Before COVID hit, the role of chief medical officer was confined mostly to hospital systems or health-oriented businesses. But once the pandemic put public health at the forefront of daily life, more companies began adding a resident doctor to their C-suite to implement health and safety guidelines, identify risks within their business, or even figure out ways to use their tools to support public health efforts in the larger community.
Former Salesforce CMO Dr. Ashwini Zenooz, who’s now the CEO of healthcare startup Commure, spent two years focused on the latter, spearheading Salesforce’s efforts to use its CRM software to help governments with emergency response management and vaccination programs through platforms called Work.com and Vaccine Cloud.
In this episode, Quartz CEO Zach Seward speaks with Zenooz about the new use case for CMOs—and their medical, not marketing expertise—and the growing intersection between public health and the private sector. She believes their cooperation will be advantageous in the future, because without centralized data, governments essentially have to “reinvent the wheel” each time there’s a natural disaster or health crisis.
CRM technology is one way to streamline those metrics, but in general, she says, if health organizations can stop siloing information and instead use technology to share it, governments will be better positioned to understand what’s happening on the ground during a crisis—and to prepare for what might come next.