Ashley Blacker

About me

I am a medical marketing and business development specialist who has had a significant career leading the marketing of some of Australia’s largest medical centre and general practice corporates, private hospital groups, research organisations and prominent Australian specialists.

My responsibilities have largely involved:

• New patient and GP referal marketing for specialists
• Patient marketing for the aged care sector
• Study participant marketing for research organisations trying to recruit to studies
• Opening new medical centres / clinics
• Healthcare business strategy for specialists
• GP recruitment marketing for rural and regional medical centres

From 2008 – 2018, I spent approximately half my time working for general practice companies and the other half with hospitals and specialists, as well as within the medical research and aged-care sectors. This provided an excellent foundation for understanding how the primary and tertiary sectors interact, the way to enhance GP and specialist referral networks, and the relevant patient trends in elective surgery.

I have been solely responsible for managing marketing budgets of up to $500,000 pa for various healthcare companies, which granted me licence to experiment on a broad range of marketing strategies and platforms to develop a precise understanding of what works to increase patient numbers and what doesn’t.

I started Medsolve in 2018 as I identified what I considered to be a gap in the market for a digital marketing agency that offered doctors access to marketing professionals who have actually worked within the industry at the highest levels, as opposed to mainly generic digital marketing agencies that have no healthcare sector employment experience or knowledge. The reality is, medical marketing is an advanced area of marketing, which relies heavily on sector-experience, medical terminology, a thorough understanding of private health insurance dynamics, what constitutes an elective procedure, the demographics of diseases, and the supply and demand of services in specific regions.