Amendola Nabs Hermes Creative Award for HSBlox Thought Leadership Campaign

Amendola Nabs Hermes Creative Award for HSBlox Thought Leadership Campaign

SCOTTSDALE, ARIZ., May 18, 2022 — The Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals has named Amendola, a nationally recognized, award-winning healthcare and health IT public relations and marketing agency, as a Gold Winner in the 2022 Hermes Creative Awards competition. Amendola earned the award in the Strategic Campaigns category for a thought leadership program the agency executed on behalf of value-based care (VBC) administration pioneer HSBlox.

In a VBC system, providers such as hospitals and doctors are paid by health insurers based on patient outcomes rather than the current ​“fee-for-service” model. Ultimately, payers reward medical providers for helping patients become healthier.

The award-winning thought leadership campaign, which ran from February 2021 through February 2022, focused on raising awareness of data and payment exchange challenges—and solutions—associated with VBC models. Specifically, the program illustrated how HSBlox technology enables timely payment of services to social services agencies.

Amendola built a weekly cadence of media campaigns that included proactive, issues-based media pitching, company news and general thought leadership.​ Amendola successfully crafted new, creative story angles for media around emerging VBC models and secured briefings with top analyst firms covering payer markets.​

The campaign yielded impressive results, including 17 briefings with eight analyst firms, 19 pieces of vendor-neutral content placed in high-value media outlets and five podcast appearances.

“The value-based care landscape is a crowded, competitive market that makes it difficult for any one player to stand out,” agency CEO Jodi Amendola explained. “To set HSBlox apart, we targeted analysts and publications focused on value-based care and health equity and positioned HSBlox as an innovator and valued resource.”

HSBlox solutions assist healthcare stakeholders at the intersection of value-based care and precision health with a secure, information-rich approach to event-based, patient-centric digital healthcare processes—empowering whole health in traditional care settings, the home and in the community.

“Our team’s work armed HSBlox’s sales leaders with high-value content to help move prospects through the sales funnel by underscoring the value of their digital infrastructure for success in a value-based care environment,” Amendola said.

AMCP’s Hermes Creative Awards is an international competition for creative professionals involved in the concept, writing and design of traditional and emerging media. AMCP consists of several thousand marketing, communication, advertising, public relations and digital media professionals.

About Amendola

Amendola is an award-winning, insights-driven public relations and marketing firm that integrates media relations, social media, content and lead gen programs to move healthcare, health IT and life sciences decision-makers to action. The agency represents some of the industry’s best-known brands as well as groundbreaking startups that are disrupting the status quo. Nearly 90% of its client base represents multi-year clients and/or repeat client executives. Amendola’s seasoned team of PR and marketing pros understand the ongoing complexities of the healthcare ecosystem and provide strategic guidance and creative direction to drive positive ROI, boost reputation and increase market share. Making an impact since 2003, Amendola combines traditional and digital media to fuel meaningful and measurable growth. For more information about the industry’s “A-Team,” visit www.acmarketingpr.com, and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Media contact:

Marcia Rhodes

MRhodes@acmarketingpr.com

Iris Telehealth Engages Amendola for Strategic PR and Media Relations Services

Iris Telehealth Engages Amendola for Strategic PR and Media Relations Services

Award-winning health tech PR agency to elevate the profile of telepsychiatry service provider

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., April 26, 2022 – Amendola Communications, a nationally recognized, award-winning healthcare and technology marketing and public relations firm, announced that Iris Telehealth, a leading provider of telepsychiatry services for community mental health centers, community health centers, hospitals, and health systems across the U.S., has selected the firm to manage PR, media relations, and thought leadership. Iris conducted an extensive agency search and selected Amendola for its successful track record, industry acumen, and bench strength.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has magnified the importance of addressing mental health as a part of overall public health,” said agency CEO Jodi Amendola. “Providing easy and convenient access to accredited psychiatric services from quality behavioral health professionals is essential to this effort. Iris Telehealth’s use of telemedicine to expand clinically sound psychiatric services to patients and healthcare organizations is making a tangible impact in this regard, and we’re enthused to help execute their vision of enabling a better world through healthy minds.”

Amendola is implementing a comprehensive public relations, thought leadership, communications, and media plan for Iris Telehealth that will showcase its value proposition, services, accomplishments, customer wins, and industry partnerships. The agency successfully kicked off the relationship by supporting the Austin, Texas-based company’s recent Series B funding. Amendola garnered significant media coverage for this major milestone, including an audience reach of more than 61 million via placements in high-profile healthcare trade and business media such as MobiHealthNewsMedCity NewsDigital Health Business and TechnologyAxiosFortune, and STAT as well as local Austin media.

