Senior marketing and operations leadership for independent physician groups, multi-specialty practices, ambulatory surgery centers, and community hospitals — built from the inside of healthcare, not the outside looking in.
Physician groups and hospitals face a uniquely difficult marketing environment — one where clinical excellence alone no longer guarantees growth, and where the competitive landscape is shifting faster than most practices can respond. The organizations that thrive are the ones that treat growth as a discipline, not an afterthought.
Independent practices are competing for patients and physicians against well-funded health systems with large marketing budgets, national brand recognition, and aggressive acquisition strategies. Staying independent — and winning — requires a deliberate marketing and operational response.
Patients now research physicians and practices online before they call — reading reviews, comparing websites, and searching for specialists. A practice that's invisible digitally is losing new patients before the first interaction. Word-of-mouth alone is no longer sufficient for sustainable growth.
Attracting top physicians and advanced practice providers requires the same discipline as attracting patients — a compelling employer brand, a clear value proposition, and a recruitment marketing strategy that reaches candidates where they are. Most practices have no formal approach.
Adding a new service line — a surgical program, an imaging suite, an ancillary service — is a significant capital investment that requires a commercial strategy, not just a press release. Most practices launch new services and hope the referral network figures it out.
Growth is not just a marketing problem — it's an operations problem. Practices that grow their patient volume without fixing their revenue cycle, scheduling efficiency, and care coordination workflows often find that more volume creates more losses, not more margin.
In most physician groups, marketing responsibility falls to whoever has time — an office manager, a physician partner, or a part-time coordinator. Without senior leadership owning the function, marketing stays reactive, inconsistent, and disconnected from the organization's growth goals.
BentonNewell provides the senior marketing and operations leadership that physician groups and hospitals need to grow — without the cost of adding a full-time C-suite executive. Dana Newell has led marketing and commercial strategy inside healthcare organizations, from single-specialty physician groups through multi-site health systems.
This is not a healthcare marketing agency applying a generic playbook. It's senior leadership that understands the clinical culture of your organization, the regulatory constraints on your communications, and the competitive dynamics of your specific market.
Because BentonNewell provides both CMO and COO services, we can address growth holistically — fixing the marketing and the operations simultaneously, which is almost always what's required.
Start the ConversationBentonNewell works best with physician organizations that recognize growth requires strategy — not just more staff, more volume, or more advertising — and are ready to treat marketing and operations as leadership functions, not administrative tasks.
Single and multi-specialty practices with 5 or more physicians navigating growth, consolidation pressure, or new service line expansion
Community hospitals, critical access hospitals, and specialty hospitals competing with larger health systems for patients and physicians
ASCs growing case volume, adding service lines, recruiting surgeons, or establishing referral networks with regional physician groups
Healthcare organizations managing growth across multiple locations that need consistent brand strategy and operational infrastructure to scale
Dana Newell has led marketing and commercial operations inside physician groups and multi-site healthcare organizations — including market entry strategy for physician organizations, multi-site operations oversight, revenue cycle management, and P&L accountability across portfolios reaching $200M in annual revenue.
That inside experience is the difference. Understanding how a physician group partnership makes decisions, how clinical culture shapes what marketing can and can't do, how revenue cycle problems masquerade as marketing problems — these are not things you learn from the outside. They require having been in the room.
BentonNewell provides both fractional CMO and fractional COO services — which means we can address the full growth equation for physician organizations, not just the marketing side.
Read the FAQ: Why hire a fractional CMO? →P&L responsibility across multi-site healthcare portfolios
Years of healthcare marketing and operations leadership
CMO and COO functions — strategy and operations in one engagement
No learning curve on healthcare culture, compliance, or clinical dynamics
A fractional CMO for a medical practice owns patient acquisition, service line marketing, physician recruitment marketing, and competitive positioning — functions that typically have no dedicated senior owner in an independent physician group. This includes local SEO and reputation management, referral network development, service line launch strategy, and aligning marketing with the practice's operational capacity to see new patients.
An agency executes campaigns you direct. A fractional CMO sets the direction, owns the outcome, and can also address the operational constraints — scheduling, revenue cycle, front-office follow-through — that often limit whether marketing investment converts into collected revenue. Many practices use a fractional CMO to manage their agency relationships.
Yes. Physician and advanced practice provider recruitment is fundamentally a marketing problem: it requires an employer brand, a clear value proposition, targeted outreach to candidates, and a career presence that competes with health systems. Most independent practices have no formal recruitment marketing approach, which is a significant disadvantage in a competitive hiring market.
Independent physician groups with roughly five or more providers, multi-specialty practices, ambulatory surgery centers, and community hospitals see the most value. These organizations are large enough to need senior marketing and operations leadership but generally too small to justify a full-time chief marketing officer or chief operating officer.
Most physician groups know something isn't working — they just don't have senior leadership with the time or bandwidth to figure out what. That's what a discovery call is for.
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