M. Kathleen Donald: Chief Marketing Officer of Laser Spine

M. Kathleen Donald is the new Chief Marketing Officer of Tampa, Florida-based Laser Spine Institute.

According to the company, “Donald brings an impressive mix of strategic marketing, digital media, thought leadership and advertising savvy to the role. Her natural ability to consume and process large amounts of complex information, and then visualize, implement and drive organizational innovation, are some of the many reasons she was chosen to serve on the executive leadership team.”

“Ms. Donald will work alongside Laser Spine Institute’s President and Chief Executive Officer, Roger Cary, to engineer the integrated marketing roadmap, further amplifying the organization’s strong commitment to providing the highest level of patient-centered care.”

Laser Spine’s newest senior executive holds a certification in applied strategic marketing planning from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and a bachelor’s degree in business studies from Wayne State University in Michigan. She has a certification in Japanese language studies from the University of Detroit.

Ms. Donald told OTW, “I worked in Europe for two and a half years; working across a lot of different kinds of cultures. While there, I dealt with overlapping organizational structures where different responsibilities, which would normally be inside one of organizational team, were distributed. Because of this, I needed to work to coalesce the team in order to deliver results for our clients.”

“I also held a top leadership role in Operations at Campbell Ewald where I was tasked with doing a major restructuring and introducing new processes. I also spent time working on the agency side in business development.”

“The first thing we want to be able to do is make sure we’re optimizing the investments we’re making in marketing. At the same time, we realize our brand is going through a transformation. And because we really want to help people with all sorts of spine and spine-related difficulties, we’re doing two things: offering conservative care to our patients and our prospective patients and building out a network of preferred providers to help deliver it.”

“At the same time, we’re continuing to do what we do best—offer life-changing, minimally invasive spinal surgery. In addition to that, we’re also offering conservative care to our patients right inside our state-of-the-art Ambulatory Surgery Centers with our Total Spine Care arm. So, whether it’s physical therapy or chiropractic care, injections, acupuncture, massage, we’re offering all forms of conservative care to help deal with pain and do so in a way that, like our procedures, is minimally invasive.”

“We’re also working within our local communities to help our patients connect with the quality care they need. For people who live within an hours’ drive of any of our facilities, we’re developing collaborative relationships with the physicians that surround our surgical centers.”

“By doing so, we can refer our patients to a local physical therapist who may be closer to their home than to our surgical centers. Offering this convenience gets them the relief they may need, especially if they don’t need surgery yet. It also gives their primary care physician another resource if they do need surgery—to refer them here to Laser Spine Institute. For those patients who reside outside a drivable distance of our facilities, we’re continuing to build our network of preferred providers.”