Swaay.Health Podcast

Most healthcare technology companies default to safe corporate blues and sterile software illustrations. PerfectServe took a different route. Learn how the company swapped its iconic semicircle logo for an evergreen palette and why trading flat 2D graphics for authentic photography is helping it build trust with clinical buyers.

The Swaay.Health team is heading to HCIC26 in Orlando. In this video, we share what we are looking forward to at the conference. Brittany shares her interest in sessions exploring the intersection of AI and authentic human voice, as well as finding pragmatic tools marketing teams can use to build genuine brand trust. Colin discusses how he is looking forward to sessions on how generative search and GEO are changing the patient journey, and the tactics marketers are using to defend their budgets.

100 episodes! Can you believe it? It’s hard to believe, but the Swaay.Health Podcast has officially hit triple digits. Over the past 100 episodes, we’ve had the chance to sit down with some incredible healthcare marketers, leaders, innovators, and friends. We’ve talked strategy, community, content, careers, AI, conferences, and just about everything in between. So, for Episode 100, we decided to do something a little different. Instead of interviewing someone else, John Lynn, Colin Hung, and I turned the microphones on ourselves for what was supposed to be a rapid-fire conversation. Spoiler alert: We weren’t particularly good at the “rapid” part. We looked back at some of the interviews we’ll never forget, the guests who made us rethink things, and our favorite conference memories. We also got into some bigger healthcare marketing questions including the myths we’d like to bust, old-school marketing tactics making a comeback, how we’re actually using AI, and what we think healthcare marketing could look like in 2030. And, because it wouldn’t be a Swaay.Health conversation without going a little off-script, we also tackled some of the really important questions: window or aisle seat? Carry-on or checked bag? Early morning keynote or late-night networking? In the episode, we talk about: The Swaay.Health interviews that have stuck with us and why Our dream podcast guests, from Gary Vaynerchuk to Terry Fox Healthcare marketing myths we don’t necessarily agree on Why newsletters, direct mail, and highly personalized outreach may be making a comeback Some of our favorite conference memories The AI prompts we actually use in our everyday work What we’d be doing if we weren’t working in healthcare marketing Why trust, creativity, and human connection may matter more than ever as we head toward 2030 Most importantly, Episode 100 gave us a chance to reflect on what has made this podcast so much fun to create: this community. The guests who have shared their experiences with us, the listeners who continue to tune in, and the incredible community that has grown around these conversations. Thank you to everyone who has been part of the first 100 episodes. Here’s to the next 100! Check out the full conversation below. If you’d like to be a guest on our podcast or know someone who would be a great fit, we’d love to hear from you! Reach out to us! You can subscribe to the Swaay.Health Podcast on any of the following platforms: Apple Podcast YouTube Music Spotify iHeartRadio Pandora Amazon Music

