Your 2027 marketing roadmap starts here

Lauren Leone and Rich Briddock open Scaling Up 2026 with what’s changed in healthcare marketing over the past year and what the next two days are built to help you solve. From there, we go right into the opening executive panel.

The path to care no longer runs through one channel. Patients ask AI assistants, compare notes in communities, weigh peer recommendations against institutional reputation, and arrive with more of the decision already made. Competition has widened at the same time, with digital-first entrants and national brands appearing in markets that used to be local.

Three digital marketing leaders open the program with what they’re seeing from the inside. The conversation covers where patients are actually discovering care now, how that’s changing segmentation and channel mix, where budget is moving and what’s being pulled back to fund it, and how each of them is proving marketing’s impact when the journey is this fragmented and the signals are this thin.

They’ll also name what they’re watching most closely going into the year ahead, which sets up the two days that follow.

Opening executive panel topics we’ll cover:

• How patient discovery is changing, and the role AI assistants, social platforms, and peer communities now play alongside referrals and word of mouth
• How competition is intensifying, with table stakes rising across the board and the status quo is no longer an option
• Where media and channel mix are evolving to reach patients across those disparate paths
• Where budget is moving toward, and where it’s being pulled back to fund it
• How you’re measuring and proving marketing’s impact as the journey gets harder to track
• What trends you’re watching most closely going into the year ahead

Every growth strategy starts with the same question: where is the opportunity? 

For a healthcare organization, the answer rarely looks the same across a map. In some markets, patients are there, but no certified provider is—that’s a footprint problem, solved by recruiting or certifying. In others, providers are already in place, but the population has no idea the condition exists or that it’s treatable—that’s a demand problem.

In this session, Chad Hacker of Glaukos and Lisa Fisher of Cardinal Digital Marketing walk through how they overlaid disease prevalence data and provider coverage data to find both kinds of gaps, and how that map changed where the business invests. From there, they’ll discuss how they built a media strategy to serve two very different audiences at once: consumers who need to recognize a symptom they’ve never had a name for, and the referring clinicians who see them first and decide what happens next.

They’ll also cover the measurement ambition behind the work that connects media exposure to downstream claims data to understand whether investment is actually producing diagnosed and treated patients, and how to reconcile that against media mix modeling and matched-market testing when the three don’t agree. 

The approach applies to any multi-location healthcare organization planning where to expand and who to reach next.

If you run marketing across dozens of locations and multiple brands, you know where the time goes. Pulling numbers out of separate ad accounts, CRMs, EHRs, scheduling systems, and call tracking, then stitching them into something that resembles an answer. By the time it’s assembled, it’s already old.

This session debuts Pulse, Cardinal’s healthcare AI growth operating system. You’ll see it live: the daily read on whether you’re pacing to goal, the analyst you can ask anything in plain language, and the toolkit that diagnoses and fixes the operational problems standing between you and new patient volume. We’ll also walk through what’s launching in the weeks ahead.

Pulse itself is available exclusively to Cardinal clients. Attendees, though, can claim a free growth diagnostic: an audit of your patient acquisition strategy that shows whether your conversion signal strategy is sound, where your campaign hierarchy is costing you, where you’re hitting a ceiling, and where you need to diversify.

Media strategy for multi-brand, multi-site groups in active acquisition 

When a healthcare group is acquiring practices faster than its comp set grows, “did marketing work?” stops being a simple question. Spend goes up, bookings go up, platform efficiency improves—and same-store patient volume still moves the wrong way, because growth landed in locations the business doesn’t measure itself against.

Cardinal’s Group Media Director and Group Account Director walk through how they built a performance-based investment model for a multi-brand optometry group with hundreds of locations, and the order they had to build it in. They’ll cover why conversion signal cleanup had to come before any budget restructuring, why appointment capacity turned out to be one of the highest-leverage inputs in the model, how newly acquired practices get funded when a performance model is designed to starve them, and how they keep field-level requests from contaminating tests already in flight.

A multi-location healthcare group had real growth potential, ad budgets that were hitting their ceiling, and no way to know what scaling spend would actually return. This session walks through how we built a saturation-based forecasting model from two years of unified call and online booking data, producing four budget scenarios with a projected cost per new patient booking at each spend level.

We’ll cover how the model guided not just the size of the budget increase, but where the incremental dollars should go by channel, what happened when the account’s actual channel mix diverged from the model’s recommendation, and how checking the forecast against real results led to refitting the model on a full year of data, cutting forecast error from 16% to 4.5%.

