This article is based on an episode of the Scaling Practice Management podcast: “The Power of Branding in Healthcare Practices (and How It Affects Your Staff),” with guest Jennifer Lagemann.
Watch the full conversation below:
Most practice managers think about branding the same way they think about interior design – something you do once, then forget about. Pick a logo, choose some colors, print some brochures. Done.
Jennifer Lagemann would gently, but firmly, tell you that’s not even close.
Jennifer is the founder of NextJenn Copy, where she serves as a fractional CMO for healthcare and health tech brands. She’s worked across the spectrum – from national home care franchises to hospice, health systems, and health tech startups. And her take on branding is one that most practice managers aren’t ready to hear: your brand lives or dies in the behavior of your people. Not on your website.
In this episode of Scaling Practice Management, Jennifer talks branding, staff burnout, hiring practices, and the quiet crisis of underused software. The result is a conversation that starts with logos and ends up somewhere most practice managers wouldn’t expect.
Before anything else on branding or marketing, Jennifer started with the patient:
Listen to your patients and their families. They are looking for support. They’re looking for help. You are a guide to them in learning the healthcare system. To you, it’s your nine to five – you’re clocking in, you’re doing your work. But for these patients, this is their life. Their chronic conditions are chronic and everlasting. And so they’re dealing with these 24/7.
Something as basic as picking up the phone on time, or offering bilingual support – things that might look like operational line items – are actually patient care decisions. Jennifer puts it plainly: “These are things that keep people alive.”
So why do the patients so often fall through the cracks? Jennifer’s answer is simple: reactive mode.
Clinicians and practice owners are constantly putting out fires. There’s always an emergency in front of them. Someone needs triage right now, which means the bigger picture – are we actually serving our patient population well? – gets pushed to the back.
“They need to be able to look at the micro and the macro,” Jennifer says. “Zooming out and thinking big picture. Are we meeting patients where they are? Are we helping them in the ways they need to be helped?”
This is where tools like Talkie.ai come in – not to replace human interaction, but to free up space for it. When an AI medical receptionist handles the calls about holiday hours or prescription refills, the humans on your team can focus on the patients who actually need their attention.
Jennifer’s definition of branding is broader than most practice managers may expect.
Brand building isn’t just a logo or your colors, your fonts. It’s also being able to match what you say online and what you say out loud in the practice.
She uses Apple as an example – not just the logo, but the smell of a new phone when you open the box, the feel of peeling off that plastic for the first time, that classic hello on screen when you first power it up. The product is an experience from start to finish.
Healthcare practices aren’t that different. Patients remember how they were made to feel. They remember whether the person who answered the phone was rushed or calm, whether the wait was acknowledged or ignored.
The gap between what a practice promises on its website and what a patient actually experiences when they walk through the door – that gap is the brand problem.
Ask Jennifer where most practices go wrong on branding and she doesn’t hesitate: no brand guidelines.
That means you have an owner who bought a sign maybe ten years ago, hasn’t updated it since and it’s getting weathered. And then when you hire a social media person, they have no logos to work with. They don’t know what font you want to use. They have no idea what you sound like and what you want to put out there as your brand voice, tone, and positioning.
The result? Everyone is freelancing the brand. The owner says one thing, the front desk staff says another, the social media person guesses. Nothing is consistent – and consistency is exactly what builds trust.
Getting brand guidelines together doesn’t have to be a massive project. Jennifer recommends starting with Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller, which gives a practical framework for positioning your patient as the hero and your practice as the guide. From there, the rest of your brand voice, website copy, and messaging follows.
A burned-out receptionist isn’t a branding problem. Or rather, it is – but it starts somewhere else.
Jennifer draws a direct line between how your staff feel at work and how they show up for patients. A burned-out receptionist is not going to be the warm, welcoming first impression your branding promises. And that’s not their fault – it’s an ops problem wearing a brand costume.
It’s not just a consumer brand. You’re also talking about a talent brand and those two things have to intersect when you’re creating your brand. How are the people that you’re hiring? Do they like what they do? Are you inspiring and encouraging them to do better?
To actually address burnout, Jennifer points to a few often-overlooked levers: proper EHR training (more on that below), flexible scheduling, and wellness benefits. Even something like a one-day offsite with a speaker and a genuine conversation about what the team needs – not the most expensive or elaborate thing – can shift the culture.
Jennifer closes with a statistic that should give any practice owner pause: most physician practices only use about 20% of their EHR’s functionality.
Think about what that means. You’re paying for a sophisticated piece of software every month – sometimes per patient, sometimes per employee – and you’re using a fifth of what it can do. Reports you’re not running. Features no one was ever trained on. Data that could be surfacing insights and saving time, but isn’t.
Think about the lack of ROI you’re having when you’re only using a fifth of its total functionality.
The fix isn’t always an expensive one. Jennifer’s recommendation: identify the staff members who know the EHR best, and have them train the ones who don’t. Create sessions. Make it a priority. And if your EHR genuinely is too clunky to use well – too many clicks, too hard to navigate – then maybe the software itself is the problem and it’s time to revisit that decision.
The through line of this whole conversation is something that sounds obvious once you hear it but isn’t obvious at all in practice: branding is not a marketing department activity. It’s how your entire operation behaves. Your hiring decisions are brand decisions. Your EHR training is a brand decision. Your staffing model is a brand decision.
If patients are getting a different experience from what you’re promising, that’s not a marketing problem to fix with better copy. It’s an ops problem – and it usually has a name: burned-out staff, undertrained teams, or tools that no one really knows how to use.
Fix those things, and the brand tends to take care of itself.
Talkie.ai is the AI medical receptionist that handles calls, schedules appointments, and manages prescription refill requests – so your team can focus on the patients who need them most. Visit talkie.ai to learn more.
Jennifer Lagemann is the founder of NextJenn Copy, where she serves as a fractional CMO for healthcare and health tech brands. You can find her on LinkedIn or at nextjenncopy.com.
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