“There’s a nationwide need to provide timely, quality behavioral healthcare, and our track record shows we can help health systems and community organizations sustainably improve care for their communities,” said Dan Ferris, Chief Marketing Officer of Iris Telehealth. “We’re teaming up with Amendola Communications to drive awareness of our unique value to the healthcare market and our mission of supporting the mental wellbeing of patient populations that need it most. Our Series B announcement was our first effort to gain more market awareness and we know that with Amendola’s help, this is just the beginning.”

Iris Telehealth has grown exponentially over the last 18 months as healthcare organizations seek to provide timely, quality care to their patients. Iris’s combination of high-quality providers, best-in-class support, expertise to optimize care models, and technology has enabled customers to reimagine how behavioral health services are provided across the continuum of care.

About Amendola Communications

Amendola is an award-winning, insights-driven public relations and marketing firm that integrates media relations, social media, content, and lead gen programs to move healthcare, life sciences/pharma and healthcare IT decision-makers to action. The agency represents some of the industry’s best-known brands as well as groundbreaking startups that are disrupting the status quo. Nearly 90% of its client base represents multi-year clients and/or repeat client executives. Amendola’s seasoned team of PR and marketing pros understand the ongoing complexities of the healthcare ecosystem and provide strategic guidance and creative direction to drive positive ROI, boost reputation and increase market share. Making an impact since 2003, Amendola combines traditional and digital media to fuel meaningful and measurable growth. For more information about the industry’s “A-Team,” visit www.acmarketingpr.com, and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About Iris Telehealth 

Iris Telehealth helps healthcare organizations consistently increase access to quality mental healthcare for their patients by providing the clinicians, staff support, and knowledge to build a sustainable telepsychiatry department. With clinical grounding and emphasis on human relationships, Iris Telehealth identifies best-fit providers for each unique organization and ensures long-term commitment to meeting their partner’s needs, allowing them to provide the highest quality care to their patients and community. For more information, please visit iristelehealth.com

Media Contact:

Marcia Rhodes

Amendola Communications

mrhodes@acmarketingpr.com

SyTrue Engages Amendola for Strategic PR and Marketing Services

SyTrue Engages Amendola for Strategic PR and Marketing Services

Award-winning Healthcare IT PR agency to collaborate with leader in modernizing payer workflows to amplify client successes and industry best practices

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., April 5, 2022 – Amendola Communications, a nationally recognized, award-winning healthcare and technology public relations and marketing firm, announced that SyTrue, the leader in modernizing payer workflows to reduce costs and increase efficiencies, has selected the firm as its agency of record to amplify client successes and industry best practices after a competitive review of agencies.

SyTrue enables healthcare payers to make sense of fragmented, dirty data, driving greater transparency that increases productivity, reduces costs and enhances revenue. SyTrue’s innovative clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP) Operating System NLP OS™ synthesizes, normalizes and transforms unstructured clinical data into a strategic enterprise-wide digital asset that catalyzes informed decision-making for risk adjustment, care coordination and payment integrity.

“As a result of fragmented, incomplete patient data, health plans routinely miss opportunities to improve payment integrity, risk adjustment and population health,” said SyTrue Founder and CEO Kyle Silvestro. “We look forward to partnering with Amendola to share the story of how SyTrue enables payers to make sense of disorganized data to increase productivity, reduce costs and enhance revenue.”

“Issues such as inaccurate payments, unneeded tests and procedures and overly complex pricing cost health plans millions of dollars a year in lost revenue,” said agency CEO Jodi Amendola. “With its NLP OS™ enterprise solution that reads and understands medical records, SyTrue is fundamentally improving the way healthcare experts interact with patient records.”

Amendola is implementing a comprehensive media and communications plan for SyTrue that will showcase the company’s current technology and services, new offerings, accomplishments, customer wins, and industry partnerships. Recently, SyTrue announced that SyTrue payer clients benefited from 35% to 55% increases in productivity and ROIs between $13 and $28 per audit using SyTrue’s payment integrity tools and services. SyTrue also shared that in 2021, it capped off a year of tremendous growth in the company’s client base, number of employees and transaction volume.

