Your 2026 marketing roadmap starts here

In this can’t-miss opening panel, CMOs from leading healthcare organizations share what’s really happening in the trenches of healthcare marketing, and where things are headed. With 2026 bringing new economic pressures, regulatory changes, and shifting consumer expectations, marketers are being asked to do more with less while delivering measurable growth.

You’ll hear directly from CMOs navigating these pressures, including:

• The biggest challenges holding back healthcare growth, and how to overcome them
• How changing consumer behavior and competitive pressure are shaping strategy
• Budgeting for 2026: where they’re investing, what they’re cutting, and why
• How they’re scaling marketing teams and adopting AI to work smarter
• Their biggest lessons from the past year, and what they’re watching next

This panel sets the tone for the summit and offers a rare, honest glimpse into the mindset of healthcare’s top marketing leaders. Come ready to take notes.

How do you scale marketing efficiently while hitting aggressive growth goals? In this session, Matt Stringer, CMO of Action Behavior Centers, shares how his team quadrupled qualified lead volume by building measurement infrastructure while moving fast—not waiting for perfection before launching.

Learn how ABC used a continuous feedback loop approach to expand into new channels, navigate the quality vs. quantity dance, and communicate strategic risk to executives. From incrementality testing to revenue-proxied metrics, discover the practical framework ABC used to test new channels like Meta, while maintaining guardrails that allow fast failure without burning budget or trust.

Key takeaways include how to align marketing targets with operational realities, set realistic expectations with leadership, and use measurement insights to guide budget allocation decisions as you scale.

Grab your lunch and jump into a small-group discussion with your healthcare marketing peers. In this interactive networking block, you’ll choose a breakout room based on the topic that matters most to you—from AI to analytics to operations alignment. Each room will be hosted by an industry expert to help guide conversation, but this time is all about sharing experiences, trading ideas, and learning from each other.

Whether you’re swapping MarTech stack tips, comparing measurement frameworks, or debating how AI is changing creative, you’ll walk away with fresh insights and new connections you can tap long after the summit ends.

Choose your room:

• MarTech Exchange – Share your favorite tools, integrations, and time-saving automations.
• All Things AI – Compare prompts, tools, and use cases for smarter, faster marketing.
• Winning the Digital Front Door – Discuss listings, reviews, and online reputation at scale.
• Gaining Marketing + Operations Alignment – Explore how to bridge data, priorities, and communication between departments.
• Making Measurement Meaningful – Dive into metrics, KPIs, and frameworks that actually prove value.

Healthcare marketers write off Meta for one reason: lead quality. High volume or cheap leads don’t matter when leads are unqualified, uninsured, or never convert to patients.

Cardinal’s paid social team cracked the code. Through systematic testing of Meta lead forms—adding SMS verification, progressive insurance qualification, and strategic engagement tactics—they transformed Meta from a brand channel into a legitimate performance driver. The result? A 78% reduction in cost per qualified lead compared to Google Ads, with quality that actually converts.

In this session, Lisa Fisher and Caro Costa walk through the exact testing framework and optimization strategies that made it work. You’ll leave with a replicable playbook for your own Meta campaigns.

From content creation to patient acquisition workflows, AI is reshaping the way healthcare marketers work. In this panel, marketing leaders from provider organizations will share how they’re actually using AI today, what results they’ve seen, and what they’ve learned along the way. We’ll also explore the marketer’s role in helping teams adopt AI responsibly—preserving trust, credibility, and the human element patients expect.

• How do you use AI to improve workflows and efficiency without losing brand trust, credibility, or the human side of healthcare? 
• What is the communicator’s role as the bridge between innovation and integrity?
• Use cases and recommendations on how to adopt AI while maintaining patient trust?

You can’t scale patient acquisition without a strong foundation. Before investing heavily in paid media, healthcare organizations must ensure their marketing infrastructure is ready to capture and convert demand. In this session, marketing leaders will share how they evaluate marketing readiness across operations, martech, and patient experience—and what happens when you skip this critical step.

Panelists will discuss:

• Building a martech stack that supports growth: call tracking, online booking, scheduling tools, CRMs, and contact centers
• Evaluating your digital front door and removing friction in the patient journey
• How to align marketing with operations to avoid wasted spend 
• The readiness checklists they use before launching campaigns
• Real examples of how small infrastructure changes made a big impact on results

Whether you’re launching in a new market or trying to grow an existing one, this session will help you ensure the foundation is solid before stepping on the gas.

Too many healthcare marketers allocate budgets based on guesswork or last year’s spend. Cardinal’s approach is different. In this conversation, we’ll walk through our investment planning process: distinguishing paid performance from organic and earned, aligning investment with operational capacity and business goals, using forecasting models to predict outcomes before you spend, and applying marginal economics to move beyond blended metrics that hide the truth.

