How DocNews and Digest Reinforce Each Other

What does it actually take to build a physician engagement strategy that drives results and not just impressions? Doximity Strategic Accounts Director, Krista Milburn, pulls back the curtain on how the strongest hospital marketing programs are built, optimized, and scaled.

From the questions she asks in every first meeting to how she thinks about DocNews and Digests working together, Krista offers a candid look at the strategy behind the tactics—and what your program could be doing more of.

Q: How would you describe what you actually do for your hospital partners beyond managing a campaign? What does it mean to be a Strategic Accounts Director?

A: It really is about being an extension of my clients’ teams. I’m focused on helping healthcare organizations connect the dots between their goals and effective strategies.

It’s a team effort to bring the best possible strategy to my clients – leveraging insights from our Editorial and Newsfeed teams to stay ahead of content trends, understanding the “how” and “why” from Operations and Development teams, collaborating across our client success team to see what’s resonating in different markets.

I also spend a LOT of time thinking about data…like a lot! My clients are managing a wide range of priorities, and Doximity is just one piece of the pie. So beyond the raw data, I focus on storytelling, connecting performance back to real impact, and giving clients something they can actually use.

When we’re doing it right, it doesn’t feel like a vendor relationship; it feels like one team working toward the same goals, solving problems together, and building something that has real impact on care.

Q: When you sit down with a hospital marketing leader for the first time, what are you trying to understand before you make any recommendations? What questions are you asking?

A: First, I’m not jumping straight into recommendations. I’m focused on understanding the full picture so anything we build is actually aligned and impactful.

I want to know what success truly looks like for them, and not just at a campaign level. At the organizational level: Are they trying to grow a specific service line? Shift perception in a competitive market? Drive higher-acuity referrals? Strengthen relationships with community physicians? And just as importantly, I want to understand how they define and measure success. Those nuances completely shape the strategy.

Q: Most of our partners are working toward one of two broad goals: growing patient acquisition or building brand awareness. How does that primary goal shape the way you think about building their program and the tactics you recommend?

A: This is a great question because that primary goal really shapes how I think about everything from strategy to execution.

For Brand Awareness, I’m thinking about consistent visibility and credibility across a wider-reaching physician audience. Here, it’s about shaping perception over time, ensuring the institution shows up consistently around key clinical priorities, and keeping them top-of-mind. Content typically focuses on clinical innovation, new studies that will impact how the audience treats their patients, advancements in the field, practical insights, clinical implications, and programmatic strengths.

If the goal is patient acquisition, I’m thinking much more about action and intent. How do we reach the right physicians at the right moment when they’re making referral decisions? Who do we need to reach to influence referrals or patient decisions? What content is going to influence that next step in care? The strategy often means tighter audience segmentation, broader content with messaging that clearly ties to outcomes, access, treatments, or differentiated expertise.

Q: DocNews is part of almost every Doximity program. How do you help partners think about it strategically rather than just tactically?

A: DocNews really is the foundation of most programs. It’s a strategic way to reach physicians while they’re actively engaging with clinical content, across a variety of formats. That allows us to meet physicians where they are and engage them based on how they prefer to consume content.

It’s also one of the most cost-effective ways to scale visibility. Hospitals can reach a highly relevant, targeted, and engaged audience without needing massive budgets, driving meaningful exposure.

Q: When a DocNews program is working well, what does that look like? And what signals tell you a partner is ready to think about adding more to their program?

A: When a DocNews program is working well, certain service lines, topics, or headline styles start to emerge as repeat drivers of engagement, which gives us a strong foundation to build on. Just as importantly, we see the audience alignment dial in; content is consistently reaching and resonating with the right specialties. Once we’ve established confidence in the strategy, we can build on that momentum and amplify it.

Q: When you first bring up Digests to a partner who's been running DocNews for a while, how do you introduce it? What's the distinction you want them to walk away with?

A: Digest is truly complementary to DocNews.

DocNews is where we can build consistency and scale reach. The lower price point allows us to show up more frequently and reach a broader audience. It’s the foundation of the program.

Digest, on the other hand, is about amplification, deeper engagement, and high-impact touchpoints. Yes, the impression lift is significant, but what really stands out is the quality of engagement, driven by a more curated, limited audience.

At a high level, I view DocNews as consistency and Digest as amplification. Together, they create a more powerful and well-rounded strategy, delivering extended reach and deeper engagement.

Q: Digests deliver significantly higher impressions than other channels—sometimes 300–500% more. How do you help partners understand what those numbers mean in the context of their goals, rather than just as a raw metric?

A: Digest provides more visibility with the right audience, resulting in greater opportunity to stay top-of-mind. We know that repeated, high-quality exposure drives action over time.

And the data supports that our Digest audience isn’t just passive reach, it’s active and quality engagement. For example, looking at one client’s engagement in a quarter, over 70% of their targeted audience viewed multiple headlines. And, out of those that clicked into the content, over 40% viewed more than one article. We see this pattern of physicians engaging and coming back for more. It’s sustained, meaningful interaction that reinforces your message, driving familiarity, trust, and action.

Q: The physician experience is different in a Digest than in the newsfeed. How do you describe that difference to our partners? What's the physician's mindset at each moment?

A: With DocNews, physicians are in a browsing mindset. They’re scrolling through the newsfeed, quickly scanning, and discovering content. Digest is more curated and intentional. Physicians receive Digest content based on their specialty and/or location, so the content is inherently aligned with their clinical interests. That creates a more focused, “lean-in” mindset.

Q: Exclusivity is a meaningful part of how Digests works. How does that factor into the strategic conversation, and how do partners respond to it?

A: You’re not one of many–you’re the only sponsored content among organic news. From a strategic standpoint, this opens up opportunities in competitive markets. For example, if there are key regions or specialties where a competitor is strong, Digest allows you to show up consistently in those spaces with clinically-relevant, curated content.

Q: When a partner is ready to add Digest, what do you suggest?

A: This is typically where our Relationship Managers lead, given their deep understanding of the partners’ market, their growth goals, and the larger competitive landscape. From the Client Success side, I'm layering in performance insights that can help us identify opportunities to expand: where engagement is strongest by specialty or region, where there are gaps in visibility, and where competitors may already have a presence. Together, we make sure we're placing clients in the right environments to win.

Q: When both channels are running well together, how can you tell? How do you measure success and report back?

A: When DocNews and Digest are working well together, you see a strong balance of reach, consistency, and engagement. More importantly, we’re seeing repeat interactions—physicians engaging with multiple pieces of content over time and staying connected.

Q: What's a pattern you see in programs that perform especially well when DocNews and Digests are running together? What are those teams doing differently?

A: The strongest programs treat DocNews and Digest as a connected system, not separate tactics. They commit to consistency while being intentional about how each channel plays a role. They’re also highly engaged partners: open to testing different content formats, refining messaging based on performance, and evolving targeting year over year. Most importantly, they act on insights using engagement data to optimize audiences, expand into new service lines, and maintain momentum. That combination of consistency, adaptability, and strategic alignment is what really sets them apart.

Q: For a hospital marketing leader reading this who has a solid DocNews program and hasn't yet explored Digests, what's the one thing you'd want them to walk away thinking about?

A: If your goal is to stay top-of-mind with the physicians who matter most, consistency and scale are key, and that’s exactly where Digest adds value. It’s not about replacing what’s already working, but about amplifying it, helping you reach more of your audience, more often, in a highly engaged environment. The real opportunity is in how the two work together to build a more complete, high-impact strategy over time.