Ashley Blacker

About Me

Ashley Blacker is a medical marketing and business development professional with significant experience in doctor practice development, having worked directly with more than 300+ Australian surgeons, physicians, private hospitals, diagnostic service providers and medical centres.

Ashley and his team specialise in AHPRA and TGA compliant patient advertising and communications, digital patient marketing (strategy and technical implementation) and medical website design and development that is vocation-appropriate, patient-centric, uniquely designed, SEO compliant, and AI visible. Many of Medsolve’s clients enjoy sitting in the #1 position in Google, procuring untold numbers of patients.

Ashley founded Medsolve in 2018 after a 10+ year career in the healthcare sector, and since then, Medsolve has grown to be the largest full-service medical marketing agency in Australia. We have built websites for more than 100+ Australian doctors, and securely host and manage over 120+ medical websites. We also perform digital patient marketing for more than 80+ clients (predominantly doctors) around Australia, evidencing the trust doctors place in us to manage their online reputation and deliver new patient growth.

Qualifications & Certifications

• MBA (Finance & Business Law) (UTS), Distinction
• Bachelor of Communications (Advertising)
• Diploma of Marketing Communications
• Google Certifications: Google Ads, Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager
• Meta Certifications: Facebook BluePrint
• RACGP Certified: GP CPD Point Education Provider
• Udemy Cinematography Course

Career Experience

From 2008-2018, Ashley worked in operations, marketing and business development roles within the private and public healthcare sector. This included general practice, medical research, private and public hospitals and the aged care sectors. He gained invaluable industry experience and understanding that is essential in this field, given medical marketing is so heavily regulated by AHPRA and the TGA, and quite specific in terms of where and what patients demand services.

Having worked across both the primary and tertiary healthcare sectors was an excellent foundation for understanding the underlying referral networks for specialists and ancillary medical services, and the relevant patient trends in elective surgery.

Previous Employers:

• Group Homes Australia (dementia / high-care / palliative care corporate)
• Healthe Care Australia (3rd largest private hospital corporate in Australia: surgical / medical / rehab / mental health hospitals)
• Evolution Healthcare (private hospital corporate: surgical / radiology / medical / rehab)
• The Woolcock Institute of Medical Research (sleep and respiratory medicine research and multidisciplinary specialist clinic)
• St Vincent Public Hospital Sydney (Manager of Senior Medical Officers)
• Eastbrooke Medical Centres (general practice corporate)
• Ochre Health Medical Centre (rural general practice / rural ED hospital manager)
• Software AG / WebMethods (global software company)

Ashley has been solely responsible for managing medical marketing budgets of up to $500,000 pa for various healthcare companies, which granted him licence to experiment on a range of marketing strategies and platforms to develop a deep understanding of what works to increase patient numbers, and what doesn’t. Many doctors spend a lot of monthly, often monthly, on strategies and platforms that simply don’t work.

Areas of Expertise:

• New patient marketing and GP referral development for specialists / private hospitals
• New resident marketing for the aged care sector
• Study participant marketing for research organisations
• Opening new medical centres / clinics / service development
• Radiology and medical imaging marketing
• Business strategy for specialists and healthcare corporates
• GP recruitment for rural and regional medical centres
• AHPRA-compliant digital patient marketing

About Medsolve

Ashley founded Medsolve in 2018 due to many failed attempts using other medical marketing agencies and healthcare marketing services. It became apparent that there was a significant gap in the market for a digital medical marketing agency that was truly Australian-based and offered doctors access to industry professionals who have actually worked within the industry at the highest level, as opposed to mainly generic digital marketing agencies that tend to work with plumbers, electricians and furniture removalists, or worse, fake medical marketing agencies that were increasingly popping up that also offer staff with no healthcare sector employment experience or knowledge when scrutinised closely.

The reality is, medical marketing is an advanced, sub-specialised area of marketing, which relies heavily on sector-experience, medical terminology, medical sciences, a thorough understanding of private health insurance dynamics, what constitutes an elective procedure, the demographics of diseases, and the supply and demand of competing services in specific regions. In addition, an in-depth understanding of AHPRA’s guidelines is mandatory, given your reputation and registration is at risk (as well as significant fines potentially being imposed when things go bad). This is hard enough for a doctor to learn, let alone a generic marketing agency!

Career Achievements

• 10+ years of full-time, in-house medical marketing and business development experience.
• 2-year full-time MBA at UTS in Sydney, graduating with a distinction average in the top 1% of graduates.
• One of the first in Australia to pioneer doctor-to-patient digital marketing, proving a small group of savvy doctors who trusted Ashley’s advice with an incredible financial outcome and competitive advantage.
• Having worked with over 300+ Australian doctors with their marketing and business development activities.
• Medsolve achieving Partner Agency accreditation status with Google, Facebook and Microsoft.

Outside of Work

Outside of work, Ashley enjoys spending time with his wife and kids, playing the drums, the outdoors, mountain bike riding, cooking (prawn linguine), mowing the lawn, philosophy (Arthur Schopenhauer), astronomy, and cosmology. He is an amateur astronomer but mainly sticks within our solar system.