You’ll see how we prioritize where dollars go before deciding how to spend them, ensuring media investment aligns with operational reality and growth potential. Expect honest discussion about common attribution traps, capacity constraints, trade-offs between growth and efficiency, and a practical framework for allocating budget across complex, multi-location healthcare organizations.

Key themes to explore:

1. Understanding your digital mix and performance first 
2. Capacity-driven and goal-aligned thinking – Don’t market where you’re full and align with business goals
3. Forecasting models – Predicting outcomes before you spend
4. Marginal economics – Looking beyond blended metrics
5. Allocation frameworks – Market-by-market, brand-by-brand prioritization

Bad marketing data doesn’t just waste budget; it blocks patient growth. In this session, we’ll discuss how detrimental this data problem is, how it affects your campaigns, and which areas to fix first. Walk away with a clear understanding of how to turn messy data into measurable patient appointments.

The most successful healthcare marketing strategies don’t choose between brand and performance; they integrate both. And they don’t spread media dollars evenly across channels; they allocate strategically based on market realities, service line needs, and operational capacity.

This session brings together both perspectives: the strategic case for brand investment and the tactical execution of a smart media mix. You’ll leave with both the strategic ammunition to defend brand investment and the tactical playbook to optimize your media mix.

Panelists will cover both the strategic “why” and tactical “how”:

• Why brand investment matters in ROI-driven organizations and how it actually lowers acquisition costs
• How market realities, service lines, and capacity constraints shape media allocation decisions
• Measurement approaches that prove both brand impact and channel performance
• Real examples of media mix strategies that work for different healthcare markets and goals

Whether you’re defending brand investment to leadership or deciding where to put your next media dollar, this session bridges strategic thinking with tactical execution.

Marketers are drowning in dashboards, reports, and raw data, but AI is helping surface what really matters. In this session, Cardinal’s Applied Analytics team showcases how AI is transforming the way we analyze performance, uncover opportunities, and guide smarter media decisions. From creative testing insights to real-time anomaly detection and predictive forecasting, you’ll get a look under the hood at novel use cases and tools that are changing the analytics game. If you’re ready to see how AI can help you move faster, think smarter, and act with clarity, don’t miss this one.

Healthcare marketing leaders—VPs, CMOs, and directors—are under pressure to justify investments with real outcomes. Traditional metrics like impressions and clicks no longer cut it. In this session, top executives will unpack how they’ve aligned around shared KPIs, navigated the complexities of multi-touch healthcare journeys, and leveraged advanced measurement frameworks to report real ROI.

Key topics include:

• Aligning around meaningful success metrics like booked appointments, marketing-influenced revenue, and ROMI, not just impressions or clicks 
• Overcoming unique measurement challenges in healthcare (HIPAA compliance, complex attribution, and disconnects between short-term spend and long-term value )
• Using advanced frameworks like MMM, causal attribution, data clean-room modeling, and holistic KPI roadmaps 
• How they present measurement to C-suites and boards, communicating attribution, ROI, and impact in a clear, confidence-building way

What does it take to truly connect marketing performance to business outcomes? For many healthcare organizations, data lives in silos: marketing reports on leads, operations tracks call center activity, and finance forecasts revenue. This session shares how one organization brought it all together with a two-year Salesforce rollout, custom dashboards, and new workflows designed to align marketing, sales, operations, and the call center.

You’ll hear how this team:

• Built a centralized dashboard that predicts revenue and appointment generation
• Used Salesforce as the backbone of patient acquisition across dozens of locations
• Turned media performance data into insights the C-suite could trust
• Improved appointment generation by 50% in just weeks of rollout

Attendees will walk away with lessons learned from a complex, multi-site Salesforce implementation and a blueprint for aligning marketing strategy with operational execution to drive measurable growth.

AEG Vision is one of the fastest-growing eye care platforms in the U.S., with 500+ practices operating under a complex house-of-brands model. As the business scaled, the marketing team recognized the need to evolve their data infrastructure to unlock more precise, efficient growth. With a bold new vision, they set out to centralize martech systems, refine their investment strategy, and build a foundation for long-term success.

In this session, AEG’s CMO, Rachelle Kuebler, and Associate Vice President of Marketing, Allie Lancaster, will share how they partnered with Cardinal to lay the groundwork for smarter decision-making. They’ll unpack how the team:

• Overhauled paid media accounts and investment strategy to shift toward patient growth at scale
• Established foundational tracking and a custom UTM strategy for reliable attribution
• Built a roadmap to align media spend with market capacity and business outcomes
• Created a scalable approach to testing upper-funnel channels to fuel future demand

Moderated by Cardinal’s Lauren Leone and featuring insights from our media strategy team, this session offers a behind-the-scenes look at how AEG Vision is building a modern marketing engine designed for scale, efficiency, and measurable growth across its complex national footprint.

