The Evolution of the Sickbay Brand, with Jennifer Lazarz

Jennifer Lazarz is Director of Marketing at Medical Informatics Corp. (MIC), where she now runs the company’s entire marketing function as a sole practitioner. Her work spans brand strategy, demand generation, content, and go-to-market execution for the Sickbay Clinical Platform, an FDA-cleared patient monitoring solution used by health systems nationwide.

Since joining MIC in 2022, Jennifer has grown the company’s digital footprint from a minimal presence into a full content and demand engine, driving a 6x increase in website traffic and a 400% increase in content output through an integrated strategy spanning thought leadership, video, and social media. She works closely with sales leadership on pipeline strategy and is currently building new structures for marketing-attributed opportunity tracking. She also led the branding and positioning work behind MIC’s shift toward the Sickbay name, along with the company’s 2024 website relaunch and a full rebuild of its marketing technology stack.

Jennifer’s path into healthcare marketing is anything but linear. She spent years as a professional opera singer before building a destination marketing organization from the ground up as Tourism & Marketing Manager for the City of Gallup, NM, managing a $1.8 million budget and serving as the city’s Public Information Officer during COVID-19. That background in building brand and audience trust from scratch now shapes how she approaches marketing in a highly regulated, relationship-driven industry like healthcare technology.

She holds a Master of Music from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and a Bachelor of Arts from Augustana College. Jennifer serves as Treasurer of the American Marketing Association’s Colorado chapter, she enjoys needle felting (or as she calls it “Stabby craft”) and spending time with her two mischievous miniature schnauzers.

What you’ll learn about in this episode:

• How Sickbay transitioned from Medical Informatics Crop to a customer recognized brand while maintaining trust and market credibility.
• Why connecting with people, not just the products, is the foundation of effective B2B healthcare marketing.
• How Sickbay tailors its messaging across clinical teams, healthcare executives, researchers, and channel partners.
• Why treating brand, product, and performance as interconnected rather than separate entities creates a stronger marketing strategy.
• Practical approaches to proving marketing ROI, including ways to understand AI search visibility and content performance.
• How AI is accelerating content creation, research, and analysis while reinforcing the importance of human expertise and authentic storytelling.
• Why Sickbay’s long term vision is to be recognized as a trusted partner that helps healthcare organizations improve virtual care, telemetry, and data driven decision making.
  
  

Additional resources: 

• Jennifer Lazarz’s LinkedIn
• Sickbay’s website
• Josh Dougherty on LinkedIn
• Josh Dougherty’s speaking site
• A Brave New’s Website

Transcript

Josh Dougherty:
Welcome to A Brave New Podcast. This is a show about branding and marketing in the healthcare space. But more than that, it's an exploration of what it takes to create brands that will be remembered and how marketing can be a catalyst for those brands' success. I'm Josh Dougherty, your host. Let's dive in.

On this week's episode of A Brave New Podcast, I have the privilege of speaking with Jennifer Lazarz, who is the Director of Marketing for the Medical Informatics Corporation. They are the makers of Sickbay. And I think you'll find our conversation pretty interesting because she's going to walk us through the thought process and the decision-making and the strategy behind really putting all their eggs in the basket of Sickbay and using that as a primary brand that they're promoting.

She's also a really smart marketer who is a solo marketer but doing great things and someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about how do you establish a firm foundation of brand and product marketing so that you can then use that foundation to drive demand. So we're going to talk about all those things and more in our conversation. I think you're going to enjoy it. Without further ado, I'm going to bring Jennifer into the convo.

Welcome to the show, Jennifer. It's so nice to have you on.

Jennifer Lazarz:
Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Josh Dougherty:
Awesome. Well, we have a lot to talk about today, but before we do that, I would love for you to have a chance to introduce yourself to our audience. Can you share a little bit about yourself and the work that you've been doing over your career, what you're all about?

Jennifer Lazarz:
Absolutely. Something I love to talk a lot about is people, and I have had a very people-centric career that is unconventional in the marketing space. I have two degrees in classical music. I was a professional opera singer. It's fun when people discover photos of me in costume. Then I went on and I actually, I ran a historic theater. I double-dipped my entire professional singing career in and worked in events, and events come with marketing.

So the marketing started early on, but more importantly, I was connected with people. And so that's the through thread. But yeah, definitely was a professional opera singer. I got into running historic theater, which led into tourism. And before I began my journey here at this company, I was a tourism and marketing manager for a city and a PIO for COVID. So that was an interesting, like I said, very unconventional path. And for almost four going on five years, I think it is—I can't do math—I've been here at Medical Informatics Corp.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah. And you're the Director of Marketing there, and I think you guys-

Jennifer Lazarz:
I am.

