I came to this work from the exam room.
I trained in dentistry and practiced for three years. What stayed with me was not the clinical work. It was the first minute of an appointment, watching someone decide how much of what I was about to say they were going to accept. That decision was usually made before I got to the explaining, and nothing in my training had anything to say about it.
Health communication gave me a way to study the same question from the other side. I went back to school for it, earning an MS in Health Communication from Boston University, and spent a year and a half studying how people decide. Then I wrote a book about it, arguing that the point is not to use what you learn to push people, but to stop working against how they already decide.
Since December 2023 I have led marketing and strategy for My DPC Story, a podcast and media platform for physicians running their own primary care practices. In practice that means an audience built from nothing, two annual research studies, a quarterly magazine I write and co-edit, live events, and the commercial systems underneath all of it. Before that I worked in digital health, on a portable ECG sold to physicians and patients at the same time.
What I am interested in
Healthcare keeps agreeing on things it has not checked. That empathy is a soft skill. That referrals matter mainly because they are cheap. That a high rating is the same thing as a reputation. A lot of my work starts by taking one of those and asking what the evidence supports.
I am interested in what healthcare technology can make possible, and in what its design and rollout ask of patients and doctors on an ordinary Tuesday. Those get treated as opposing positions, the enthusiast and the skeptic. They are the same question asked twice, and the second half is usually the one nobody has budgeted for.
The consistent thread is that I would rather generate evidence than borrow it. When something I publish rests on my own data, I say so. When it rests on someone else's, I say whose, and whether they paid for it.