Search CPCs keep climbing. Your team needs to diversify. Programmatic promises scale, but proving ROI feels impossible. In this session, we share honest insights from 15+ programmatic campaigns across dental, behavioral health, and specialty care. You’ll see what’s actually worked, where we’ve pulled back, and why measurement is harder than vendors admit. More importantly, you’ll get Cardinal’s practical framework for deciding if programmatic makes sense for your organization, including when to test, how much to invest, what measurement infrastructure you need, and red flags that signal you’re not ready. 

Healthcare marketers today aren’t just tasked with driving demand—they’re expected to lead. In this panel, senior marketers share how they’ve earned the confidence of the C-suite, aligned with finance and operations, and positioned marketing as a critical driver of business strategy. Learn how to communicate impact beyond the marketing team, gain buy-in across clinical and operational teams, and navigate the internal dynamics that make or break marketing’s influence.

Panelists will share:

• Real talk on navigating the politics of cross-functional alignment
• How to tailor your message for Finance, Ops, and Clinical leaders
• The skills that help marketing leaders gain trust and strategic sway
• Stories of what worked—and what didn’t—when trying to earn a seat at the table

Search performance is plateauing. CPCs are up, conversion rates are down, and every dollar feels harder to justify. You know you need to diversify into Meta, CTV, or programmatic, but how do you prove they actually work?

Blended metrics lie. Last-click attribution is broken. Your CFO wants evidence that new channels actually drive incremental growth, not just claim credit for patients who would’ve converted anyway.

In this session, Cardinal’s analytics and media leaders show how incrementality testing removes the guesswork from channel expansion. You’ll learn:

• Why traditional attribution breaks down for upper-funnel media
• How to design geo-lift and holdout tests that prove causal impact
• Real healthcare examples that used incrementality to justify budget increases
• How to choose metrics that resonate with CFOs and CEOs

Walk away with a testing framework you can implement immediately, and the confidence to finally diversify beyond search.

Reaching the right patients is harder—and more important—than ever. With privacy regulations tightening and traditional signals becoming less reliable, healthcare marketers are rethinking how they discover, define, and engage their audiences. In this panel, marketers from leading healthcare brands share how they combine research, payor data, 3rd-party data, and AI-powered targeting to uncover new patient segments and drive measurable results. You’ll learn:

• How research and segmentation reveal new market opportunities
• Real-world examples of using 3P data, payor targeting, and AI to reach high-value audiences
• Targeting strategies that balance precision with privacy
• Practical wins you can apply now to improve targeting without increasing spend

Managing dozens of brands across hundreds of locations isn’t just a logistical challenge—it’s a strategic one. In this panel, marketing leaders from multi-brand, multi-site healthcare organizations share how they drive growth in highly complex environments. From budgeting across brands to managing campaigns with limited internal resources, they’ll discuss how they’re balancing local relevance with operational efficiency. Expect real talk on:

• How to prioritize spend across diverse brands, markets, and service lines
• Structuring campaigns to scale when you have dozens of brands
• Building a performance strategy when goals vary by region or brand maturity
  Lessons learned from what hasn’t worked—and how they adapted

Whether you’re managing a patchwork of acquired practices or balancing centralized and decentralized models, this session will help you navigate the complexity and scale smarter.

Google Ads isn’t what it was two years ago—and it won’t look anything like this two years from now.

Performance Max is no longer experimental. Demand Gen is replacing traditional display. YouTube’s premium CTV inventory is directly competing with your programmatic spend. And with each product launch, Google’s machine learning gets smarter, broader, and more capable of replacing your carefully built campaign structures with automated signals you can’t directly control.

In this panel, Cardinal’s paid media leaders will explore what’s actually changing and how to navigate it. Should you consolidate into Google or maintain diversification? When should you adopt versus wait? What does smart testing look like? Expect honest debate, real examples, and a practical framework to guide your decisions.

Age, gender, and ZIP code don’t cut it anymore. Two patients in the same demographic can have completely different healthcare needs, behaviors, and intent. That’s where third-party data comes in.

Rich Briddock walks through how Cardinal layers claims-based, behavioral, and contextual data with platform audiences to reach highly specific patient populations. From targeting lapsed GLP-1 users still seeking weight loss support to finding mammography-eligible women in low-screening areas, you’ll see real case studies that show when deterministic vs. modeled audiences make sense, and how to activate them across Meta, programmatic, and social channels.

Leave with a practical framework for evaluating whether 3P data is worth the investment.