Attendees will leave with a framework for building their own multi-scenario budget model, and for using real performance data to keep sharpening it after launch.

A patient’s decision to get care rarely happens in one sitting. They notice a symptom, ask people they trust, look you up, reach out, wait, hear back, decide whether to show up, and then decide again whether to come back. Marketing usually measures the inquiry and inherits the blame for everything after it, and the volume lost between those steps is almost never visible in a campaign report.

Every one of those handoffs is a place to remove friction or add it. Automation makes a journey faster and it can also make it colder, and the friction a marketer takes off the patient often lands on the intake team, who then have to chase what nobody collected. Deciding where that line sits is a leadership call rather than a technology one.

Three marketers who own different stretches of that journey compare how they manage it, from building demand and presence in a market before a location is open, through the response window that decides whether an inquiry becomes an appointment, into the engagement work that determines whether a patient shows up and returns. The conversation covers what to automate and what to keep human, how patients find and vet providers in places marketing doesn’t control, what to measure when the payoff is a kept appointment rather than a lead, and how to work with intake and operations teams whose incentives don’t always match marketing’s.

Multi-site and national healthcare campaigns are inherently complicated. Markets don’t behave alike. Other teams are running their own outreach in the same footprint. Business priorities shift mid-flight, conversion events get redefined, and the variable you most want to isolate is rarely the only one moving. This session walks through a multi-market awareness experiment for a national healthcare brand and how the team structured it to produce usable answers under exactly those conditions. 

We’ll get into the decisions that determine whether a test tells you anything: how markets get paired, what a matched market test can and can’t measure, when a causal impact model is the better instrument, and why the measurement approach has to be designed alongside the media plan rather than bolted on afterward. 

Then there’s the targeting problem. When only a fraction of any given market qualifies for your service, paying to reach everyone gets expensive fast. The team built deterministic audiences from claims data to reach qualified prospects directly—we’ll cover how we constructed and validated those audiences, what we learned along the way, and what you’ll want to think through before trying it, compliance included. 

Expect a practical look at how experienced teams design media experiments in complex environments, and the real trade-offs that come with it: between a statistically clean test and a program you can keep optimizing, between speed and confidence, between everything you’d like to learn and what your budget can actually answer. 

You’ll leave with:

• How to build a learning agenda before the media plan, and why alignment on the question matters more than the elegance of the test design
• Practical criteria for choosing between matched market testing, causal impact analysis, and business-metric triangulation
• How to construct and validate narrow, high-qualification audiences, and the compliance considerations that come with them
• How to structure a test when you know other variables will enter your markets and you can’t prevent it

Most women who need pelvic care are not searching for it. They have symptoms, no diagnosis, and no term to type into Google. What they do have is TikTok, Instagram, and communities of other women comparing notes on the same symptoms. That is where these patients are looking for answers, and that is where Pelvic Rehabilitation Medicine went to meet them.

Theresa Porcaro, VP of Growth at PRM, walks through what her team built. PRM ambassadors, women living with endometriosis, document their own care and recovery in their own voice, and Theresa can trace patient inquiries directly back to that content. TikTok lives put PRM providers in unscripted, authentic conversation with patients. The University Health Initiative brings endometriosis education onto college campuses with Below the Belt and Project Endo, including a surgeon-vetted symptom quiz that opens referral pathways into PRM and campus health centers.

She’ll cover how she earned physician buy-in, the provider playbook that lets surgeons run their own accounts inside guardrails, and how she grew a three-person team into a nine-person growth function to keep it all running.

Everyone knows that agentic AI tools can provide tremendous value for marketing analytics and insight.  However, the old adage “junk in, junk out” is more important than ever before and it’s imperative to avoid making AI-enabled decisions based on fundamentally flawed data.  In this session, marketing leaders will learn the critical data layer components that are required to feed AI tools the right information about marketing performance.

Most multi-location practices have online scheduling in place. Fewer know whether the appointments inside it are ones a real patient would take. A daily 10am slot looks like availability on a report. To a working parent whose child is in school until three, it’s a closed door.

Orthodontic Partners ran the analysis to find out where that gap sat across its practices. Grace Elliott’s team examined the booking window inside the online scheduler, the booking window across every channel including the phone, and the rate at which new patient consultations were actually kept, looking at kids, teens, and adults separately. What came back contradicted several things their doctors believed about how the schedule should look and what availability belonged online.

Grace walks through how she used that data to change minds, the collaboration with providers that followed, the technology involved, and what happened to booking and held rates afterward. She’s worked in both operations and marketing and shares what she’s learned from working on both sides of the practice. 

