by Administrator | Jan 28, 2025 | News
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., Jan. 28, 2025 – Amendola Communications (Amendola), part of Supreme Group, announced today that it has been selected by Life365 Health, a leading developer of virtual care technology solutions that enable healthcare delivery at home, to implement a national PR/marketing program.
“Life365 Health chose Amendola to help drive awareness and interest in our AI-driven platform, because of its deep understanding of healthcare, strong media relationships, senior level team and expert writers,” said Kent Dicks, CEO and founder. “Our technology goes beyond remote patient monitoring (RPM) to help healthcare organizations manage large patient populations in a proactive, pre-emptive, prioritized, and personalized manner. We look forward to collaborating with Amendola to more broadly share the story of how we help healthcare organizations monitor populations, improve patient engagement, and control costs.”
Amendola is implementing a comprehensive program of messaging, marketing, public relations, and social media to demonstrate Life365 Health’s industry-leading technology and services, accomplishments, customer wins, and industry partnerships, including those with Veterans Affairs and Microsoft.
Life365 Health has continually set the standard for innovation in RPM and virtual care solutions. The company’s mission is to enable new models of care where technologies, like AI and machine learning, play a crucial role in connecting with a large population of patients to receive insights from home to prioritize those who may be headed to more costly locations.
“Far too often, the RPM process engages with patients far too late, after patients have been discharged from the hospital in a reactive and expensive manner,” said Jodi Amendola, agency CEO. “Life365 is changing this outdated and ineffective model by advancing healthcare delivery with leading-edge technology that enhances patient engagement, personalized care, and facilitates proactive interventions to improve outcomes. We are delighted to help this leader in at-home virtual care expand its customer base and market presence.”
About Life365
Life365 Health is a leading developer of virtual care technology solutions that enable healthcare delivery at home. The Life365 platform addresses key care delivery challenges by providing scalable solution integration and logistics to enterprise healthcare organizations, to enable patient connectivity, engagement, and improved outcomes for their patient populations at home. The platform provides a single integration point that enables providers, payers, and others to utilize a proactive, virtual first care approach to remotely engage and monitor patients with a variety of conditions and needs. These include chronic disease management, post-discharge care, and population health management.
Life365 is led by an experienced, industry recognized team and is a major patent holder of wearables, sensors and patches driven by machine learning / AI, to drive the next generation of remote patient monitoring to scale. Life365 is a strategic partner of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and the Veterans Association, serving the largest population of Veterans in the world.
For more information regarding Life365, please visit www.life365.health.
About Amendola
Amendola, part of Supreme Group, 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 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 our website and follow us on LinkedIn.
Media Contact
Philip Anast
Amendola for Life365 Health
panast@acmarketingpr.com
by Administrator | Dec 4, 2024 | News
Fifth acquisition joins growing platform of world-class health-focused businesses
WEST CHESTER, PA AND SCOTTSDALE, AZ, Dec. 4, 2024—Supreme Group today announced its strategic acquisition of Amendola Communications (Amendola), a recognized leader in providing integrated public relations, marketing, and social media services to healthcare, health tech and life sciences companies. Amendola will continue to operate under its brand name as a standalone organization within Supreme Group, with Jodi Amendola continuing to lead the organization as president.
“During the past two decades, we have considered the acquisitions of our client companies among our many successes, because it means you have built something of value that can be even more powerful as part of something bigger,” said Jodi Amendola. “Joining Supreme Group is a founder’s dream, as we will not only retain Amendola’s autonomy to deliver the same strategic approach and services our clients have come to trust, but we will also level up our offerings by tapping into the wealth of expertise of the other Supreme Group companies, including digital marketing, enhanced lead generation, creative design services, and PhD-level clinical expertise. It is the ideal fit for Amendola clients and our team.”
Amendola is the fifth agency to join Supreme’s growing strategic platform dedicated to providing best-in-class marketing and communications services to a broad range of healthcare and life sciences companies. Supreme Group was formed following Trinity Hunt’s majority investment in the digital agency Supreme Optimization in March 2023.
Amendola was founded more than two decades ago by Jodi and Ted Amendola to help promote emerging digital health technologies with a very clearly defined purpose: To improve healthcare for all stakeholders. Over the years, the company has expanded to include healthcare and life sciences more broadly, while continuing to grow as a leading health tech agency. From Fortune 500 companies to startups, Amendola has consistently taken companies from virtual unknowns to household names, and its programs have contributed to successful funding efforts, profitable acquisitions and IPOs. Its senior level “A-team” helps to set the agency apart. The company’s 25 employees serve approximately 50 clients.
