Everyone deserves better.

In 2014, after working in hospitality for as long as I’d been alive, my mom switched careers. She went to work for an organ transplant program in a large health system. Her qualification: decades of hospitality experience.

At the time, I just thought it was novel. Healthcare doing what Apple had done for retail. Now, decades into my own career helping healthcare brands connect with customers on a deeper level, I see my mom’s hospitality experience as the answer to a more pervasive issue.

Why aren’t healthcare experiences better?

As consumers, we have it good. From retail to restaurants, service experiences are designed to achieve one thing: customer satisfaction. We know how to navigate these experiences—and when we don’t, we know answers are never far. 

Too often, healthcare experiences feel like the opposite.

93% of people rank clear communication as their second-highest care priority after safety.

It’s hard to imagine a scenario that commands the need for answers more than receiving a medical diagnosis. So, it’s no surprise that 93% of people rank clear communication as their second-highest care priority after safety.¹ And yet, 66% of people leave healthcare visits with unanswered questions.² 

Wrestling with the challenges here isn’t easy. There are many. Healthcare professionals are high in demand and short on time. The cost of care is on a steady uptick, and insurance coverage can be frustratingly complex. It’s all enough to leave 65% of US adults feeling that managing healthcare is overwhelming and time consuming.³

A little clarity goes a long way.

Pivot has identified four Soul Drivers that inform our work. Clarity, one of those drivers, focuses on demystifying the complexities that define modern healthcare experiences. It closes the information gap people feel as they navigate care. Making information easy to find and understand also better positions our clients as they navigate AI-assisted search and shifts in how people find answers about their health.

Patient support programs are both a case in point for the power of clarity and an area of expertise at Pivot. These programs are the pharma industry’s answer to many customer service woes. They help patients get access to needed medication, navigate affordability, and understand how their medication works and how to take it safely.

Yet despite everything they offer, patient support programs often lack soul. Having led the brand development for many of these programs at Pivot, I can say our goal is always to amplify it. 

A good example of this is Lantheus Link, a 2025 MM+M award finalist. The key strategic insight that guided us was that radiopharmaceuticals are uncharted territory for most patients (and many physicians). So the brand we developed is equal parts emotive and instructional, spelling out benefits simply and putting information and connection to live support within easy reach.

Clarity is about more than answers. It’s about what those answers can do: restoring control of your health. When you’re making sense of life with a diagnosis, there’s no better customer service than that.