Connecting the dots to find shared purpose in healthcare with Laila Waggoner

Laila Waggoner has a job title she gave herself: Chief Dot Connector. It’s a little playful, but it’s also a precise description of what she actually does. As founder of Strategy for Hire, Laila works at the intersection of health systems and the agencies and solutions providers who serve them, helping each side understand the other a little better, collaborate a little more intentionally, and ultimately deliver more value to the people they’re trying to reach.

It’s a role she’s uniquely built for. After four decades of moving between agency life and client-side leadership — including managing marketing across four market areas and 15 acute care facilities inside a health system — Laila has seen healthcare marketing from almost every angle. What she brings now isn’t just experience. It’s the ability to recognize patterns across those perspectives and find where the connections should be.

That instinct for connection is at the heart of this episode.

Laila and host Lauren Minors dig into what makes partnerships actually work: inside health systems, between agencies, and across the broader healthcare marketing ecosystem. It’s not chemistry or chemistry alone. It’s shared purpose. When everyone in a collaboration puts the same thing at the center — whether that’s the patient, the client, or the goal — Laila says something almost magical happens. The work gets better. The relationships get easier. And the outcomes start to follow.

They also talk about the evolution of healthcare as an industry — how systems weren’t built to function as systems, how the pace of specialization is forcing agencies and vendors to get honest about what they’re genuinely excellent at, and why the generalist era of agency life may be behind us.

Laila is also a long-standing SHSMD member and now serves on the organization’s National Advisory Board, co-chairing the Executive Strategies Task Force and sitting on the Education and Editorial Advisory Board. She and Lauren make a compelling case for why industry organizations — SHSMD, HMPS, HCIC, and others — are an underutilized resource for healthcare marketers at every career stage.

It’s a conversation about strategy, yes — but at its core, it’s really about remembering who’s on the other end of all that strategy. The person clicking an ad, scheduling a scan, navigating a scary diagnosis. Laila’s answer to Lauren’s signature final question — if you could change one thing in healthcare for the better — is one of the most grounded and human answers we’ve heard yet.