Josh Dougherty:
... go publicly as Sickbay is how you're marketing yourself. Can you share a little bit about what Medical Informatics Corp/Sickbay is all about and what your focus is?

Jennifer Lazarz:
Yeah. So actually I'll start with the confusion and add some clarity. We've been leaning really heavily into the Sickbay brand. The Sickbay brand is aligned with what I said, people first. Our clients know us as Sickbay. So Medical Informatics Corp, the company, sells the Sickbay Clinical Platform, which is a tool that is FDA cleared where we aggregate continuous data from the bedside into one centralized vendor neutral system for hospitals and health systems. So people have the opportunity to see all of their bedside data in one centralized view for decision-making, analytics, and AI enablement and more.

And what that means for us, though, is when we started to look at who we are as Medical Informatics Corp, we're like, "Hey, everyone knows us by the product." And informatics as a field is really, it's just generally confusing. And so over time the company name remains the same and we do have a DBA, but we really said, "Let's go with what people know and ensure that we're bringing that value and familiar space."

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah. I mean, I think it's a really good example of allowing the market and allowing people's perceptions of you to steer how you present your brand, which is part and parcel, I think, to great branding. So I'd love to have you share a little bit about how you define branding then. So obviously you've had deep conversations, thoughts, you've worked on that, but when you think of the term “branding,” how do you define it?

Jennifer Lazarz:
For me, and I think every marketer and every AI engine out there culling every book ever written about marketing, there's a lot of different definitions. But for me, it's the consistent and trustworthy experience someone's going to have with your company across every touchpoint. Because we have a saying here, it's like everyone is in sales, everyone is in support, everyone is in [insert job here] because there is no single job that doesn't touch a customer and something that our customer is related to.

And so our branding is no different. Every touchpoint that somebody sees has to be something that is representing the value that we have within our product, within our company, and not just the visual identity.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, I think it's really smart. And I think experience... Well, when I talk about branding, I think of it as a memory. So you're trying to create a memory across every single touchpoint, every experience someone has.

Jennifer Lazarz:
Exactly. And you don't want negative memories. You want them to be positive. And the other thing is you want them to be helpful. That's the thing I think in today's market with, there's so much noise. And it's not just AI noise, it's just when we look at the omnichannel marketing approach, I mean, you can't walk through a grocery store without getting lambasted by advertisements.

And so in the B2B space, it's no different. You're just constantly inundated with information. And so now it's not just is it constructive, but is it valuable to the people who are consuming that information and then recalling it?

Josh Dougherty:
Totally. And I think that value, it has to be timely too for it to be valuable, which is another sticky wicket that we all have to learn about as we're working on our marketing and our brand. You've obviously said a little bit about maybe telling us about the ending of choosing the Sickbay brand as that one you were going to present and focus on promoting, but I'd love to hear a little bit more about the story about that decision-making process. What were the key factors you considered? What made you ultimately decide to make the change? How did you walk through that process as an organization?

Jennifer Lazarz:
We started internally. We started out just simply by serving our own employees and finding out in a conversation with clients, how do you describe us? What do they say? And universally, it was really clear that everybody just said, "Oh yeah, when we talk about us, we talk about Sickbay." Especially, we have a team of more than five nurses in one team in particular and then some in some other teams in the company that are responsible for engaging with the client and helping them not only train, but creatively understand their workflows and solution and their everyday day-to-day and how they use our software. And they said the same thing. They were like, "Oh yeah, when we're talking, we just say Sickbay."

And that was really the first big dataset we went with. We went, okay, if everybody we're talking to internally says we call ourselves Sickbay, they'll say, "I work for Medical Informatics Corp, but we are Sickbay." And it was just this really interesting cognitive dissonance. And then we got into it further and we said, "We don't want to lose the identity we've had for 14 years as Medical Informatics Corp." And so that's why we looked into the DBA process and we started just moving the front-facing brand to Sickbay.

We did some inquiries among our customers. And even when we looked at one of the major use cases for our platform is clinical research. Because of that data aggregation, we're getting cited as Sickbay. And so when there's these major incredible innovations happening in our client space and they're citing the Sickbay Clinical Platform, we want to be aligned. You want the success to marry off the top of mind.

