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House Call Miami: Why the Smartest Healthcare Marketers Are Rethinking Growth
Pri Shumate had a menopause problem. Not the clinical kind, the marketing kind.
As the former CMO of the Miami Dolphins and Miami F1 Grand Prix, Shumate knows a thing or two about reaching audiences. But when she needed to find a menopause healthcare provider for herself, the billions of dollars healthcare organizations spend on Google ads didn't move her. What did? Her friends. Women she trusted. Word of mouth.
That story opened House Call Miami 2026, and it set the tone for two days of conversations that cut through the noise healthcare marketers usually drown in. If you weren't in the room, here's what you missed, and why you'll want to be at our next House Call in New Orleans.
The Room Got Honest About Where Trust Actually Lives
Shumate's keynote challenged a sacred cow: the industry's addiction to lower-funnel tactics. Search ads capture demand. They don't create trust. And they definitely don't generate word of mouth.
Her framework was deceptively simple: identify your "top mouths." These are the people whose recommendations carry weight with your target patients, and trace how trust travels from them to you. Most organizations can't answer that question. The ones who can are building something their competitors can't buy with bigger media budgets.
Privacy Stopped Being a Compliance Problem and Became a Revenue Strategy
Two privacy attorneys, Jen Pike & Jennifer Everett, from Alston & Bird delivered news that should wake up any healthcare marketer still treating HIPAA as the main event: state enforcement has overtaken federal regulation as the primary driver of privacy litigation. Twenty states now have comprehensive data privacy laws. California's CIPA violations carry a $5,000 penalty per violation, per user, per visit. The settlement amounts are in millions because damages compound with every website visit.
But Xan Spewak from Teladoc flipped the script. Xan’s data showed 96% of organizations reporting positive ROI from privacy investments, with some seeing 5x returns. The insight that landed hardest: consented data is more valuable than unconsented data because you can actually do something with it.
The main takeaway? Privacy isn't a constraint. It's a competitive advantage.
Attribution Without Alignment Is Just Metric Chasing
Chris Pace brought receipts. At Banner Health, he drove urgent care CPA from $50-100 down to $4.50. But his session wasn't about the tactics—it was about the prerequisite most marketers skip.
"Attribution is useless without organizational buy-in," he said. "Your CFO doesn't care about CPAs in isolation. They need to understand customer value and payer mix."
The marketers who survived budget cuts? They had data-backed conversations ready. Visibility breeds credibility, and credibility earns trust—not just from patients, but from the people holding the purse strings.
The Budget Reality Check No One Wanted (But Everyone Needed)
Healthcare marketing budgets dropped 21% from 2023 to 2024. Seventy percent of CMOs now cite efficiency as their top priority. The panel on doing more with less didn't sugarcoat it: academic medical centers can't out-bid private practice on cost-per-click, and leadership expectations for AI capabilities are outpacing what actually exists.
The survival strategies? Ruthless prioritization. Organic channels over paid when possible. Mining Reddit and community forums for sentiment data. And setting realistic expectations with executives who think AI will magically solve the budget problem.
Someone Finally Said It: Pick Up the Phone
The session on full-funnel ROI included a stat that made the room uncomfortable: 20% of calls get missed during business hours. One speaker calculated that 18.5% of their marketing budget goes to appointment requests that never convert because someone didn’t answer a phone.
The tension between marketing and operations is real. Marketers blame operators for wasting leads. Operators blame marketing for low-quality traffic. Data bridges that gap, but only if both sides are looking at the same dashboards with the same definitions.
Meta Beat Google (Yes, Really)
The modern tactics panel challenged another assumption: that healthcare marketing means Google or nothing. Spring Fertility shared that many of their patients come through Meta advertising and influencer marketing. The reason? People trust recommendations from people they follow.
The takeaway wasn't "abandon search." It was diversify intelligently. AI search platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity are increasingly where patients start their research before they ever reach your website. If you're not visible there, you're invisible during the consideration phase that matters most.
The Case for Actually Investing in Brand
Blair Primis from OrthoCarolina closed with a masterclass on internal advocacy. His 60/40 brand-to-performance split raised eyebrows. Most healthcare organizations skew heavily toward performance, but his logic was airtight.
Orthopedic conditions get better with time, not surgery. Patients don't need you immediately; they need to remember you when they're ready. Brand investment keeps you present during that long consideration cycle. Performance captures demand when patients finally act. The two amplify each other.
His advice for getting buy-in? "The meeting before the meeting." Individual stakeholder alignment before any group conversation. The goal isn't permission to spend, it's turning stakeholders into ambassadors.
What House Call Actually Is
Two days. Deep conversations. Healthcare marketers from health systems, pharma, dental, vision, fertility, and urgent care—all comparing notes on what's actually working.
No vendor pitches disguised as content. No death by PowerPoint. Conversations that matter with people who get it.
New Orleans Is Next
March 25-27, 2026.
If Miami taught us anything, it's that the marketers who show up for these conversations leave with advantages their competitors don't have: frameworks they can implement immediately, relationships with peers facing the same challenges, and the clarity that comes from cutting through the noise.
The healthcare marketing landscape is shifting faster than most organizations can adapt. The privacy rules are changing. The channels are fragmenting. The budgets are shrinking. The executives are expecting more.
The marketers who'll thrive aren't the ones with the biggest budgets. They're the ones with the best information and the best networks.
We're building both in New Orleans. Don't be the one reading the recap.
