Hoag Brand Experience

After leadership and physician turnover interrupted four years of growth, Hoag's Heart & Vascular Institute needed to rebuild visibility and confidence around its cardiac surgery program.

R&R Partners created the heart graphic used in out-of-home and paid media. I led the in-house extension across owned, environmental, and editorial touchpoints: directing the physician portrait strategy, reshaping the email journey around clearer paths to action, and guiding updates to the HVI landing page. The physician photography became the unifying visual across email, web, print publications, and the physical campus.

I adapted the agency’s campaign graphics for two physical experiences: the HVI Lounge at the Hoag Classic and a permanent wall installation at the entrance to the Heart & Vascular Institute in Newport Beach.

I led the experience and visual design for Hoag’s pCare smart-room system, working across clinical, development, and vendor teams to translate Epic data into three coordinated interfaces. Now installed in Irvine and designed to scale to additional inpatient rooms, the system gives patients, families, physicians, and nurses the right information at the point where they need it.

The challenge was not simply to surface more data, but to determine what each audience needed to know, when, and where. A digital whiteboard keeps the daily care experience visible; the main screen supports education, entertainment, dining, and room controls; and the staff-facing display surfaces essential safety information before someone enters.

A long, high-traffic corridor near the Newport Beach cafe had become little more than a notice board. I reframed it as editorial real estate: a place where the brand could recognize the people behind the care and remind employees, patients, and visitors what they were part of.

My proposal explored two scalable directions. Stories of Care turned Hoag for Life content into a rotating gallery of patients, clinicians, and breakthroughs. By the Numbers used enduring evidence of Hoag's scale and impact. The selected editorial direction was designed to refresh without rebuilding the system.

I created a modular editorial system where content did not need to be reinvented for every channel. It needed to be edited for the moment, then given a form that belonged in the environment.

Hoag Medical Group needed to attract new primary-care patients and reconnect with people who had fallen out of a regular care rhythm. The communication had to make access feel easy, local, and worth acting on.

I partnered with the email marketing team to establish a simpler growth strategy and creative system. Together, we reduced competing messages, tightened the hierarchy, and organized every communication around one clear next step.

I partnered with the web and development team on a proposed patient-journey optimization strategy presented to marketing leadership. The work reframed Hoag.org from a collection of individual pages into a connected path from need to care.

The recommendation centered on persistent appointment access, location-aware scheduling, condition-first navigation, and fewer steps between intent and care. Although proposed rather than implemented, it established a cross-functional roadmap for making Hoag.org a more effective digital front door while supporting patient access and organizational growth.