“When we learned about Amendola and its strong reputation and footprint, particularly in health tech, we knew the agency would fit in perfectly with the Supreme Group family of companies,” said Tom Donnelly, CEO, Supreme Group. “We’re impressed by Amendola’s entrepreneurial, results-driven focus, and excited to help take the team to the next level with the combined strength of our experienced Supreme Group executive team and the platform’s sister agencies.”
In addition to Amendola, the Supreme Group’s platform includes:
- Supreme Optimization, a full-service life science- and healthcare-focused digital agency (founded by Sheldon Zhai in 2012 to provide best-in-class services including paid advertising, SEO, content marketing, analytics and website development)
- Health+Commerce, an integrated marketing and public relations agency serving medtech, biopharma and digital health companies
- Clarity Quest, a health tech marketing and communications agency
- BioStrata, a UK-based agency offering comprehensive marketing communication services to the life sciences sector
Mike Steindorf, partner at Trinity Hunt, said: “Trinity Hunt is a growth-oriented private equity firm that builds world-class companies within healthcare. With Tom’s leadership as CEO and the supercharged platform of Supreme Optimization, Clarity Quest, BioStrata, Health+Commerce, and now Amendola, we are building something powerful in the life sciences and healthcare marketing and communications services business. We look forward to supporting and growing these companies and adding additional complementary businesses to the platform.”
California Counsel Group and Gabriel & Ashworth served as advisors to Amendola.
Headshots of Jodi Amendola and Tom Donnelly are available here and here.
About Supreme Group
Trinity Hunt-backed Supreme Group is a platform dedicated to providing best-in-class business and commercialization services to a broad range of life science and healthcare companies. Supreme Group’s portfolio companies include Supreme Optimization, a life sciences-focused digital agency; Clarity Quest, a health IT marketing agency; Health+Commerce, an integrated marketing and public relations agency; BioStrata, a UK-based agency offering comprehensive integrated services to the life science sector; and Amendola, an integrated public relations, marketing, and social media agency serving healthcare, health tech and life science companies. For more information visit www.supremegroup.io.
About Trinity Hunt Partners
Trinity Hunt Partners is a growth-oriented private equity firm with over $2 billion of assets under management focused on building leading business, healthcare, and consumer services companies. Trinity Hunt’s mission is to provide the talent and strategic, operational, and financial capabilities needed to build entrepreneurial services companies into market leaders. For more information, visit www.trinityhunt.com.
About Amendola
Amendola, part of Supreme Group, 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 our website and follow us on LinkedIn.
###
Media Contact
Jodi Amendola
Amendola, part of Supreme Group
jamendola@acmarketingpr.com
by Jodi Amendola | Jan 18, 2024 | Blog
Many of the challenges that healthcare organizations faced in 2023 – inflation, labor shortages, worker burnout, and narrow margins – are likely to persist in 2024.
These factors are certain to make for a challenging operating environment, and most healthcare executives are taking a clear-eyed, creative look at how to overcome these looming barriers over the next year—including the use of novel health tech and medtech.
Only 3% of health system executives and 7% of health plan executives report having a “positive” outlook for 2024, according to Deloitte’s annual “Health Care Outlook Survey.” Those numbers are down substantially from the prior year, when 15% of health system executives and 40% of health plan leaders reported positive outlooks.
Nonetheless, healthcare organizations will no doubt continue to invest in new technology solutions to surmount many of the operating obstacles that are confronting them. But which technologies are likely to deliver the biggest impact in healthcare in the next year? I wanted to hear from the experts, so I polled a number of my contacts in the healthcare analyst community. Below are their predictions.
- Jennifer Eaton, RN, MSN, CCDS, CRCR, research director, value-based healthcare digital strategies with IDC, notes that key industry players will continue to invest in digital solutions that support operational efficiency, optimized value, cost containment, and patient-centric care.
“This year will usher in an evolution in value-based care initiatives (i.e., reducing health disparities, accurate predictive analytics, AI-supported workflows, and hyper-personalized engagement strategies) that are especially appealing as payers and providers aim to strike a balance between the cost and quality of care,” she said. “As healthcare organizations continue to face a variety of challenges such as inflationary pressures, labor and skills shortages, clinician burnout, and evolving consumer expectations, organizations are focusing on digital transformation and digital infrastructure creation that supports automation, deeper intelligence, and real-time insights that can minimize the drudgery and low-value work that has plagued the healthcare industry and shift this valuable time and attention to the patient.”