So I mean, it hasn't come without challenges. There's some technical things I'm still ironing out. Because we're not doing a full company rename, LinkedIn makes this a little complicated, so I'm still in the process of essentially negotiating. You have to provide a certain level of documentation to LinkedIn to get them to migrate your existing content so that you don't lose your reach.

And I've spent a lot of time and effort in the last couple of years building that reach. And so I most certainly am not going to pull the trigger until I'm confident that we maintain that audience because we have a really lovely audience, especially in the space between our hospital health system partners and our tech space. So that's one thing.

The other thing that I find I think is correlated to the challenges in the shift is I've noticed over ... I think when we refer to ourselves in the space as Medical Informatics Corp just in saying, oh, I think people quickly lean into technical aspects and features. But something changed in the mindset that when we were like, we're Sickbay and it's the Sickbay solution, and really it is, that's what we call it. FDA, it's clinical platform, but we're here to help you solve your problems.

Suddenly the language across the board and everybody that's part of the team started to shift to a more value-centric focus instead of feature-centric. And it was an unintended effect, but definitely a positive one.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah. I think whenever you can get past talking about features and talk about value and talk about the core ideas behind the features, you're always going to have more success. And I think it's going to be more inspiring to people too internally.

Jennifer Lazarz:
Absolutely.

Josh Dougherty:
So as we think about value and we think about the Sickbay brand, I always like to think of a brand as having a core essence or a core idea at the center of it that is guiding out how you're communicating about it, et cetera. What would you say is the core essence or core idea of the Sickbay brand?

Jennifer Lazarz:
I'm going to tie in something that's important to everybody at MIC, which is the company level, which is our vision. Our corporate vision is every patient everywhere monitored by people who care and empowered with actionable data. And to be silly about it, it's people location, people data. And that sounds silly to say it that way, but again, I mentioned earlier there's too much noise in the market and we really want to focus on people first.

Centralize on what the information people are looking for, is it accessible, is it happening as fast and as thoroughly as possible? And that is not just in the brand, that's in the product deliverability. When you're looking at how Sickbay is used for patient monitoring, we've got these great use cases across some major health systems where they're doing virtual care command centers, tele-ICU, things like that. You don't want any kind of latency there. So we're doing things in milliseconds that are helping them make a clinical decision.

So looking at, it's people first, the location and the data, making sure that all of those three things are consistent and that's mirrored in the brand. We don't want to talk at people, we want to talk with people. We want to make sure that we're consistently supporting what we say with value and with metrics. And then we want to get this information to you as quickly as we can. So especially in our channel partner marketing, when they're making requests to us, we're very timely with that to make sure that we're continually amplifying that message.

And it's new. One of the other things too, that we just had a conversation today about a channel partner marketing thing. It's really easy to go, well, there is this, especially in healthcare tech, here's a big flagship moment in COVID. Well, COVID was six years ago now.

Josh Dougherty:
Totally.

Jennifer Lazarz:
The kickoff. So what are we doing to make sure that that information is timely and relevant? So it's always coming out with something new even if it's just refocusing on the core values. So the values themselves don't change. The why of our clients doesn't change, so let's come back to that.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, 100%. Because I think connecting with the why, ultimately people say that B2B marketing isn't emotional, but it has to connect with real emotion on the buyer's side of things. Otherwise, you're not going to be successful. So you have to understand that why. You have to understand what motivates people and how they really want to engage with our tech solution.

Jennifer Lazarz:
Yeah, and everybody has to deal with change management. The last thing you want to do is, great, you're going to solve my problem but you're going to make this like an uphill mountain for me to climb. And so that's the other side of this too, is making sure that my job and my role in this space as a brand marketer and as a generalized marketer is not to create an obstacle.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah. How are you making sure that you're not creating an obstacle or how does the organization make sure? Because obviously new solution, flashy, great, can provide new capabilities, but there is a real, I don't know, an onboarding effort that's required whenever something new is brought on.

Jennifer Lazarz:
Absolutely. You're never going to get away from change management. It's always chasing you. One of the things that I think is really notable in our company, so we hit our Series B funding in 2022 and you can track back the trajectory of how we've shifted our narrative.

It's in the last two years we went to leaning into the Sickbay brand, but even the two years before that, when I got hired at this company, there were 30 people and there's 70 now. But the number one thing that we looked at is how are we doing what I'm going to call inside-out communication? How are we looking at our inside people to reflect on what needs to be on the outside?

