RVO Health’s Mukund Jain joins healthcare advertising leader John Mangano to unpack the “magic moment” when patients and providers meet — and why every dollar of healthcare marketing ultimately succeeds or fails right there. Mukund explains how emotion, evidence, and empathy collide in those eight-ish critical minutes that define patient outcomes and brand success.
Mukund shares his journey from biomedical engineer to healthcare marketing leader. He reveals how structural and cultural divides between HCP and DTC marketing can create friction, and how shared language, unified KPIs, and conversation-ready strategies can turn that friction into connection.
The conversation looks ahead to a more integrated, AI-enabled marketing future where personalization becomes the connective tissue between patients and providers. Mukund and John cover how ad tech can quietly enable that alignment, not by selling harder, but by helping both sides meet in the middle.
Transcript:
John Mangano (JM): Welcome to Deep, the Health Marketing podcast. I'm John Mangano. Lately I've been thinking about something — as consumer marketers, we focus on helping patients become aware and treat their conditions. And as HCP marketers, we focus on helping providers learn about the benefits of new treatments. In the end, we have faith that reaching both sides of the patient-provider continuum will drive the improved health outcomes we're targeting. As an industry, we rarely manage those campaigns together, which is crazy, because ultimately both patients and their providers need to be aligned on their care. So today I want to go deep on how the industry can holistically market to patients and providers, and I've invited a special guest — someone who has pioneered doing just that, creating ways to market to patients while they're researching their care, and to providers when they're going to see those patients. I'm speaking of none other than Mukund Jain, a pioneer in marketing across patients and providers, who in his latest role as Senior Vice President and General Manager at RVO Health has invented new ways to integrate marketing. Welcome, Mukund.
Mukund Jain (MJ): Thanks, John, for having me. I appreciate the time together.
JM: Mukund, you have a unique profile for our industry. You've had a very rich and diverse career in healthcare, touching different stakeholders along the way. Most of our guests started as marketers and found their way to healthcare. You started in healthcare, advocating for patients from the start, and found your way to marketing. Tell us about your career voyage.
MJ: So I've always been interested in healthcare, dating back to college. I studied biomedical engineering in college and then went to grad school studying the same, and really wanted to understand how medical device companies can better the health of consumers. As a patient advocate, I had a grandmother who used to fall a lot, so I wanted to understand how people actually fell and see if I could come up with devices that could keep people from falling. Eventually working my way as an engineer and then as a marketer, I've always been interested in helping consumers achieve the best health outcomes. And that led me into working for Healthgrades about 15 years ago, where I worked primarily in helping hospitals and health systems get more patients in so they can see the right doctor, get the right treatment, and ultimately be on their way to living life. And through the course of that journey, I ended up going into digital marketing, where I was supporting life sciences manufacturers and bringing new therapies to consumers, but then ultimately also helping the clinician side and educating them about new treatment options and how they can be better prepared for that magic moment where consumers and clinicians are sitting across from one another.
JM: Ultimately, you're a builder at heart. As marketers, we tend to create campaigns to derive a specific goal. You're ultimately building and architecting the underlying pieces to connect the patient and the doctor, and then attaching the marketing to that, which I think is a very different way to view the industry than probably most of us on the marketing side view it. So Mukund, you've worked across both HCP and DTC sides of the business, which not a lot of people have done. What made you start thinking about connecting those two worlds?
MJ: Well, I think there's always been this division between HCP marketing and DTC marketing, and I think it's rooted in structural, regulatory, and some cultural factors. And to me it's about how do you break down some of those barriers and ensure that the right conversation is taking place at the right time, essentially. And I think it all has to do with the exam room interaction. I think that's the moment when patient and physician finally sit across from one another, and it's where every dollar of pharma marketing either pays off or it collapses. To me, it is the crucible where clinician credibility meets human emotion, and yet it's oftentimes the most neglected point in the brand journey. Most marketers think about awareness and intent, and they neglect that conversation readiness. And I think that's where my experience has led me to think about how do you prepare consumers for that magic moment, and how do you prepare physicians for that magic moment, because that is the most important part of that journey.
JM: Yeah, really — that magic moment is when everything comes together. What is happening in that moment that marketers tend to overlook?
MJ: So I think they underestimate the complexity of what transpires in that brief dialogue, because there are competing priorities. There's an asymmetry of knowledge and information, and there's unfortunately a great time constraint. The patient is going to bring anxiety. They're going to bring fragments of online information that they've collected through various sources, and very selective recall of claims that they've seen in advertising. The physician balances empathy with efficiency, because they have to get to the next patient, and they're constrained by reimbursement rules, they're constrained by clinical evidence. And what's missing is alignment — whether both parties have a shared understanding of the disease state, the treatment rationale, and what the next steps are. And unfortunately, when marketing overlooks that dynamic, it can create cognitive dissonance, because a beautifully executed consumer ad campaign might prompt a request, and that's what that team wants — but that request feels misinformed to the clinician, because they may not be prepared for that moment. And it undermines trust rather than fostering the action that marketers want to promote.