The session covers the internal argument as much as the analysis. Convincing a provider to give up a schedule they have defended for years takes evidence they can’t wave off, and the shape of that evidence transfers to any group where marketing depends on operations saying yes.

Roughly 85% of healthcare searches now return an AI-generated answer, the highest rate of any industry. Definitional content that used to bring patients in gets summarized before anyone clicks, and organic traffic charts are declining at organizations where patient volume is holding steady or growing. The old proxy broke, and most teams are still reporting against it.

That leaves three open questions. What do you concede and where do you invest instead, once ranking for everything stops being possible. How do you stay present in answers you can’t buy your way into, where the signals are peer content, provider expertise, and evidence of actual clinical differentiation. And how do you prove any of it worked when the payoff shows up as a booked appointment rather than a session.

Three healthcare marketing leaders discuss how they’re handling all three, including what they’ve stopped doing, what they’ve moved investment toward, how they’re measuring presence in AI answers, and what it takes to hold that visibility across hundreds of locations rather than one flagship site.

Day two opens with a look at what’s ahead: growth solutions for multi-site healthcare organizations, the trends reshaping healthcare media, and conversations with Google and Meta on what healthcare advertisers should be ready for.

For many patients, the journey to care now starts on social. People search for symptoms on social platforms, listen to other patients describe their experience, and start to make sense of a condition well before they’re ready to talk to anyone about it. 

At the same time, the platform has changed underneath healthcare advertisers. Automation now decides who sees an ad, creative carries much of the work targeting used to do, and healthcare teams are doing all of it with less signal than almost any other category.

Rich Briddock sits down with Clare Tuck and Emily Brill from Meta to talk about where the platform is heading and how to engage patients from first discovery through return visits. They’ll cover how health consumers are using social to seek information, the features and formats worth knowing about, what a privacy-compliant setup requires and where teams go wrong, why creative has become the targeting layer, how to optimize toward patients who book, show up, and come back, and what measurement beyond last click looks like for a provider organization.

Last year, we heard how Action Behavior Centers set out to build a stronger measurement foundation. In this session, VP of Marketing Analytics Amy Welsh and Cardinal’s Rich Briddock pick up that story—how that foundation has been refined, adopted across the org, and layered with new tools along the way. It’s a conversation about what happens when the pieces start working together, and where that’s pointing next.

Most healthcare marketers are flying blind on capacity. You can get availability data from operations once a month, maybe once a quarter, and by the time it reaches you, it describes a schedule that no longer exists. So budget keeps flowing to locations and specialties that are already booked out six weeks, while open inventory sits unfilled.

This session shows what changes when media strategy aligns with real appointment availability. We’ll walk through a case study from a multi-location healthcare organization, covering how they reallocated spend against live capacity and what it did to conversion and booking rates and cost per new patient booking. Spending where you have inventory isn’t just more efficient. It gets patients in front of a doctor faster.

Then we’ll introduce NextSpot, the tool that gives you that view across your entire system. NextSpot is free at the core level and open to everyone, not just Cardinal clients. Early access opens exclusively to attendees in this room.

Search still captures more healthcare demand than any other channel, and it’s changing faster than any other channel. AI Overviews and AI Mode now answer questions that used to send someone to a website. Assistants are compressing research that once took weeks into a single conversation. Campaigns that used to be built and managed by hand now run on automation that decides where and when you appear.

This session is a state-of-Google check for healthcare marketers. The conversation covers what changes when a patient finds and evaluates a provider through an AI assistant instead of a results page, how a compressed research phase reshapes both paid and organic strategy, what it now takes to show up across Google’s full ecosystem including Search, AI Overviews, AI Mode, and organic results, and where AI Max and Performance Max stand today and where they’re headed.

PwC just asked 4,454 CEOs where they are applying AI at scale. Demand generation topped the list. Demand fulfillment came last. Amol Nirgudkar has spent eleven years listening at healthcare’s front door, more than 300 million patient conversations across 10,000+ locations in dental, behavioral health, veterinary and medical groups, and the finding is the same everywhere: growth is not in buying more demand. It is in the demand you already paid for, lost in the seams between marketing, sales and operations. Five needles in the haystack from real patient conversations, the revenue bridge your CFO will actually believe, and the five numbers marketing leaders should own in 2027.

• Why you do not have a demand problem: the calibration problem between marketing, sales and operations, and how to measure the six seams where patients fall through.

• Five needles in the haystack, found in real call data across dental, behavioral health and pediatric care: the Friday problem, the one sentence, two-speed intake, the anatomy of a booked call, and the second impression.

