A Fresh Leadership Team at VMLY&R Health Aims to Eliminate Barriers in the Connection Between Patients and Healthcare Services
In the high-stakes world of healthcare marketing, the user experience design is not just an added bonus, but a crucial factor for ensuring effective communication of wellness solutions. This is according to Walt Geer, who is making a significant impact in this field.
Geer, the first Chief Experience Design Officer (CXDO) in healthcare marketing, is responsible for overseeing the holistic user experience across all touchpoints within a health system. His role is more specialized, focusing on the intersection of user-centered design, service innovation, and brand consistency.
The CXDO's responsibilities include ensuring that marketing campaigns, digital platforms, and service encounters align with patient and caregiver needs and expectations. This means orchestrating experiences that are empathetic, efficient, and trustworthy, beyond just promoting services.
Geer also oversees the integration of experience design into product launches, community outreach, and digital transformation. Unlike a traditional Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), who might be focused on brand and demand generation, the CXDO is accountable for making sure every patient interaction supports the brand promise and clinical outcomes.
Collaboration with cross-functional teams is another key aspect of the CXDO's role. Geer works closely with marketing, technology, clinical, and operations leaders to translate insights into actionable design improvements. He also champions patient and staff co-design, ensuring solutions are practical, accessible, and effective.
The importance of the CXDO role becomes even more evident when considering the potential consequences of missteps in healthcare marketing. Experience design leadership is especially critical in healthcare because missteps can have profound consequences—affecting trust, compliance, clinical outcomes, and even lives.
Reducing miscommunication, preventing brand-damaging mistakes, enhancing digital safety, driving continuous improvement, and aligning across silos are some of the ways the CXDO ensures error prevention. By embedding user research and rapid iteration into marketing and service development, the CXDO ensures that errors are caught early, and solutions are refined based on real feedback—not assumptions.
While Walt Geer does not work in the field of saving lives directly, his work in healthcare marketing indirectly impacts people's lives. His focus on user experience design is a strategic priority in healthcare marketing, as making a mistake can potentially put someone's life at risk.
Despite the high stakes, Geer is attempting to maintain a perspective and encourage professionals in healthcare marketing to take care of themselves. The ad industry often uses phrases like "PR not ER" and "We're not saving lives" to convince professionals to take a break. However, Geer's work in healthcare marketing demonstrates that even though lives may not be saved directly, they can certainly be improved indirectly.
- In line with his role as a Chief Experience Design Officer (CXDO), Geer focuses on the intersection of user-centered design, health-and-wellness, and fitness-and-exercise, ensuring that marketing campaigns and service encounters aim for empathy, efficiency, and trustworthiness, which promotes overall wellbeing.
- Recognizing the high demands and potential consequences of healthcare marketing, Geer advocates for workplace-wellness, urging professionals to prioritize self-care and understand their work, while indirectly saving lives through strategic user experience design in health-and-wellness, fitness-and-exercise, and science.