About Amendola Communications

Amendola is an award-winning, insights-driven public relations and marketing firm that integrates media relations, social media, content and lead gen programs to move healthcare, life sciences/pharma and healthcare IT decision-makers to action. The agency represents some of the industry’s best-known brands as well as groundbreaking startups that are disrupting the status quo. Nearly 90% of its client base represents multi-year clients and/or repeat client executives. Amendola’s seasoned team of PR and marketing pros understand the ongoing complexities of the healthcare ecosystem and provide strategic guidance and creative direction to drive positive ROI, boost reputation and increase market share. Making an impact since 2003, Amendola combines traditional and digital media to fuel meaningful and measurable growth. For more information about the industry’s “A-Team,” visit www.acmarketingpr.com, and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About SyTrue
SyTrue, the leader in modernizing payer workflows to reduce costs and increase efficiencies, enables healthcare payers to make sense of fragmented, dirty data, driving greater transparency that increases productivity, reduces costs and enhances revenue. Healthcare payers must analyze extensive amounts of unstructured data to identify insights from patients’ episodic health records, which cannot be accessed by traditional methods of search and require expensive chart reviews. SyTrue’s innovative clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP) Operating System NLP OS™ synthesizes, normalizes and transforms unstructured clinical data into a strategic enterprise-wide digital asset that catalyzes informed decision-making for risk adjustment, care coordination and payment integrity. Developed by clinicians and data scientists with deep healthcare domain expertise, SyTrue’s solutions boost the productivity of review teams and generate higher ROI on chart reviews through greater accuracy, speed, repeatability and scalability. SyTrue is trusted by top-tier health plans who have leveraged NLP OS™ to process more than 10 billion health records, yielding insights that lead to increased efficiencies and improvements in financial performance.

Media Contact:

Marcia Rhodes | Mrhodes@acmarketingpr.com

Amendola Communications Wins PR Daily’s Top Agencies Award for Small Agency of the Year 2021

Amendola Communications Wins PR Daily’s Top Agencies Award for Small Agency of the Year 2021

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., March 30, 2022 — Amendola Communications, a nationally recognized, award-winning healthcare and health IT public relations and marketing agency, today announced it has added another accolade from the PR industry to its resume. Ragan and PR Daily named Amendola as an overall winner in the Small Agency of the Year Category in their 2021 Top Agencies Awards.

PR Daily’s Top Agencies Awards recognize agencies that are conceiving and executing outstanding PR and marketing campaigns. Winners were selected based on the strength of award entry forms submitted by agencies from across the globe.

Amendola highlighted integrated PR, thought leadership, media relations and marketing campaigns it executed for clients, including BiofourmisAvaility®, ABOUT™ and others in its 2021 entry. The award is just the latest national recognition for the agency, which provides a full range of PR and marketing services—including media and analyst relations, messaging, content development and marketing, social media, digital marketing, website design, strategic counsel and more. However, the recognition is particularly rewarding given the industry turbulence experienced over the past year.

“2021 was the second straight year impacted by COVID-19,” says Jodi Amendola, CEO of Amendola Communications. “The healthcare, health tech and life sciences companies we serve faced significant challenges in the wake of the pandemic and our seasoned team of professionals was able to deliver powerful PR and marketing support to educate and influence key target audiences for our clients during this time of need. I’m especially proud of this award from Ragan and PR Daily because it recognizes our agency as a whole and the results we were able to generate for our clients.”

Winners of PR Daily’s Top Agencies Awards will be honored at a special ceremony and luncheon on May 10 at the Yale Club in New York City.

About Amendola Communications

Amendola is an award-winning, insights-driven public relations and marketing firm that integrates media relations, social media, content and lead gen programs to move healthcare, life sciences/pharma and healthcare IT decision-makers to action. The agency represents some of the industry’s best-known brands as well as groundbreaking startups that are disrupting the status quo. Nearly 90% of its client base represents multi-year clients and/or repeat client executives. Amendola’s seasoned team of PR and marketing pros understand the ongoing complexities of the healthcare ecosystem and provide strategic guidance and creative direction to drive positive ROI, boost reputation and increase market share. Making an impact since 2003, Amendola combines traditional and digital media to fuel meaningful and measurable growth. For more information about the industry’s “A-Team,” visit www.acmarketingpr.com, and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About Ragan Communications

Ragan Communications has been delivering trusted news, training and intelligence for more than 50 years to internal and external communicators, HR professionals and business executives via its conferences, webinars, training, awards, subscriptions and membership divisions. Its daily news sites—PRDaily.com and Ragan.com—are read by more than 600,000 internal and external communicators monthly. Its Communications Leadership Council is one of the fastest-growing membership groups for communications executives and its PR Daily Leadership Network is the go-to membership group for PR, marketing and social media professionals. Ragan’s Workplace Wellness Insider serves HR, wellness and communications professionals. Ragan is also the producer of Communications Week, which is held Nov. 15-19. Ragan is headquartered in Chicago, with team members spanning the country and loyal customers worldwide. Visit www.ragan.com.

