The CMO’s New Mandate: Orchestrating the Patient Journey in Healthcare

Healthcare marketing has changed. The old playbook (awareness campaigns, brand positioning, maybe some patient education materials) doesn’t cut it anymore. Across health systems, one pattern keeps showing up: Top-level marketing functions are being asked to do something fundamentally different: own the entire patient journey.

This shift isn’t just about expanding responsibilities. It reflects a deeper transformation in how healthcare organizations think about patient engagement. When patients can compare providers online, read reviews, book appointments through apps, and manage their care digitally, the line between “marketing” and “patient experience” quickly fades away.

Why CMOs Are Taking the Lead

There’s a practical reason healthcare organizations are turning to their marketing leaders for this. CMOs already sit at the intersection of strategy, operations, and technology. They understand data. They know how to map customer journeys (even when they’re called “patient journeys”). And crucially, they’re used to thinking across the entire organization rather than within a single department.

In the traditional patient journey model, marketing handled the front end (getting patients in the door) and operations took over from there. But patients never experience healthcare in neatly separated departments. They move in fits and starts, jumping between screens, people, and moments that all need to feel connected. A confusing billing process can undo months of brand-building work. A clunky appointment scheduling system becomes a marketing problem, whether marketing “owns” it or not.

So healthcare systems are increasingly asking: who should be responsible for the complete experience? The answer, more often than not, is the CMO.

What Patient Journey Orchestration Actually Means

Let’s be specific about what we’re talking about here. Patient journey orchestration means designing and managing every touchpoint a patient has with your organization. That includes the obvious marketing moments (ads, website visits, social media). But it also includes scheduling, pre-visit communications, the check-in process, post-visit follow-up, billing communications, and ongoing care management.

The goal is consistency and continuity. A patient shouldn’t feel like they’re dealing with five different organizations depending on which department they’re interacting with. The experience should feel coherent. And ideally, it should feel personalized to their specific needs and situation.

This requires a few capabilities that haven’t traditionally lived in the marketing department. You need visibility into clinical workflows, not to redesign care but to understand how communication, access, and follow‑through function in real time. You need access to (and the ability to act on) anonymized clinical data so you can move on patterns like care gaps, service‑line demand, and population‑level trends while staying compliant with privacy regulations. And you need tight coordination with IT, operations, clinical leadership, and patient services. Each of those departments oversees a piece of the experience that patients interpret as one continuous journey.

In other words, you need organizational authority that goes well beyond traditional marketing scope.

The Technology Challenge

Easy right? Here’s where it actually gets complicated. Orchestrating patient journeys at scale requires technology that can keep up with the way patients move through the system. That means customer data platforms that can integrate cleanly with electronic health records, marketing automation tools that can trigger based on clinical events (e.g., MyChart‑based reminders or Journey Builder workflows that adapt as appointment statuses change), and analytics capabilities that reveal what is really happening across online and offline touchpoints (e.g., dashboards that combine web behavior with call‑center or EHR data).

Healthcare organizations have invested heavily in their EHR systems, less so in the patient-facing technology stack. There’s often a gap (sometimes a chasm) between what the marketing team wants to do and what the technology maturity can truly support. CMOs taking on journey orchestration responsibilities frequently find themselves becoming de facto technology leaders, advocating for platforms and integrations that enable better patient engagement.

However, the challenge isn’t just buying the right tools. It’s getting them to work together. Ensuring data flows between systems appropriately, and training staff across multiple departments to use them effectively, is easier said than done. The tech exists. The full integration and team alignment? Not so much. Or not yet, in most places.

Measuring What Matters

Traditional marketing metrics (impressions, clicks, conversions) still matter, but they’re not enough when you’re responsible for the full patient journey.

This creates some interesting questions about accountability. If a patient has a poor experience during their visit, is that a marketing failure? If patients aren’t following through with recommended follow-up care, should the CMO be held responsible? The answers to these questions aren’t always clear-cut, but they’re increasingly part of the conversation.

The most sophisticated healthcare marketing organizations are starting to measure their marketing success against patient health outcomes: medication adherence rates, appointment follow-through, post-discharge follow-up completion, readmission prevention. The stakes here are different from typical consumer marketing. Communication gaps don’t just hurt conversion rates, they can hurt patients. It’s messier and harder to measure than impressions or click-through rates, but it’s what matters: whether your marketing and communication efforts are helping patients get and stay healthy.

The Organizational Politics

This is where things get uncomfortable. Asking a CMO to orchestrate the patient journey means asking them to have influence over areas that traditionally belong to other executives. The COO owns operations. The CIO owns technology. The Chief Patient Experience Officer (if there is one) owns patient experience, at least on paper.

Which raises an obvious question: isn’t overseeing the patient journey already someone’s job? The answer is, no. In practice, patient experience roles are usually focused on what happens once care is underway. These personnel own service standards, satisfaction scores, service recovery, and in‑facility interactions.

That gap is where journey orchestration lives. Structurally, the CMO is often the only executive already familiar with every instrument in the ensemble. Marketing owns the digital front door, brand trust before care begins, patient communication platforms, and the data that connects awareness, access, and follow‑through. CMOs are typically accustomed to aligning teams that shape the experience even when they do not report to them. 

When departments stay siloed, the result is a lot of roundabout conversations and very little real movement. The experience stays fragmented, not because the technology fails but because leaders haven’t bridged the gaps in collaboration between personnel. The tension that necessarily takes place in that process is a risk worth taking on.

Looking Ahead

Healthcare organizations are still figuring out what this evolution means structurally. Some are expanding the CMO role. Others are creating new C-suite positions focused on patient experience or digital transformation. There’s no single right answer, and we’ll probably see continued experimentation.

What’s clear is that someone needs to own the patient journey in a holistic way. The fragmented approach (where marketing, operations, IT, and clinical departments each optimize their piece without better integration) produces fragmented experiences. Patients deserve better. And increasingly, they’re choosing providers who deliver better.

Whether or not the CMO owns it, someone must connect every patient touchpoint into one coherent experience. The organizations that figure that out first will win, and their patients will feel the difference.