complex care journeys that take months, sometimes years. How do you build engagement across that timeline?

They’re doing some very interesting things. They’re brilliant. I’m super excited about this. I think there’s going to be a lot of real tangible walkaways that people can take home and start thinking about how do you keep that pulse on the patient when a decision isn’t something you can make overnight. I’m really excited about that one.

Lauren: Scaling Up would not be possible without the sponsors. I think using the term sponsor can make it seem like they just paid to be here. Let me be clear, these are organizations that we recommend highly to our clients because they are part of this solution of how do I track, measure, how do I ensure that the dollars that I’m spending and the investment that I’m making are actually helping my business grow. While these organizations are very kindly sponsoring this event because they want to be part of this community, if they hadn’t paid a dollar, I would still be recommending these organizations. Thank you to Patient Prism, Fresh Paint, Line, ZocDoc, and Ars Privacy. Those organizations are going to be speaking throughout the event, so we’re very excited to have them.

Ashley: Our sponsors are bringing great presentations to the program. Really excited to have them join us and share what’s working in their spaces and sharing their point of view. Yes, super excited and thankful for our sponsors.

Lauren: Just to recap us here, Ashley, Scaling Up is coming up in just about three weeks from today, October 13th and 14th. It is totally free to join. Get yourself signed up. Get your entire team signed up. We went through a bunch of incentives this year for Joining Sessions Live. However, if you are not able to make it, we know you all have busy schedules. It’s the middle of planning season. A registration will still get you access to all the content on demand. We highly encourage just tossing your name in the form, and you’ll get sent the link to access everything after the fact.

Get registered. Specifically, pay attention for that Pulse session where we’re going to be debuting that product and getting you all access to some of the really cool tools that we want to bring to the market next year. Ash, thanks for joining. We hope to see you all on October 13th. Thanks. See you all soon.

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