- While much of the industry’s focus in 2023 was on the challenging operating climate for hospitals and health systems, payers will face similar obstacles next year, according to Jeff Rivkin, research director, payer IT strategies, IDC.
“Payers face payer-provider convergence, care delivery modernization, digital business expectations, and adopting a unified healthcare experience in 2024, on top of mandates around price transparency and prior authorizations,” Rivkin said. “It’s hard to make money only being a health insurance company, so creative innovations and business models will thrive to address cost-of-care, labor shortages, and legacy technical debt.”
- Since the emergence of Chat GPT, generative artificial intelligence (AI) has been among the hottest topics in health IT, as well as executive suites across nearly all industries. As generative AI models mature, healthcare organizations will increasingly look to implement them, according to Delfina Huergo Bensadon, senior research and consulting analyst, Frost & Sullivan.
“One of the digital health trends we are seeing at Frost for 2024 is the increasing adoption of generative AI in healthcare organizations, as the physician’s main concern of accountability is addressed globally through regulations, such as the AI Act,” she said.
- Elena Iakovleva, research analyst, Chilmark Research, foresees increasing investment in AI-based technologies to improve both patient care and healthcare administration.
“Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) solutions will definitely be on the rise,” she said. “Often the accuracy of existing monitors isn’t that good (Hi, Apple Watch and friends) and without a doubt in 2024, major RPM vendors will be competing for the best data available to train their models.”
Additionally, AI will continue to transform providers’ approach to revenue cycle management (RCM), according to Iakovleva. “We have been observing tremendous growth of various RCM-oriented AI technologies,” she said. “In 2023 it feels like we hit a critical mass and by the end of 2024 we should start seeing a big change in RCM departments across the U.S. and professions associated with RCM.”
- John Moore III, managing partner, Chilmark Research, foresees increased emphasis on the importance of healthcare organizations addressing patients’ social determinants of health needs.
“We will see the first ‘backbone’ organizations funded by federal grants connecting with care organizations to create closed-loop referrals to community-based organizations,” Moore said. “Safety-net and capitated hospitals already piloting ‘food pharmacy’ and other healthcare-related social needs initiatives will receive federal funding for these programs via new community-benefit designations.”
Of course, we already know what the biggest news story of 2024 is bound to be – the presidential election – and healthcare, as usual, is sure to play a role.
“With the 2024 election looming, both parties will step up pressure around reigning in healthcare costs and system abuses to win points with the electorate,” Moore said.
by Jack O'Brien | Dec 22, 2021 | Blog
To be successful in business, you have to come up with a viable idea, develop it, bring it to market, and sell it to customers. That may be an oversimplified version of the formula but the basic principles are there: craft a product or service and then spend most of your time selling it far and wide.
As with so many things in healthcare, this process is more complicated than usual. Caring for patients is always the top priority but then there are also so many different stakeholders and revenue streams that muddle how a company should explore expansion.
Ultimately, healthcare executives are the guiding force that can bring an organization to the next level by embodying the mission statement, promoting value to the market, and winning over skeptics.
But in an era where the playing field is so flat, where new markets emerge only to experience a sudden rush of competitive saturation, companies have to stand out. The most obvious answer to an executive might be to rely on standard business strategies to address these challenges.
However, I would argue that the best way to differentiate yourself as a company and secure necessary industry credibility is to operate above the fray.Optics matter, so leaders must recognize that opportunities to interface with the media and stakeholders as a vendor-neutral voice of reason are an effective, proven way to better serve the business.
Casting yourself as an industry authority or subject matter expert pays dividends down the line because outsiders can look at you and realize you have more to say than simply reciting the same sales pitch over and over.
In the years I spent as a healthcare reporter, some of my most valuable contacts in the industry were accomplished executives that could speak to specific events or general trends in a vendor-neutral way.
Neither me nor my audience needed to know about how their RCM company was the best at streamlining the financial experience for patients or how their virtual care service was going to be the Holy Grail of care access. Quality journalists aren’t there to hand out superlatives or write puff pieces about executives and the companies that they run; rehashing a press release isn’t why reporters do what they do.
However, soliciting the opinions of healthcare’s movers and shakers never goes out of style. For example, if there’s a significant policy announcement affecting payers and I can get an insurance executive on the phone to talk about ramifications without reminding me that they were the first to offer certain benefits to members, then that’s a source I can reliably turn to again down the line.