And so we have a clinical engagement team, we have an implementations team, we have a support team, account managers, innovation. There's all of these different touchpoints with our clients. And we said, how are we making sure that these interactions that we're having are earnest, they're sincere, they're honest, and that there's levity. Healthcare alone can be so serious. Let's work together and let's try to just find some joy in that.

But then looking at those teams across the company as a marketer, what am I doing in that space to capture the moments, capture the narrative, and empower people to have a voice? So we've done a lot of thought leadership. We've done a lot of subject matter expert consultation, especially across our clinical engagement team. And our solutions architects are taking the time to sit back and go, "Okay, you're the ones who've heard the most. Where should this compass be pointing from a messaging standpoint? What are the problems you're identifying in the market?"

You're hearing it firsthand. I don't have to hire a research firm to hear what people are really struggling with so that I can turn around and ensure that we're taking a client-first approach when it comes to the messaging, not what we think we should say, but what they want to hear.

Josh Dougherty:
Totally. What's been the response from your team of being engaged in that way?

Jennifer Lazarz:
It's twofold. I think there are some that are really excited. And then when it comes to the marketing side, there's a little trepidation. And what I mean by that is excited, always, to collaborate. This is probably one of the best workplaces I've been in terms of people just genuinely wanting to help each other out to the best of their capabilities with respect to our boundaries, but genuinely wanting to do what's best for the client and have those real conversations.

But the trepidation in the marketing space is putting their face on it. Honestly, I have some really intelligent, amazing peers and it takes some coaching to get people to feel comfortable lifting up their name and their voice in the space as a subject matter expert.

Josh Dougherty:
No doubt.

Jennifer Lazarz:
So we do a little bit of both. I offer opportunities internally where we just kicked off a project where we're revisiting across our nursing teams, how our clients see us in the units. In a unit deployment, what are they using us for? What are they finding value in, and where does it intersect across personas, across units? And so we had a discussion to kick that off, outlined what's going to happen, and they're going to actually just take it and run with it, have a bunch of conversations internally and come back to me with a synthesis of that and what that looks like, the updated version 2026.

And it should happen regularly. Where we were positioning ourselves two years ago on a website is going to be very different now because everybody's tech solutions are changing. But am I going to behind the scenes be like, now are any of you willing to be interviewed to be part of my thought leadership? Absolutely. And some are more eager than others.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, I think it's natural. Some are just more confident and some require coaching, but I love getting when you can unlock someone who maybe was more uncertain because oftentimes they have such a wealth of knowledge that if you can open that up, you have a breakthrough in how you're telling a story.

Jennifer Lazarz:
Absolutely.

Josh Dougherty:
Well, thinking about storytelling, thought leadership, et cetera, you have, I think, three separate or related people that you're marketing to. You have your clinical care teams, you have health executives, you have researchers and scientists. So they all have different needs. How much are you evolving or repositioning your message as you go out to each of those audiences, or is it pretty similar for each of them?

Jennifer Lazarz:
It's fascinating. At first we thought they were really different, then we thought they were similar, now we're going ... It's kind of like one of those revolving doors in how it works, and especially with what we see in the market and the spaces that we're in. And so that's the first thing that I've started to walk backwards from is depending on the space I'm in, how specific do I need to be?

So, for example, in the executive persona set, if you will, we've got a lot of IT people. And when you're looking at a clinical software deployment, there's a lot of challenges when you're looking at how data streams intersect in deployment and server stacks being installed. And you want to ensure that people feel the most comfortable.

And when I stepped back and looked at the trajectory of our messaging, I'd done a lot of messaging in the nursing space. I'd done a lot of messaging with our researchers, done a lot of high level revenue line messaging. And then I stepped back and went, "Well, there's a whole buying committee. How is this space being represented?"

And I actually took some time and contacted our CTO who put me online with several other team members across our support and tech teams and did internal interviews that we recorded and said, "What do you guys feel or hear is working for customers?" And I got some incredible metrics, frankly, about response times, support ticket turnover. When they've done their own analyses of when a ticket comes through, what does that really look like for our company? Is it a Sickbay problem or is it an issue a customer might be having with an integration that is originating somewhere else, but how can we still help them fix it?

And that was the central thing to that message is how can we still help them fix it that was unique to the support situation but really is anybody's problem. When a nurse is having, if she can't see everything she needs to see at the bedside with regard to patient data because she's down the hall in another room, how can we help fix that?

So we still go through it like a cycle of ebbs and flows in terms of what is really niche to those personas. I'm not going to talk to a nursing audience about IT ticket turnaround times because that's just not going to relate. But to that central thing of how can we help them fix it, we do keep that throughout everything and going, "Hey, it doesn't matter what your intersection is with our product at the hospital. We want you to understand we're the solution. We're here to help you."