JM: It seems like no matter where you are — whether you're in the doctor's office, at work, or even as a father of a teen at home — when the listening stops, that's when things go sideways quick. And if a patient is talking to a doctor and the patient is already dismissing, or the doctor's already dismissing what the patient is saying because it's "that ad again," or the patient isn't listening to the doctor because they're thinking about something entirely different than what the doctor's talking about — that's where it goes sideways. Is that the point marketers need to focus on the most?
MJ: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think effective marketing has to act as a translator between the emotional motivation that the patient has and the scientific validation, which is sort of the mindset of the clinician. And there are several strategies I think marketers can use. First and foremost, I would say a shared language and framework. There's inconsistency in the lexicon and some of the visual cues that I see amongst the DTC and HCP materials, right? First and foremost, you don't have the same concepts and the same things appearing in both environments. And when a patient uses a term like — I saw an ad today, and I'm going to say something to a doctor tomorrow because I've seen it, and it sort of resonates, which is great — the clinician immediately has to recognize that context, and that doesn't happen.
JM: Well, and it's interesting too, because I'd say in most cases the driver of that communication and the mindset is very different with a healthcare provider. They're in a non-emotional, clinical, factual, scientific state for most conditions. The patient is coming in with probably a much more emotional response to the condition, whether they're just being diagnosed for something for the first time, or they've been in pain and are scared about what it means. And that conversation between the patient and the doctor could take very different turns, or even produce different reactions to the exact same thing being said.
MJ: Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think that's where both parties have to come to the middle at some point. And I think consumers, just because they're bringing such an emotional lens, it's hard for them to move — whereas the burden really has to be carried by clinicians. And as marketers, we have to provide clinicians with concise, compliant discussion aids that can really help clinicians meet the patient at the moment and at the place where they are, and they have to anticipate the exact sort of misconceptions or questions that DTC campaigns are going to generate, which is kind of what they're intended to do. There's a reason why we ask consumers to "ask your doctor if such and such is right for you."
JM: So there has been somewhat of a great divide. When have you seen great work on one side where the other side — whether it's a DTC campaign that just didn't deliver on the message the way the HCP campaign did, or vice versa — in hindsight might've been done differently and driven different outcomes?
MJ: We see it pretty prevalently in most cases. It's almost more common to see that dissonance than it is to see alignment. Most of the time, unfortunately, you have one team who's really struck the chord with the intended audience and done a great job of mobilizing that audience to take action or to be prepared for the other party. More uncommon is where both parties are aligned — both parties in terms of DTC marketing or HCP marketing — and there are certain brands where they've really aligned their HCP and DTC storytelling around connecting that care, and ensuring that physician messaging about patient empowerment mirrors the emotional tone of the consumer work that's actually been done. But that happens very rarely.
JM: It seems like we're comfortable as an industry keeping them in silos. Is that a matter of habit, or is there something deeper going on there?
MJ: That's a good question. I think it has to do with habit and some organizational inertia, and it's also cultural and psychological. So pharma companies are inherently very risk-averse. They've got layers of compliance oversight, they've got conservative hierarchies. These structures favor control, they favor specialization rather than integration. And additionally, I'll say the metrics of success differ, right? So for HCP marketers, it's all about script lift and formulary inclusion and that kind of thing. Whereas for DTC teams, they focus on awareness and patient activation. So if you're not unifying KPIs and strategic ownership, collaboration becomes an option rather than a necessity, unfortunately.
JM: So you've been at the forefront of this. Walk us through what "good" actually looks like in practice.
MJ: First and foremost, what I would say is you've got to have strategic alignment. And I'm not talking about structure — unify the brand narrative. You have to have one singular core value proposition that resonates both clinically and emotionally, and then adapt it to both audiences — whether consumers or clinicians — rather than developing separate campaign platforms. You can have joint planning sessions where your HCP team and your DTC team co-create that brand journey from awareness through prescription through adherence. And tactically speaking, you've got tools at your disposal — I've seen it done really well where you've got journey mapping or architecture exercises that really expose the overlap and interdependencies in the messaging across both audiences. And that shared process is really instrumental in surfacing redundancies, contradictory claims, and missed opportunities for reinforcement, especially at that magic moment where patients and clinicians come together.
JM: And you mentioned something — we have more tools than ever before. The tech is so much better at connecting the dots, all still in a HIPAA-compliant way, but in a way that lets us understand reaching patients and reaching clinicians, and what that cumulative impact is. What do you tend to see when that does happen? What kind of impact are fellow marketers seeing?
MJ: I think when that happens, especially with the tech, you have strategic alignment, certainly emotional alignment, where consumers are bringing a full, complete knowledge of whatever that condition is and whatever the treatment options are to the forefront. And you have clinicians who are very sensitive to what's in front of them — a very informed patient — and they can align with that consumer, both in terms of the treatment, but also what that future state is going to look like for that consumer. And I think when you have that orchestration done properly, it really ensures, one, that it gives clinicians the satisfaction of being a clinician — especially important in this day and age — and gives consumers the experience of actually being heard, which is something that's lacking in consumer health marketing.
