Carevide

Chris Gage

Patient Experience Advocate

Chris Gage is the director of Marketing and Community Engagement at Carevide, a federally qualified health center serving northeast Texas. With a versatile background spanning graphic design, copywriting, brand development, and web strategy, Chris brings a multidisciplinary approach to healthcare marketing. He is currently pursuing his master's in clinical mental health counseling from East Texas A&M University. Chris merges behavioral science and clinical empathy with today’s marketing strategies to create empathetic, human-centered healthcare marketing that aims to build authentic community and user trust.

Strategy Shaped by Listening

It starts by letting go of the instinct to just broadcast what we think sounds good. In counseling, the foundation of any therapeutic relationship is active listening. I apply that principle to marketing. It’s easy to take our internal assumptions, throw them up against the wall like spaghetti, and see what sticks. But genuine relationships require us to step outside our organizational lens and actively listen to our community partners, as well as current and prospective patients. We have to ask: What does good health mean to you? What does it mean for you to feel seen, understood, and cared for? Then, we have to let those answers shape our messaging and dictate our strategy. When we shift from shoving strategic messaging down people's throats to responding to their articulated needs, we build an authenticity that turns community partners into brand ambassadors.

“We build trust by bridging clinical empathy and customer service together so that we can better relate to our audience's experiences, and then we work to achieve a user experience that matches our brand promise.”

Leading Through Listening and Empowerment

The leadership lesson that most encompasses my approach is Jessica Campbell’s three Ls: listen, lift, and love. When marketing to large audiences, it's easy to forget that we are dealing with individual people, and when we lose sight of that, we lose touch with them. As a leader, I use a counseling approach—specifically, open, two-way communication—to stay grounded. Instead of asking closed-ended questions, I ask open-ended questions that encourage others to share their actual experiences and expertise. That process creates an environment of safety where folks feel empowered to "fail forward." We stop looking for perfection before launching, and instead embrace iterating, prototyping, finding the flaws, and refining for better solutions. I've learned that you build your brand from the inside out. By taking the time to lift others up and letting their expertise shine through, we create a collaborative hive mind capable of delivering the best comprehensive approach for reaching external audiences.

Keeping Human Connection at the Center

Ironically, one of our biggest challenges is the array of digital tools and workflows that empower us to reach massive audiences. We have so many technological channels at our disposal, but all of them place a screen—or an algorithm—between the people we serve and us. In clinical counseling, we deliberately remove the table between the therapist and the client because we don't want any physical or psychological barriers; we want them to know we are walking with them through their struggles, fears, and hopes. In healthcare marketing, the challenge is figuring out how to keep that open, human-to-human connection while still leveraging tech stacks to broadcast our message at large. At the end of the day, the communities we serve are comprised of individuals who need our services to better their lives. We can't afford to lose sight of the human being beyond our computer.

Building Trust through Authentic Experiences

We build trust by anchoring our strategy in the fact that technology changes rapidly, but human psychology doesn't. Tools and tech stacks will constantly evolve, but people still have the same base needs, desires, and universal struggles. We foster trust by ensuring that our external messaging perfectly aligns with the actual user experience. A core concept in counseling is recognizing incongruent narratives and reframing them. If our marketing tells a story of compassionate, accessible care, but the patient’s actual experience when they walk through the doors is cold and clunky, we lose credibility as a provider. We build trust by bridging clinical empathy and customer service together so that we can better relate to our audience's experiences, and then work to achieve a user experience that matches our brand promise.

Turning Experience into Meaningful Impact

Embrace all of your diverse experiences, because everything you do is building and positioning you for opportunities you can't even imagine right now. My career path looks unconventional—spanning newspaper production, graphic design, sales, marketing and communications, various parttime gigs, and now, pursuing a master's in clinical mental health counseling—but every one of those experiences has uniquely qualified me to meet the challenges I face today. Beyond that, I would advise marketing professionals to focus on the ripple effect of their work. When we adopt a counseling mindset in healthcare marketing, we begin to understand the profound impact of helping just one person shift their mindset toward living well. That individual person goes home and supports their family better, and that family goes out and contributes to the community better, and it keeps rippling out from there. Finally, as you navigate your career, trust in your wings, not the branch that's holding you up. The branches will inevitably break, but if you embrace your ability to fly, you will find the courage to take flight and land where you truly fit and make a lasting impact.