And that's our north star. And then everything underneath that starts to become a little bit more persona specific based on the space, based on the frequency, what we're seeing in trends in our data when we get into the Google Analytics and we see what is and isn't performing, where do we need to put more emphasis, et cetera.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And I think even you talked about the nurse being able to see all the data they need at the bedside, that is an issue that's relevant to all of your audiences. You just have to maybe talk about it in a slightly different way with each of those audiences.

Jennifer Lazarz:
Absolutely. Data means something different to everybody. And that's the hardest thing when we're a clinical decision platform or we're a data aggregation platform. We've been saying here, data isn't sexy. Nobody is talking about data sexiness, but everybody needs it and everybody wants it. And so it's this thing that it doesn't come off as attractive or exciting, but it is hotly in demand.

It's just what we'll joke about here is how do we talk about the data without talking about the data? And it's because somebody's really actually just trying to solve a different problem. We just happen to know data's the answer.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah. It's like rocket fuel to solve all types of problems for real people.

Jennifer Lazarz:
Exactly.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah. Well, I'd love to shift the conversation a little bit to marketing nuts and bolts. I know every health tech has this inherent balance that they're trying to strike between product marketing, brand marketing, and doing performance or demand generation. How do you manage that balance? Because I think every portion of each type of marketing is essential, but it can be hard to do all of them well at the same time.

Jennifer Lazarz:
Absolutely. One of the things that I've been thinking a lot about lately is how those three things are really just concentric circles. It's not a Venn diagram, it's not a line, and it's not a loop either. Because like you said, it's balancing the three and it's how are they also, kind of like a cell in the body, how are they all working together?

In our case, looking at it, we've had a big focus on brand and product marketing for a while. I say that, and then when I was really rethinking about what performance marketing means in a long sales cycle, B2B SaaS pipeline, it's been there too. It's just had to take a back seat as we've regrouped under what our core values are in the market. We've never stopped having the value, it's just how we're talking about it changed. And so there's been a lot of that brand and product focus, that migration away from features that lean into the client's stories and that thought leadership.

But it's been an exciting time, honestly, for that performance marketing part. I like to think of an analogy that we've spent, and it's funny I say that it's been there, it's not because I've spent the last two years in addition to doing this whole shift is really building a MarTech stack here. It's the unglamorous side of marketing is to put all of that tech in place so that you can have those performance metrics.

And I'm excited for where we're at now because I think where we've come from to where we are today, it's like I built the house. Now I get to worry about is everybody inside the house comfortable and taken care of? We've got the leads coming in the door. Are they nurtured? The guest is in the suite. Is the air conditioning on if it's 90 outside?

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, 100%. And I think everything that you mentioned from the MarTech stack to the brand to the product marketing, it's all like a multiplier that if you have it in place, it'll make everything go faster now because you took the time.

Jennifer Lazarz:
Well, exactly. And I think the other thing too, that's easy to lose track of, is I have been a one-person team for a long time. I've got an intern right now, which I'm really excited about, that it's so fun to mentor somebody. But regardless of my capacity, it's understanding that it's okay to lead. Perfection is not the goal.

And I would say across these three things, when you're looking at product marketing in space, your go-to-market initiatives, your brand, how are you represented, your performance, what exactly is happening? There are times that I think any of us in marketing, whether it's a team of 1 or a team of 20, is going to have to say, "You know what? I got to walk away from this for a second."

I'm not going to lose sight of it. This is just a moment to go, "Hey..." I don't like the back burner thing because yeah, it's still on, but more than a few of us have burned food on the stove on a back burner. And so I just like to say, it's either paused or this is over here. The track is still on the playlist. It's just not up at the top right now.

And looking at that and going, it is also okay to lean away from something for a little while. So I built the MarTech stack while doing this big emphasis on a brand awareness in the space. And now it's exciting because we're coming back to, okay, the stack is in place and the data streams are all starting to come in now, what do we do?

I keep joking with my peers, I want to get a T-shirt line in this age of AI that says, "You've got the data. Now what?" Or, "You've got your answer. What else you got?" Because there's just so much information out there, now what? And I couldn't be more excited about that process where these three things intersect.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah. I love how you talk about minimizing or being able to walk away or pause things for a moment because I think that's the discipline of good marketing is understanding I have a finite amount of resources to be able to get stuff done. And it benefits me more to put my focus fully into a couple places than to try to spread across everything.