Some people build successful careers by focusing on what’s next for themselves. Others make a point of bringing people along with them. Abdul Rastagar has spent years doing both. As Co-Founder of Sirona Marketing, Abdul has built a career spanning life sciences, healthcare, technology, and marketing. But within the healthcare marketing community, he’s also become known for something that doesn’t necessarily show up on a resume: his willingness to share what he knows, make connections, mentor others, and help people succeed. It’s that commitment to the community that earned Abdul the 2026 Swaay.Health Distinguished Service Award. What makes his approach particularly interesting is that it didn’t begin with a grand plan to become a mentor. It started with a simple question: Where could he give his time and knowledge and actually see the impact? For Abdul, the answer became the marketing community. Over the years, that decision has led him to create resources for job seekers, share his network, mentor fellow marketers, and directly help dozens of people land new roles. I sat down with Abdul to talk about giving back, the career lessons he’s learned along the way, why trust is becoming increasingly important in an AI-driven world, and the advice he believes the next generation of healthcare marketers needs to hear. In This Conversation: Why giving back became such an important part of Abdul’s career. Don’t work for jerks: The career mantra he wishes he had learned sooner. Why trust may be one of healthcare marketing’s biggest challenges in the age of AI. How marketers can make networking more intentional and actually useful. Why judgment, communication, and creativity will matter even more as AI becomes ubiquitous. Watch the full interview or listen to the podcast below, then keep reading for some of our biggest takeaways. Sharing What You Know Can Help Others Succeed Abdul’s commitment to giving back became especially tangible during the pandemic. As marketers around him began losing their jobs, he looked for a way to put his own experience and network to use. That led to Up Your Game, a podcast focused on helping marketers navigate job applications and interviews from a marketing perspective. What started as one way to help quickly grew. Abdul brought CMOs and other leaders into the conversation and ultimately produced more than 100 episodes in a single year. For Abdul, that’s what giving back looks like: finding the skills, knowledge, or network you already have and using them to create a tangible impact for someone else. As he shared throughout our conversation, “I get excited whenever I see somebody else succeed.” Seeing other people succeed has become its own reward for Abdul. It’s a simple reminder that contributing to your professional community doesn’t have to mean launching a massive initiative. Sometimes it starts with sharing what you know, making an introduction, or taking the time to help someone who needs it. One Career Rule: Don’t Work for Jerks Not every career lesson has to be complicated. At Sirona Marketing, Abdul and his team have several internal mantras based on lessons learned through their own experiences. One of them?: “Don’t work for jerks.” It’s funny, but there’s an important lesson behind it. Earlier in his career, Abdul was more likely to stay in situations that weren’t working and simply suffer through them. Experience taught him to recognize those situations sooner and be more willing to walk away when someone clearly didn’t have his best interests at heart. And, as he quickly pointed out during our conversation, there’s an equally important second half to that rule: Don’t be a jerk either. It’s straightforward career advice, but perhaps some of the most useful. In an AI-Driven World, Trust Matters More It’s nearly impossible to have a conversation about healthcare marketing in 2026 without talking about AI. But for Abdul, one of the biggest changes AI is creating isn’t just increased productivity or automation. It’s a growing issue of trust. Consumers are being inundated with more content than ever before. Some is human-created. Some is AI-generated. Some is accurate. Some isn’t. And as the volume increases, audiences are becoming more skeptical about what they see, hear, and believe. “That changes the job of the marketer,” said Abdul. He believes marketers need to work harder to demonstrate authenticity, credibility, and real expertise. And sometimes the best way to do that has very little to do with technology. Have conversations. Host roundtables. Sit down for dinner with customers. Visit them in person. Be human.  That doesn’t mean avoiding AI. Abdul and his team are actively using it. In fact, he introduced me to the thought of thinking of AI tools as “teammates” that can automate work and expand what a team is capable of doing. But those teammates still need oversight. AI can make mistakes. Outputs need to be checked. Human judgment still matters. For small healthcare marketing teams in particular, AI can dramatically expand capacity. The opportunity is to use it to make the team stronger without removing the human expertise that makes the work credible in the first place. Stop Saying “Network.” Start Doing It. “Network more” might be one of the most common pieces of career advice. It’s also not particularly useful unless someone tells you what that actually means. Abdul first heard the importance of networking in business school, but he admits it took years before he truly understood its value. Once he became more intentional about building relationships, he saw a significant impact on his career and professional success. His advice for making networking more actionable is simple: Think about two or three things you want to accomplish over the next five years. Then ask yourself: Who is already where I want to be? Find those people and start reaching out. They might be former colleagues. They might be mutual connections. They might be complete strangers whose careers you find interesting. The point isn’t to collect LinkedIn connections. It’s to start conversations and build genuine relationships. Sometimes those conversations lead to professional opportunities. Sometimes they lead to friendships. Sometimes they simply introduce you to a person, perspective, or experience you wouldn’t have encountered otherwise. All of them have value. The Skills the Next Generation Will Need Most When I asked Abdul what skills the next generation of healthcare marketers will need over the next decade, AI was inevitably part of his answer. Marketers will need to know how to use it. But knowing how to use AI may not be what ultimately differentiates them. Judgment, communication, and creativity will. Abdul is already seeing this with younger marketers entering the workforce. Learning how to use AI tools is important, but so is knowing when the output is wrong, when something doesn’t sound human, or when an answer simply doesn’t make sense. That requires critical thinking. The marketers who stand out won’t necessarily be the ones who can generate the most content or build the most AI workflows. They’ll be the ones who know what to do with those capabilities. They’ll ask better questions. They’ll recognize bad information. They’ll communicate like humans. And they’ll use technology to create things that are genuinely useful. Passing It Forward At the end of our conversation, I asked Abdul what “distinguished” means to him. He laughed at the word itself, saying it sounded a little too lofty. But his answer captured exactly why he received the Distinguished Service Award in the first place. For him, it comes down to giving back and passing it forward. Share what you know. Help other people succeed. Make the introduction. Have the conversation. Give someone else the benefit of what you’ve learned. Careers are built on skills and experience, but they’re also built on people. And Abdul’s career is a great reminder of just how much impact we can have when we make helping those people part of the work. Congratulations again to Abdul Rastagar, recipient of the 2026 Swaay.Health Distinguished Service Award. Learn more about Sirona Marketing here: https://www.sirona.marketing/

