Brand as a Strategic Growth Engine: A Conversation with Piedmont Healthcare’s CMO 

In healthcare, few organizations have redefined the role of Brand Growth as boldly as Piedmont. Under CMO Douwe Bergsma’s leadership, Brand Growth has evolved from mostly a communications and sponsorships function into a measurable business growth engine; accountable for driving demand, shaping brand health and improving patient experience. 

In this conversation with Scott Davis, Prophet’s Chief Growth Officer, Bergsma shares how he’s reframed Brand Growth at Piedmont around patient-centered, financial rigor, data-driven accountability, and the courage to simplify. Together, they explore how brand and demand disciplines combine to power sustainable growth in one of the nation’s most complex industries. 

Douwe, you’ve had quite a year. Piedmont’s performance has been exceptional. How would you describe where the organization stands today and how that influences your Brand Growth priorities? 

Douwe Bergsma: It’s been a record year across many dimensions. Ten years ago, Piedmont’s total revenue was around $1.5 billion. This year, we’re tracking toward $9 billion. We now serve ~4.5 million patients across ~50,000 employees and offer services close to about 85% of Georgia. Piedmont is among the best performing systems in the U.S when it comes to quality, safety, cost management and overall financial performance.  

For me, the real story is how Brand Growth is now directly accountable for a significant part of our total revenue. That’s based on our internal Brand Growth Mix Model (MMM), which quantifies the contribution to patient acquisition and office visits. That level of measurable impact is rare in healthcare. 

We measure success across three pillars: 

• Demand: How many office visits and appointments Brand Growth directly drives, and at what ROI? 
• Brand: Awareness and favorability, tracked through independent third-party research. 
• Experience: How well do patients adopt our digital tools and how satisfied they are.  

Those three lenses together represent the full brand journey – from the first awareness moment to a lifetime of patient loyalty. 

That’s an extraordinary shift, from Brand Growth as a service function to a growth engine. What sparked that transformation? 

DB: When I joined Piedmont, Brand Growth was respected but mostly viewed as the “communications and sponsorships department and patient experience was even a separate team. My goal was to reframe Brand Growth as a strategic driver of growth, a patient-centered revenue engine.  

I came from the CPG world, where you live and die by metrics like household penetration and sales velocity. In healthcare, the equivalents are patient appointments and office visits. So, I started with that: proving that Brand Growth could measurably drive patient volume. 

Once we had data to show how communications, physician outreach, campaigns and digital investments translated into patient growth, the conversation with leadership shifted. Over time, Brand Growth was not only visible, but it was essential. 

I tell my team all the time: Marketing is math, with creativity to make the math work better. That mindset changed a lot.  

You’ve often said your mantra is “Think like a CFO, act like a CMO.” What does that mean in practice? 

DB: It means that marketers must understand and speak the language of the balance sheet. The fastest way to earn credibility in the C-suite is to tie your work directly to patient satisfaction and financial performance. 

When I came in, I brought data tables to almost every meeting, not creative storyboards. I walked the CEO, EVP and CFO through how Brand Growth metrics can translate into patient preference, conversion and financial outcomes. 

Over time, we built a full Brand Growth Mix Model to validate those linkages. It’s not just correlation, but also attribution and causation. We can now forecast how much incremental patients and revenue a certain campaign, media channel, or experience improvement will generate, approximately 

Once you can do that, Brand Growth earns a more permanent seat at the table not the “kids’ table,” as I like to say. 

That level of financial discipline feels rare, especially in healthcare marketing. What other changes made it possible? 

DB: A big one was patient-driven simplification. Like many large systems, we had accumulated too many vendors, tools, and disconnected digital experiences. There were multiple patient portals and apps, each with their own logins, designs, and data silos. 

We now aim to simplify almost everything down to one patient-preferred platform: Piedmont MyChart. It’s now the single digital front door for the majority of our patients. That decision was somewhat controversial; it meant consolidating walking away from several vendors. But simplification delivered an easier patient experience, clarity, consistency, and cost efficiency. 

The result is not only a better experience for patients, but a more streamlined, measurable, and scalable Brand Growth ecosystem. 

Once you had the demand engine humming, how did you elevate brand building within that mix? 

DB: Once we proved Brand Growth’s impact on office visits, the next step was to embrace its role in shaping brand awareness and preference.  

We were the #1 system operationally in Georgia but ranked only #2 in brand health. That gap was unacceptable. I used the science of marketing to help other executives understand that awareness drives patient consideration, and consideration drives choice. 

Once that clicked, support followed. Our brand building efforts grew exponentially within a few years. Today, our CEO is personally involved and presents Brand Growth results to our leadership and board. When the CEO takes pride in Brand Growth, you know it’s embedded in the enterprise strategy. 