And I think from a data perspective too, from a marketing data, not data that you're gathering for your clients, it benefits you to look at some data points rather than trying to look at every single data point that exists and then optimize to those data points.

Jennifer Lazarz:
Yeah, very much so.

Josh Dougherty:
Speaking of data points and result measurement, what does that look like for you and your team? I think every time I talk to someone, they have a similar but slightly different take on how they're measuring success and ROI of their efforts. So could you share a little bit about how you're approaching that?

Jennifer Lazarz:
Oh my goodness, yes. I want to share something unnoticed lately and then I'll back that into how it fits into the big picture because it spawned a lot of conversation between not just myself and my peers here at the company, but the agency that I have working for us. And that is a lot of people don't know there's the Bing Webmaster Tools. It is the strangest place to live because nobody in a general ...

When you say you're going to search for something, we've all come up in the last 15 years, 20 years and said we're going to Google it. And now that conversation is shifting around AI. And here of all places in the Bing Webmaster Tools is the funniest, most transparent look into AI search discoverability that I have found anywhere. And it blew all of our minds.

And how we stumbled into this was I was on a call with someone who was more or less trying to talk to me about whether or not there was a space for our company in connected TV, which is not so much. But in the midst of the conversation, they just scrolled off like in an ADHD tangent in a beautiful way about how people didn't know that ChatGPT or Copilot weren't necessarily informed from Google because they're major competitors.

And I sat there and I was like, "This call just became 100% worth my time." Because I had never thought to think here are all of these big search platforms where people are looking. We're all looking to rise to the top, if you will, but where are they really getting their data from? And in our industry, we can talk about schema markup, we've talked about SEO. There's all these arguments about SEO, AEO, GEO. It's just this never-ending acronym puddle.

But that one moment struck me. So we went in and we set up our Bing Webmaster Tools and thought, "Okay, we'll see where this goes." And it turned out that they launched a beta AI discoverability portal and they tell you not only which terms are you being surfaced and cited on, but they tell you which pages. And so suddenly, we were just in there last week looking at this and went, holy crap, we have a company initiative about telemetry that was founded in client feedback, customer feedback, research in the market. We offer this, we have many deployments in this space, but we want to improve it and we want to grow in that market.

And then we looked, I am in Bing Webmaster Tools of all things, and I see that in the last three months I've had 970 citations for one telemetry blog. And I was like, "You've got to be kidding me." And so then we get in the line and we're like, "Okay, let's start to look at where else is this showing up." Because when we had just run our quarterly SEO metrics about a month or two ago, we did notice this uptick in telemetry and this quest, if you will, in the market.

And so where I'm going with this is I'm in the midst of going, okay, yes, there's the traditional email metrics and I'm looking for those. There's your traditional performance metrics, just your visibility incentives that come through in LinkedIn or whatever it might be. We want, of course, our web tools and we have a lot of one of the big values in our space. And I think other B2Bs experience this is we do a lot of hosted buyer meetings, so we have a very long sales cycle.

So we're really looking at how are those conversations evolving and what are all of those things that we have in place to track that conversation evolution through campaign management, you name it. But that one thing that catch in the Bing Webmaster Tools made all of us stop in our tracks and go, okay, why was this so successful and now what? Because we can't find this information in Google, it's just not available. You can't go into a dashboard in OpenAI.

And there's a lot of vendors right now in the market who are trying to offer you this, but it's kind of funny. I actually thought to myself from the OpenAI standpoint, man, if OpenAI who's trying to sell ads to everybody right now could come out and tell you how much you're being cited and stuff, it would change their advertising game because they're not leading in that space. They're going, "Hey, people see you." But I'm going, "Bing of all things just told me how much percentage of the telemetry real estate I'm being cited in." That's huge.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, it's massive.

Jennifer Lazarz:
And so I talk about that because I think we're in some shifting sand right now in terms of performance analysis. And so where success is lying for us, I mentioned that that was a blog. We've had consistently seen that we're being cited. We're seeing a lot of citations from the blogs that we've been putting out there in the space. Our thought leadership has been performing consistently well and our customer stories. And so those three things come back to how are we helping you? Do you feel heard? And are we credible and is it clear?

So the AI and the people don't have that. There's not a big gap in terms of those three things. Is it helpful, credible, clear? No.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, I agree with you 100%. I would've never thought that my takeaway from this podcast was to tell people to go and check out Bing Webmaster Tools too.