Subtlety, rather than outright salesmanship, is the best way to position your organization for maximum opportunity.
Getting your name in print, on industry panels, or invited to deliver keynotes should always be the goal because then you build a natural rapport with the audiences you’re most seeking to connect with. Everybody wants what they say to have merit and thought leadership is the ideal exercise to make that happen.
Perhaps most importantly to note, you and your company don’t have to be the star of the story; you just have to be in the story.
Since the initial outbreak of COVID-19, healthcare innovation has enjoyed prime media coverage, the likes of which hadn’t been seen before. Whether it was telehealth, remote patient monitoring, or vaccine research, there were thousands of stories printed about fast-moving developments in an industry that has historically been averse to change.
In each of the stories that ran on television, in print media, or on podcasts, there were ample opportunities for leaders to chime in about the future of healthcare. Many participated, but I implore those who didn’t to reconsider their approach to promoting their brand.
If there’s an outlet or reporter asking to associate your name with a trending story or a noteworthy event, even one that likely will not give you the sole spotlight, you’re better off accepting that invitation because now you’re linked to it.
I know there’s a strong inclination to use any and every media appearance to preach the company’s gospel, but there’s an even stronger value in looking at the world from a 30,000-foot view. If you can step outside yourself and speak to topics that are not simply related to your company’s latest announcement, you will gain invaluable industry credibility and media contacts that will return to you without hesitation.
Thought leadership is not just a pie-in-the-sky buzzword for the most outgoing executives in healthcare, it’s a useful strategy to expand brand awareness that every leader and their communications teams should be pursuing if they haven’t done so already.
by Elizabeth Schwartz | Nov 24, 2021 | Blog
When I was a little girl, I always wanted to be a pediatrician. And a writer. I had no idea as an idealistic young lady that there wasn’t really a career that combined the two disciplines.
And when I learned how long I had to go to school to be a pediatrician, I leaned in a little more on the writing.
It wasn’t until I had leaned way into writing and four years of Journalism school that I got my first job at a multi-hospital research health system. I learned quickly that I could combine my three passions—helping people, healthcare and writing. I was not the one performing the lifesaving transplants, but through my writing I got to share the stories of two sisters who shared a lifesaving kidney transplant and encourage others to be organ donors. It was a great fit. I thought of it as writing. I had learned in Journalism school how to write a lead, a body and a close. I never thought of what I did as storytelling.
Then, as if it couldn’t get any better, I got a job as a writer at a pediatric hospital. I met awe-inspiring families struggling through unimaginable heartache but taking me along and allowing me into their lives to tell their story and show how they battled adversity with strength, bravery and grace.
I got to see the loving way nurses and doctors approached children and their families. I got to see the way parents looked bravely at their children and told them it was going to be OK even when they weren’t sure. I was humbled and grateful for each and every family. I remember thinking that I was so glad to be able to tell their stories but could never imagine being in their shoes. I had found my place: healthcare and writing. But then something happened that changed my perspective completely.
The Tide Turned
About two years into my job, I had children. My son and daughter are 18 months apart in age. When my daughter was six months old, she began to have seizures. We spent weeks in the hospital trying to find the root cause—from a brain tumor to epilepsy—what we found was that she had a stroke at birth and had cerebral palsy. When my son was two, he was diagnosed with autism. What had been unimaginable to me about the lives of those parents had become my life. We spent many days and nights with doctors, nurses, therapists—my colleagues—and now my child’s caregiver. I was the one of the parents that I had been writing about.
Why It Matters
My children have been a consistent source of joy and inspiration to me. I know that doesn’t make me unique as a parent, but when they were young, we journeyed through a lot together in ways I never thought I would experience. All the times I wrote those patient stories, I never knew one day it would be me.
I’m happy to report they are both thriving, active teenagers now. What I learned is that in some way for all of us, healthcare is personal. Whether it’s an aging parent, your own health challenges, or a child, when we walk through our healthcare system as a patient or a caregiver of a patient, it changes us.
For me, it changed the way I write. It changed the way I tell the story of the latest innovation in EHRs. It changed the way I appreciate the passion and selfless care that every single position in the healthcare ecosystem puts into what they do.
I think it’s easy as PR and Marketing professionals to get robotic and apathetic in the way that we amplify a brand or write a blog. What we should remember is that at the end of that journey is a real person with a real story. And you never know when that might be you. Write with your heart. Bring your own story in the passion you have for what you do. It will never steer you wrong.
