by Administrator | Apr 5, 2022 | News
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
by Administrator | Mar 30, 2022 | News
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 Biofourmis, Availity®, 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
by Administrator | Jul 22, 2020 | Blog
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.
by Administrator | Jan 7, 2020 | News
Featured posts from Amendola Communications include those syndicated by Bulldog Reporter, a popular PR publication.
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., Jan. 7, 2020 PR and marketing pros looking for some inspirational reading are invited to check out the top blog posts of 2019 by the team at Amendola, a nationally recognized, award-winning healthcare and health IT public relations and marketing agency. The following posts from the Amendola blog were among the most popular this past year, receiving extensive views and shares with some also picked up by industry outlets like Bulldog Reporter.
Take a look for insight into how to win national press, extend the shelf life of media placements and more.
“So You Want to Be in the Wall Street Journal” Breaking into national media is the toughest nut to crack in public relations, no way around it. But for companies willing to take the steps outlined in this post, national coverage is definitely possible for the coming year. Heads up: It calls for patience and a pitch with exceptional substance.
“Maximizing the Value of PR Placements” Congratulations on that enviable article or byline your awesome story (and publicist) just scored for you! Time to circulate it on social media, with prospects, your mom and then what? Turns out there’s quite a bit more you can do with a media placement long after its publication date.
“The Science of Marketing and Public Relations” Question for marketers: if asked to prove how your marketing campaigns are paying off, can you give tangible, impressive specifics? For too many in our profession, the answer is a sheepish “not really,” but it simply doesn’t have to be going into a new year. Regroup your team and reground your campaigns in the proven, solid fundamentals of measuring marketing and PR, all captured in one concise post.
And lastly, a Readers’ Choice, the blog’s most popular post two years running:
Going in AP Style Let’s own it with pride: the PR and marketing profession is a natural habitat for grammar geeks! And when in doubt if we’re “writing it right,” the first source we turn to is the venerable AP manual. That’s not to say we don’t occasionally find ourselves surprised by some AP guidelines and in this perennially popular post, we take a closer look at the top five that tend to trip people up the most
The above are just a small sample of the wealth of free but top notch guidance for PR and marketing professionals. Give yourself a gift and subscribe to the Amendola blog to receive weekly advice from subject matter experts in every aspect of publicizing and marketing healthcare and health IT.
About Amendola
Amendola is an award-winning national public relations, marketing communications, social media and content marketing firm. Named one of the best information technology (IT) PR firms in the nation four times by PRSourceCode, Amendola represents some of the best-known brands and groundbreaking startups in the healthcare and HIT industries. Amendola’s seasoned team of PR and marketing pros delivers strategic guidance and effective solutions to help organizations boost their reputation and drive market share. For more information about the PR industry’s “A Team,” visit www.acmarketingpr.com, and follow Amendola on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Media Contact:
Marcia Rhodes, Amendola Communications, mrhodes@acmarketingpr.com
by Administrator | Dec 18, 2019 | Blog
Building relationships with journalists takes time. Smashing them to pieces takes little time at all.
One terrible, irrelevant pitch and you could end up on a journalist’s blacklist and that isn’t where you want to be. Because as any good media relations guru will tell you, we need journalists more than they need us.
To build strong relationships and maybe fix bad ones there are some basic rules of the road anyone out there sending pitches should follow, lest you end up in the SPAM folder where email goes to die!
Know What they Write and What Who they Write for Writes
Sometimes a good tongue-twister helps you to remember a basic principle such as this one do a little research! You need to know who the person and the publication is before you pitch him/her.
This seems like a no-brainer, but it’s actually one of the biggest problems editors run into. If they won’t accept company sources for stories and prefer to limit
themselves to end-users and customers, you need to know that. And, more importantly, you need to respect that.
No, you cannot change their mind. Instead, because you failed to know who you’re dealing with and respect their rules, you’ll just end up alienating yourself.
Give publications a call before you pitch them. Or, do what I do, drop a quick email with the subject like “Quick Question” and just ask what it’ll take to get a
story covered. And then take the response as a Commandment. It’s as simple as that.
Use the Medium of their Choice
Media relations people are told all the time “you have to make the calls!” Well, that’s true sometimes. And sometimes, it’s not true at all.
The fact is if it’s a solicitation or a pitch editors prefer email almost universally. That said, a quick phone call to remind them you sent one is probably OK for most editors. Don’t, however, overstay your welcome. Keep calls brief. And if an editor tells you they prefer email, keep to that avenue.
I have been yelled at on the phone once or twice for calling someone I shouldn’t have. My advice to avoid this is to 1) check your PR software, such as Cision, and read the notes to see if a journalist explicitly states that they prefer email; and 2) try to limit your calls to work numbers.
Just because you can get a journalist’s personal cellphone doesn’t mean you should call them on the same line. Like everyone else, they use their phones primarily to like baby photos on Facebook and to swipe left on Tinder mirror selfies. They probably don’t want a call on their personal line so don’t do it.
Don’t sound like Rachel From Cardholder Services during phone calls, and don’t make your emails look like marketing blasts. Talk and write to editors as if they are real people and as if you’re a real person (I failed to develop a good tongue-twister, but I tried).
Keep it Real
Keep it real. If you’re writing an email, keep it brief and just offer a story. Don’t drone on and on about a product and how great it is no one cares. And if you’re calling an editor, don’t jump into a monologue, because no one will listen.
Just try to have a conversation, weave in the most important information, and be yourself. If you don’t fall back on your personality, you shouldn’t be in media
relations.
People skills are a huge part of the job, and good people skills shine most when those people are being themselves.