Jennifer Lazarz:
Being a televangelist for Bing Webmaster Tools was never in my playbook, let me tell you.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, no doubt. But I love that you talk about how, I don't know, everyone's like, "Oh, we're just marketing for bots." But at the end of the day, what you just talked about is the fact that yeah, maybe we're talking or we're structuring things differently to have bots pick it up. But it is at the end of the day, marketing that's for humans that's focused on helpfulness.

And I don't think that's changed in ... Technology has changed a lot throughout my 20-year career, but that's always been at the core and that's what people have always said. It's more like you have to have the technical chops to make sure stuff is found. But nothing's really changing as far as that emotional connection we're building with our audience.

Jennifer Lazarz:
100%. I had mentioned earlier things needing to be timely. If you're looking at ... When people want no latency in their bedside data, they're not going to want latency in the report. It's 2026. I don't want my healthcare informed by 1926. And so that's the thing. The biggest challenge in marketing is not that there are bots, it's what we're giving to the bots. Are we feeding the bots more bot?

And I mean, I'm a huge proponent of AI utilization, don't get me wrong, but the bot is going to be as central as possible. Its job is to make you happy, but it's not to create conflict. And so the unique brand offering that any of us have in that space is sure, use the bot to help with a first draft or use the bot to help analyze something, whatever it's going to be. But what is the really strong line we've got to hold? And it's people. What do people care about? Is it relevant? Is it authentic? Is it consistent?

That's the other thing too is when we're in marketing, it's so easy right now with AI to be like, "Ooh, I'm going to try, [insert here]." And you could squirrel away a hundred ways with even just sample messaging. And it's like, no, are you consistently speaking to what your audience wants to hear, which is why you matter? And if you're doing that consistently and you're doing it often enough, it's going to make a difference in the bots.

Josh Dougherty:
Yep. And this is why when we talk about leveraging AI, because I'm also a huge proponent of leveraging it, we don't use it to really develop brands as we're developing brands as an agency in my practice. Because as you said, its job is to be centrist and it doesn't understand context, consistency.

And to me, the greatest brands can be controversial. They have a perspective, a point of view, something that either people buy in and say, yeah, I love that or, yeah, I don't. And if something's seeking to create centrist content, you are going to miss all three of those things throughout the process.

Jennifer Lazarz:
Very much so.

Josh Dougherty:
So we talk about maybe what AI isn't good at. I'd love to hear how AI's supporting and accelerating your work and the work of the marketing for Sickbay.

Jennifer Lazarz:
Yeah, so I am a huge AI proponent, and I've been really proud of two things happening at our company. We have a CEO who we've taken a bottom-up and a top-down approach to AI deployment in the company. So we've had an extensive amount of training, but what's been really fun about it is I'm on that committee that's been helping steer that, and it's looking at how are we using AI to do employee training differently? How am I using AI for weekly project tracking? How am I using it for simplifying very time-consuming things?

AI is great at some graphic design, not all. It's great at research. And of course there's a million tools out there right now that you can build out these most amazing workflows and things like that. But here, what I'm in love with is we're all looking at this going ... There's a saying out there, it's like, how do you eat an elephant? You eat it one bite at a time.

And I read somewhere, my favorite iteration of that is it's not one bite at a time, it's you share the meal. And I love that version because AI utilization in a company is not just everybody take an incremental step forward, it's how are we all helping each other take that incremental step forward?

So I've been involved in sales enablement training where it's like, hey guys, instead of coming to marketing and saying, I need a flyer, let's talk about what the AI can draft for you that you can kick my way so that I can take this the last mile, but we get this done in half the time. And you guys, what does context training look like?

And even in the employee training ... In the training this intern I've got right now, I was just saying to a couple of colleagues yesterday, "This is the most challenging training I've ever done," because rather than going through step-by-step, okay, here's how you step through these processes, I actually have turned this on its head. And after the first week, I let them get settled.

There was a lot of education very transparently. So it's not to say that they did not have to get read in, especially because this intern is new to healthcare technology. So this is very overwhelming. But I really spent my first big efforts with this intern going, "Let's walk through—we're at Google Workspace. Let's walk through what Gemini can do for you."

And so yes, you can come ask me questions, but as you're going through and you're learning the difference between an EMR and an EHR in healthcare tech, go ask this thing questions. And how do you continue your learning loop without feeling hindered by these conventional structures?

And it's a growth journey for both of us, but honestly, I turned to Claude. I had Claude build an interactive website so that my intern could walk through a lot of the terminology and quiz herself, do exercises. I've never trained like that before. We're so used to a traditional training model of slide decks and videos.