JM: I appreciate that. But as you know, I am an analytics wonk, and usually when clients come to me, they want to see incremental scripts and ultimately activity that shows improved outcomes and improved ROI in the campaign, if I can say it that way. Are the KPIs aligned between HCP campaigns and DTC campaigns, or do measurement companies out there even have a solution that helps quantify that?
MJ: The KPIs are unfortunately not aligned because of some structural limitations. You still have DTC agencies focusing on consumer intent, awareness, and activation, and you have HCP agencies focusing on script lift, and tragically those two things aren't aligned. Unfortunately, structurally you've got a DTC agency that's focused on DTC KPIs such as brand awareness, intent, and activation, and you've got HCP agencies that are focused on script lift and engagement with HCP marketing or advertising elements. Because you've got that structural limitation, and you've got two different agencies — or oftentimes those two agencies might be the same agency, but two different teams — you've got misalignment there. It's hard to get that KPI alignment.
JM: So what advice would you give if a listener is someone working at a brand or an agency and they're saying, "well, my world is so siloed" — how would they start to bring these worlds together?
MJ: I think you have to anchor everything and everyone around that shared moment of care. Every piece of content — whether it's an ad, a rep detail aid, a patient email, or even clinician emails — they should all be measured on their ability to make that physician-patient conversation more productive, more aligned. And that means unifying data flows, harmonizing language, and building empathy into both sides of the journey, which is very hard to do. The most successful marketers aren't going to think in terms of HCP strategy or DTC strategy — rather, they're going to be thinking about how do I create a decision-support design that really meets both parties, and make sure that the eight minutes patients and physicians interact are truly impactful.
JM: So then where is all this heading in a few years? There's always change in marketing, not just pharma and healthcare marketing, but marketing in general. We have tech that's dramatically changing, we have a pharma environment shifting through legislative and privacy and other forces. Where do you think this will all be in five years, as those changes take place?
MJ: I think the trajectory of pharmaceutical marketing is going to converge. You've got two binary tracks with HCP and DTC, and that's all going to converge into a much more integrated ecosystem. It's going to be defined by a lot of shared data, synchronized messaging, and digital experiences. You're also going to see a lot of personalization and AI enter into this connected approach. Personalization is going to serve as that connective tissue in this new world where both paths are converging, but AI is going to be a game-changer in the sense that it's going to enable real-time tailoring of content based on behavior, demographic, and context. And that's not just going to be for patients — it's going to be for HCPs as well. So I'll give you an example: predictive analytics is going to determine when a patient is most receptive to disease education content — is it when I'm watching Jeopardy with my 15-year-old? And it's also going to tell you when a physician is most likely to consider a new therapy — is it going to be during lunch, or when they're back in front of an EMR finishing their notes? Natural language processing is going to be very effective in aligning search behavior with professional discourse, and it's going to make sure that what patients read online is compatible with what clinicians are learning in CME activities and their various portals. AI-driven insight engines are going to change, in the next one to two years, how that magic moment happens — especially when we're going to match patient intent with HCP readiness, which I think is really at the heart of where pharmaceutical marketing is going.
JM: Yeah, I don't think people realize the degree to which measurement occurs, or that it occurs at all — and the degree to which customization, in a HIPAA-compliant way, is possible, which ultimately means better health outcomes. I was watching the World Series with my daughter, and there were a lot of pharma ads, and she looked at me and said, "Do all these pharma ads really work?" And I just kind of looked at her — do you know who you're talking to? This is what I do day in and day out — and if my own kid doesn't understand how the industry works, I can't imagine anyone outside of the industry understanding the value we're building to provide patients and healthcare providers with this information.
MJ: Yeah, I think we're about to enter a whole new world with AI and the level of personalization it enables.
JM: Any final thoughts for our two groups of listeners? First, for marketers who are building plans on how they can market to HCPs as well as to patients — what would you leave for them to think about?
MJ: I think ultimately it's all about the patient-physician interaction — those few moments both parties have when they're interacting with one another. Bridging that moment requires empathy for both sides — understanding how patients articulate hope, how clinicians process evidence — and marketing that equips both sides to meet one another halfway. I think it transforms the brand from a message to a meaningful exchange.
JM: I think empathy is probably in short supply in today's world, so we could all focus on that. Second question — and I think this is where you find that empathy — in the world where there are people like you who started their career not as marketers, but looking to solve health problems as biomedical engineers, or as healthcare providers who may want to go into marketing — what advice would you give them?
MJ: I think being in healthcare is a very noble profession, especially because we're all humans and we all have to deal with health issues, whether for ourselves, our children, or our parents as they age. We're all touching health, and if you can align what you do in your professional life with what you do in your personal life as a caregiver and as a caretaker of yourself, I think that alignment is very rewarding, very fulfilling. So if there's someone out there interested in getting into biomedical engineering, or someone interested in getting into healthcare marketing, I encourage them to pursue that, because it's really going to be very fulfilling and rewarding at the end of the day.
JM: Mukund, thank you so much for joining us.
MJ: Thanks for having me, John. Congratulations on your success. It's a pleasure and an honor to be here with you.