That’s a powerful evolution and it mirrors what we see across industries: marketing leaders earning credibility through measurable results. How do you think about the intersection of brand and demand today? 

DB: They’re not separate disciplines; they’re symbiotic. Demand gives you patient choice, results and short-term value. Brand gives you the long-term ability to grow. 

The first phase of our transformation was all about driving demand: measurable, patient-centered transactional growth. But once we proved that engine, brand became the next multiplier. Brand health amplifies everything else: patient preference, physician partnerships, patient loyalty, even recruiting.  

We no longer debate “brand vs. demand.” We build both in concert, guided by a unified Brand Growth Flywheel that connects awareness to consideration to conversion. 

Scott Davis: That’s exactly what we call Brand & Demand at Prophet — the idea that sustainable growth happens when both sides of the Brand Growth equation reinforce each other. 

Let’s talk about experience, the final frontier of Brand Growth ownership. You’ve brought CX, marketing, and analytics under one roof. What prompted that integration? 

DB: The patient experience is the brand experience. You can’t separate them. 

We merged communications, community affairs, marketing, sales and patient experience into one organization with centralized insights and analytics. That was a major reorganization. It was a bit painful, but necessary. 

We rebuilt our organization and now we have a single, integrated view of the patient: from first awareness to appointment booking, to post-visit feedback. 

Brand Growth now is also accountable for digital tool adoption and patient satisfaction. It’s a closed loop. When patients have better digital and in-person experiences, loyalty and volume follow. 

Healthcare is facing capacity constraints and policy headwinds. How do those external dynamics shape your Brand Growth agenda? 

DB: Demand for healthcare in Georgia continues to grow, but access needs to increase as well.  

Our focus is on balancing patient demand growth with available capacity across our footprint. It’s about connecting patients to the right services, at the right place and time, managing expectations, and ensuring alignment with operations. 

We’re increasing access to quality care through capital investments in new and expanded facilities, hiring more physicians and staff and expanding virtual care, but Brand Growth also plays a crucial role in optimizing patient demand.  Relentless focus on quality and building a strong brand helps attract patients, but also physicians, nurses, and partners who want to work with the best. 

You’ve also been candid about cutting “vanity spend” and reinvesting for impact. What did that process look like? 

DB: We had a zero-based budgeting mentality – every program, vendor, and sponsorship had to justify its investments and show it was patient-preferred, driving value.  

I literally asked almost each partner to present their own value creation. Some could prove it instantly. Others, like certain sponsorships, technology partners or promotional programs, couldn’t. 

One example: we walked away from a high-profile sponsorship. It was a tough call; they were great partners, it had visibility but no measurable patient preference or impact. We reallocated that money to further upgrade our digital patient experience. 

That decision earned credibility with the other executives and freed resources for initiatives that drive true patient-centered and measurable growth. 

Many CMOs right now are under pressure to reorganize and to reimagine Brand Growth for greater agility and accountability. What guidance would you give them? 

DB: Transformation is never one-and-done. We’ve gone through multiple reorganizations to centralize analytics, insights, and patient experience l under unified leadership. Each time, it’s disruptive but clarity always follows. My advice? 

1. Start with what matters. Define the few patient-centered metrics that connect directly to overall business performance 
2. Invest in insights. The most underleveraged asset in most organizations is understanding the customer, or in our case, the patient, better than anyone else. 
3. Reinvest for growth. Don’t cut costs to just hit a number; reallocate investments toward what drives measurable patient-centered outcomes. 

Transformation is uncomfortable. We lost people along the way — some I wanted to keep. But we gained an organization built for the future: patient-focused, agile, data-fluent, and growth-oriented. 

When it comes to AI, what’s your perspective on its real potential within marketing? 

DB: AI is a promising tool, not a strategy. I expect that the real AI-driven value in healthcare will come from clinical and operational applications like diagnostics, imaging, ambient listening to aid in documentation, or operating room optimization, and less from marketing automation. 

Within Brand Growth, AI will absolutely streamline workforce effectiveness and efficiency and enable us to focus on upside opportunities that might currently be under-resourced.  

Our priority is still patient-focused life-saving or improving AI before marketing AI. We’ll automate where it makes sense, but not at the expense of authenticity, creativity or empathy. Brand Growth still needs a human heartbeat, especially in healthcare! 

Finally, as we look toward 2026, what’s top of mind for you as a CMO? 

Bergsma: Three things. 

First, sustaining growth responsibly, ensuring patient demand aligns with available capacity and that our efforts keep patient needs at the center of all we do. 

Second, continuing to integrate brand, demand, and experience into one team, one set of metrics, one North Star, driven by one Brand Growth Flywheel. 

And third, building future capabilities, remaining patient-centered, applying automation thoughtfully, elevating data literacy, empowering teams to think strategically and fostering a culture that embraces it all. 

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