And I was like, wow, okay, this is going to be a really different experience. And I've been very candid with her. This is kind of the future. And she's just said today, "I was out there looking at job listings and I'm seeing more and more listings for AI utilizations." She goes, "So I'm really grateful. Even though I'm the guinea pig, I'm grateful for being the guinea pig in this training environment with AI even."

So yeah, I mean my favorite use case is always going to be, I'll tell you, whether it's any of the tools, if they can fix a spreadsheet for me, they're my hero. Because in marketing, I want to be able to navigate the data, the lead lists, the insights, and then I want to move into action. And so the fact that the AI is there now to just coach me through, I took a budget project about two weeks ago that I think would've taken me four business days and did it in three hours. And I can't even believe that that's what happened when I look at the outcome of it.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, I love that so much. I have the same experience when I can have a crunch data or do background research for me and all of a sudden I have all these new ideas at my fingertips immediately. That was transformative. And I was thinking about your training experience, I think it really is reflective of how we're having to train ourselves and new people coming into the industry as it's a new way of thinking versus a new set of processes or skills to do.

Jennifer Lazarz:
Yeah, because this career is never ... The generation and all of us even now who are in this space, I listen to a lot of podcasts about AI and marketing and things like that. And the one universal is it's all changing. So in the workplace with AI, I regularly think about this, and my colleagues who are part of this committee internally as we govern AI in our company think about what are the benchmarks? We know it's all going to change, but what are the things that can be the constants that give everybody a little bit more stability?

Josh Dougherty:
Exactly.

Jennifer Lazarz:
And in some ways it's actually really refreshing too to go, okay, we don't need ... Same conversation as that other thing. We don't need to go a hundred directions. Let's just pause and keep it simple.

Josh Dougherty:
Take a little bit of time. It's okay to move slowly and to make judicious steps in the right direction.

Cool. Well, one last question for you as we close out. This has been such a great conversation. I'd love to know, you've spent the last year, couple of years doing positioning, brand and product awareness, et cetera. You're doubling down on some demand work now. Looking forward to a year from now, what do you want people to say you’reknown for? What do you want Sickbay to be known for, for people to say about Sickbay when they are asked about it?

Jennifer Lazarz:
First and foremost, I'd love somebody to say I found that really helpful. At the end of the day, any tech company, of course, in the market, we want to be known for what we're doing in virtual care and telemetry and data and AI enablement. That's a given, but I want that conversation to be, I found Sickbay really helpful for [insert here]. And that would be the best reward for where we're at as a brand and where we're at as a company because I have the greatest pleasure of seeing the research that comes through and hearing the stories.

And the hardest thing for a company like ours is sometimes the smallest wins are so big. You hear a nurse talk about how they didn't realize they could see something and how they couldn't really ... We connect with the HR. They didn't realize they could see their labs and meds integration in not only the streaming view, but in the historical trending views down to the second. And they're so excited about that because they can see a complete picture.

And through that excitement and that joy, that's what I want for this company and for this product. Of course, no company is going to say ... My husband always jokes when he watches game shows, he goes, "Everybody says I'm in it to win it." He goes, "I'm so sick of hearing I'm in it to win it because then what are these other people here for?" So that's a running joke in our house. And so that's why I say I want people to think of Sickbay as this helped me. That's what's most important.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, love it. Well, thanks so much for sharing your knowledge and your expertise. How can people connect with you and follow along with the work that you're doing?

Jennifer Lazarz:
Me personally, the best place you can find me is on LinkedIn. Well, hopefully you guys will share that information with everybody.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, we can. Yep.

Jennifer Lazarz:
That's the easiest way to find me. You can also look up Sickbay.com. We're constantly updating over there in terms of the company and what we're doing. But yeah, definitely come hunt me down on LinkedIn. Drop me a note, and I'd love to have a conversation. I care a lot about not only this space, but the industry and the people in it.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah. Awesome. Well, thanks Jennifer so much for coming on. I really appreciate the time and the conversation.

Jennifer Lazarz:
Thank you. I really appreciate it.

Josh Dougherty:
Thanks for listening to this episode of A Brave New Podcast. Go to abravenew.com for more resources and advice on all things brand. If you enjoyed this episode, show us some love by subscribing, rating, and reviewing A Brave New podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts. A Brave New Podcast is created by A Brave New, a branding agency in Seattle, Washington, that crafts bold and memorable healthcare brands. Our producer is Rob Gregerson.