• The 2027 scorecard for marketing leaders: cost per booked patient, the share of paid contacts that end with no next step, speed to lead, the signal you send back to the platforms, and benchmarking to your own best.

Most of what limits patient volume never shows up in a campaign report. It’s the test that didn’t get funded, the tool that sat in review for eight months, the location that kept underperforming because nobody could get operations into the room. Marketing leaders spend a large share of their time on internal work that determines how much growth they get to attempt in the first place, and almost none of that work is taught anywhere.

Three healthcare marketing leaders discuss how they do it. They’re at different points on the curve, from a team still building credibility without measurement infrastructure to one with two decades of accumulated trust and a leadership team that treats marketing as core to growth strategy, and they’re accountable to different kinds of scrutiny.

The conversation covers translating marketing performance into the numbers operators and executives are already judged on, what to do when marketing metrics look strong and patient volume doesn’t move, how to earn funding for infrastructure before you can prove its return, and how to build enough standing that the next ask gets approved without a fight. Expect specifics on what they bring to leadership and what they hold back, how they get operations to act on what marketing sees, and what it costs when the alignment isn’t there.

Most multi-site healthcare marketers are flying blind—not because they’re not working hard, but because no one’s connected the dots between what marketing does and what actually fills the schedule. Without that clarity, you can’t tell your own team if it’s working, let alone convince a C-suite or a PE board to fund more of it. Brooke Newton has built that clarity from scratch across organizations.

In this session, Brooke walks through how she moved AllerVie off manual, finance-run reporting and built a real attribution foundation: connecting paid search, organic web, and organic call tracking into a single view of where patients actually come from—then linking that data to scheduling and call center operations so marketing’s impact shows up in the metrics operations and finance already trust. She’ll get specific about the hardest part of this work: not the tracking itself, but translating it into language that earns incremental trust—and funding—from executive teams and private equity boards who need to see it’s not just another tool going unused.

If you’re not sure whether your marketing is working, or you know it is but can’t get anyone above you to believe it, this session is for you.

A growing share of your patients decide whether to book with you on a mobile device, after hours, in under five minutes. They won’t call your front desk to reschedule, and if changing an appointment is hard, they are more likely to skip it.

Tend Dental built its brand on that reality. A seamless patient experience is a pillar of the organization and a reason patients choose it over the practice down the street. Kaela Shupe shows how her team put that belief into practice, redesigning the online booking flow from eight steps to four and using EMR data to surface the right location and time before the patient has to think about it. Patients can book and modify appointments easily. 

Kaela walks through how the team mapped the existing flow, where the friction actually lived, and what surprised them along the way. She also covers the downstream consequences of changing a flow. When steps move, the conversion signals behind them change too, and every event has to be re-audited to confirm it is still firing the way you think it is. All of it is deliberate sequencing. The experience had to be right, and the measurement behind it had to be trustworthy, before Tend Dental scaled media investment.

You’ll walk away with:

• A method for auditing your own booking flow, step by step, and identifying which steps are load-bearing and which are habit
• How to use data you already own to remove decisions from the patient instead of adding features
• What changes when the flow changes, including how to re-verify your conversion signals before you trust the results
• A case for doing optimization work first, and how to make that argument internally when the pressure is to spend

Most healthcare marketing teams are somewhere in the middle—call tracking is live but the CDP isn’t, or signals are flowing but no one’s sure how to act on them. This session meets you where you are.

We’ll cover the real, in-between moves available right now: manual matchback processes, workarounds for schedulers that don’t integrate cleanly, and how to use campaign-level conversion goals so a shallower signal doesn’t starve your algorithm of volume. Then we’ll move from capture to strategy—how to weight conversion values so the algorithm understands a booking isn’t worth the same as a click, how to move from static to dynamic value-based bidding, and how to test a new conversion strategy without disrupting your entire account. Throughout, we’ll use real client examples to illustrate what progress looks like at every stage of the infrastructure journey.

Leave with a concrete next step, wherever your program stands today.

Patients are asking AI where to go for care, and AI is answering with a short list of names. 

Over the past year, Rob Sauter and his team at Cardinal have benchmarked AI visibility for health systems, specialty groups, and national multi-location brands. They tracked it month over month and tested what moves a brand from absent to cited. This session covers what they learned. Rob walks through documented case studies, including a dermatology group that climbed to the top AI visibility rank in its market and a regional health system rebuilding its content around service line authority. In most healthcare categories, no one has fully solved AI entity structure yet, so the brands that build it first gain a compounding advantage. Come away with the specific moves to make that happen for your organization.