Media contact: Marcia Rhodes | MRhodes@acmarketingpr.com

In 2020, a “Thought Leader” is just a Regular Person

The phrase “thought leader” is one that is thrown around a lot in public relations. And it’s understandable: For any public-facing organization or business, it’s important to have experts on hand who can speak to the public.

However, as someone involved in day-to-day media relations operations at an award-winning PR and marketing agency, I have a major gripe with thought leaders, and I wrote this blog specifically for them and their coaches. In short, my gripe is this: You need to be able to talk about something else other than your products and services. You must be able to speak about something other than your business and your brand.

If you can’t do it, you’re not a thought leader, you’re a spokesman. And there is a difference.

Meet Marc, Human Person

Let’s turn our attention to Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, a cloud computing giant operating out of San Francisco.

Marc founded the company out of his apartment. It has since grown to be a publicly traded technology leader, with a soaring stock value
that has catapulted Marc onto the list of American billionaires.

As you can imagine, Marc has appeared in a number of media outlets. In fact, practically every mainstream news outlet you can think of has
interviewed him at one point or another.

Sometimes Marc is on Mad Money talking about the latest Salesforce contract. But, more often than not, Marc is sitting down to talk to the media about the issues that were always important to him: homelessness, the changing face of capitalism, the failure of technology companies to support their communities, and how CEOs have an obligation to think about how their companies impact social order.

Much of this can be summed up in an interview he conducted with CNBC early in 2020, where Marc emphasizes “stakeholder return” as being of more value to society than shareholder returns.

Considering federal law mandates all CEOs of publicly traded companies must maximize profits, this is a particularly bold statement. It’s also only one of many that Marc has made over the last decade.

“Capitalism as We Know it is Dead”

What does Marc talking about the issues above have to do with Salesforce? Nothing. But, I bet you’ll remember his name and be curious
about what his company does.

Sure, he plugs Salesforce now and then, but mostly Marc talks about his personal views. To back those up, Marc’s non-business philanthropic endeavors match the socioeconomic issues he talks about, culminating in the portrait of a genuine character – or, from a media relations perspective, a genuine thought leader.

Anyone who works in PR or content marketing (or politics for that matter) is aware of the concept of the “soft sell” – an indirect link created between an issue and a person that circles back to what’s being sold. Often this is something crafted deliberately by a media strategist or savvy marketing person.

Even if crafted by a genius, anything crafted is doomed to fail as the world changes. Instead of creating thought leaders, maybe it’s time we task PR professionals with finding them and adding a little bit of polish.

As the economic and government systems in the world evolve, we’re seeing more and more evidence that the public is done with scripted information. In other words, that old “soft sell” carries less weight in 2020 than it did even a few years ago. Sure, the soft sell allows a potential “thought leader” to avoid controversy. But, that’s the problem. You can’t avoid controversy anymore.

Speaking in platitudes and avoiding a conversation about serious issues is a product of the old political and corporate class – a class, I would argue, that is fading rapidly.

I do declare! That is unbecoming of a CEO, good sir!

No one cares. Hate to break it to you, but short of being racist, homophobic, or a closet abuser, no one is judging your lifestyle or personal opinions anymore. And if they are, they’re part of an old guard that is on the way out.

Elon Musk – one of the richest men in the world who may change transportation forever – smoked one of them jazz cigarettes on a comedian’s podcast, where he and host Joe Rogan talked about artificial intelligence conquering all human life.

Other than some fake outrage from the old guard, no one cared. Tesla’s stock is higher than ever, and Elon is still a renowned thought leader, interviewed on a wide variety of topics.

Granted, he does say extremely stupid stuff all the time, but since it’s harmless and he’s just genuinely being himself, the public mostly loves him. And so do his shareholders.

In 2020, thought leaders are people with real ideas who aren’t afraid to be themselves, kind of like Marc Benioff. I don’t know about you, but I would love to sit down with that guy, have a few beers, and talk candidly about how to fix the world’s problems.

Yes, of course Elon is invited, especially since I know how much he and I share a love for video games. It’s BYOB around here though, Elon. I’m not made of money.

Tl;DR

If you want to craft a thought leader to garner media interviews, don’t craft them at all. Instead, start just by encouraging them to be themselves.

Encourage them to talk about the issues that are important to them, even if they have absolutely nothing to do with the business they’re in. Lastly, tell them not to be afraid to let their personality shine.

If they’re smart, genuine, and have unique ideas, they’ll be a hit. The new public values people, not corporate magnates.