Kate Merz
Senior Vice President, Content & Creative
PatientPoint
Enriching Patient Education
As the most awarded company for the past five years at the National Health Information Awards, PatientPoint is doing something right. What’s “right” is Kate Merz, Senior Vice President of Content and Creative, and her exceptional leadership of her team. Kate’s passion for patient education is unparalleled in the industry, and the accolades she and PatientPoint receive prove it.
PatientPoint works with many groups—from pharmaceutical sponsors to healthcare providers across care settings to local healthcare organizations—but when it comes to the content Kate and her team produces, Kate’s primary focus has always been developing education that enriches the patient experience across all points of care and ultimately enables patients to live healthier lives.
Specifically, Kate was instrumental in the launch of PatientPoint Interact, an interactive digital touchscreen for exam rooms—the first product of its kind for the point-of-care industry—featuring multimedia health education content and 3D anatomical models to aid patient-physician discussions. Based on Kate’s leading effort, PatientPoint Interact—now in six distinct specialties—provides condition-specific education at the fingertips of patients and providers during the exam room visit and beyond (physicians are able to email content directly to patients), enriching the patient/provider dialogue and powering better patient understanding and adherence.
More recently, Kate led the creative marketing execution for the October 2016 launch of PatientPoint 360°, a physician-facing app that provides an enhanced mobile experience of two successful PatientPoint products, including Interact as well as Access (a physician medical news program). The app enables physicians to provide valuable resources to patients while staying on top of clinical news and industry trends to improve their patient care.
Even more notable than the awards Kate and PatientPoint have won is the positive feedback from patients and providers that the company regularly receives. For example, one patient wrote about how she learned to spot signs of a stroke from PatientPoint waiting room program content—and later recognized the same symptoms in her husband. Meanwhile, multiple providers say PatientPoint and Kate’s content is helping their patients to lead healthier lives and encouraging them to take more active roles in their health. That in itself keeps Kate passionate about her work.