When people think about healthcare innovation, marketing isn’t always the first thing that comes to mind. But sometimes the biggest breakthroughs happen because someone asks a simple question: “Would someone outside this industry actually understand this?” That’s the perspective Sadie Andersen brings to her role as Marketing & Communications Coordinator at The Sequoia Project and it’s one of the many reasons she was recognized as one of Swaay.Health’s 2026 Marketing Rising Stars. Sadie didn’t begin her career in healthcare. In fact, it was working with caregivers and experiencing the healthcare system herself that opened her eyes to just how difficult something as fundamental as accessing medical records can be. Those experiences ultimately led her to healthcare marketing, where she now helps communicate some of the industry’s most complex topics in ways people can actually understand. “I had an easier time seeing the gaps because I wasn’t native to the industry,” Sadie shared during our conversation. “There were areas where I could say, ‘I don’t know what that word means,’ and realize a lot of other people probably didn’t either.” That outside perspective has become one of her greatest strengths. Sadie’s story is a great reminder that some of the strongest marketing ideas come from curiosity, fresh perspective, and a willingness to ask the questions others may overlook. We sat down with Sadie to talk about her path into healthcare marketing, what winning the Marketing Rising Star Award means to her, how she approaches communicating complex topics, and the lessons she’s learned early in her career. In This Conversation: Why an outsider’s perspective can be one of a healthcare marketer’s greatest strengths. How to communicate complex healthcare topics in ways people actually understand. The leadership mindset that helped Sadie become a Marketing Rising Star. Why adaptability—not perfection—is one of the most valuable skills marketers can develop. Watch the full conversation or listen to the podcast below, then keep reading for some of our biggest takeaways. Making Complex Feel Simple Healthcare is full of acronyms, technical language, and highly specialized topics. For organizations working in interoperability and health information exchange, that complexity can quickly become a communication barrier. Rather than adding to the jargon, Sadie focuses on removing it. Her approach is straightforward: break complicated ideas into smaller pieces, tell stories, use visuals whenever possible, and never lose sight of the people behind the technology. If the content doesn’t feel interesting or human, she believes it’s probably time to rethink it. It’s advice every healthcare marketer can benefit from. Because the goal isn’t simply to explain technology, it’s to help people understand why it matters. Leadership Doesn’t Require a Management Title One of the qualities highlighted throughout Sadie’s award nomination wasn’t a campaign or a metric. It was a mindset. She’s known for saying: “You didn’t ask this, but I thought it would be helpful.” That simple philosophy has helped her identify opportunities, launch new projects, and create resources that benefit her entire organization. Having previously worked in startup environments, she developed the habit of spotting gaps and stepping forward to solve them instead of waiting to be asked. That initiative also extended beyond creating content. Sadie developed an editorial strategy that brought greater consistency to The Sequoia Project’s communications, then spent time educating staff and members on how they could amplify the organization’s message through LinkedIn and other channels. She emphasizes that even small actions: liking, commenting, or resharing a post, can have an outsized impact when an entire community participates. Thriving in a Constantly Changing Industry I asked Sadie what skill matters most for marketers entering the profession today, and her answer isn’t writing, design, or analytics. It’s adaptability. Marketing plans change. Industries evolve. Priorities shift. The marketers who succeed are the ones who can pivot, stay resilient, and keep moving forward even when the original plan no longer applies. She also credits supportive colleagues and mentors as one of the biggest contributors to her own growth, reminding us that great careers are rarely built alone. Celebrating Healthcare Marketing’s Next Generation The Marketing Rising Star Award recognizes emerging professionals who are already making a meaningful impact on their organizations and the broader healthcare marketing community. After speaking with Sadie, it’s easy to understand why she was selected. Her curiosity, willingness to lead, and ability to make complex healthcare topics accessible are qualities our industry needs more of and they’re exactly what makes the future of healthcare marketing so exciting. Congratulations again to Sadie Andersen, we can’t wait to see what comes next. Interested in the work Sadie and The Sequoia Project are doing? Join them at the 2026 Sequoia Project & Carequality Annual Meeting on October 28–29 in Texas.