What a Physician Told Me That Changed How I Think About Our Messaging

A few weeks ago I wrote about what it's really like to market in primary care - the trust deficit, the fatigue, the clinician who's deleted three emails that looked exactly like ours before 8:30am. Quite a few people reached out to commiserate, which was either validating or alarming, I'm still not sure which.

That post was the diagnosis. This one is what I did next.

Since writing it, I've been more deliberate about going straight to the source - having real conversations with physicians, not to pitch them, but to understand what actually cuts through. One of the most useful was with Jared Dashvesky, a practicing PCP and founder of Healthcare Huddle, a newsletter and community at the intersection of medicine and health tech. I basically asked him to tell me what makes a company worth paying attention to, and to not be polite about it.

The Answer I Didn't Expect

He said: "The less flashy, the better."

Not a ringing endorsement of most health tech marketing, including, if I'm being honest, some of ours. His point was that physicians' biggest frustrations aren't the dramatic ones. They're the slow bleed of small, daily frictions that nobody wants to put in a press release. Pajama charting. Routine labs stacking up. Ordering Tylenol in an inpatient setting - which, Jared informed me, takes approximately 17 clicks. Seventeen clicks for Tylenol. Amazon has spoiled us all, but healthcare apparently missed that memo.

He was literally on vacation when we spoke, and was still catching up on patient messages. That image stayed with me. Because that's the actual problem we're solving for. Not "transforming care delivery."  

The Thing About Clicks

Here's what I keep coming back to from that conversation. When I asked Jared what messaging would genuinely stop him in his tracks, he brought up something I hadn't centered enough: the number of clicks.

It sounds almost too small to matter, but that's precisely the point. A physician spends hours a day inside an EHR. Every unnecessary click is a small tax, and those taxes compound fast. Jared put it simply: if a tool could cut his clicks by 50%, he'd feel it immediately, and it would mean something. Not because it's glamorous, but because he lives in that interface. It's the difference between a tool that technically saves time and one that actually changes how a workday feels.

That reframe hit me hard from a marketing perspective. We have real numbers at Droxi- 5+ hours back per provider per week, 38% of routine labs auto-processed, 98% of refill requests closed within 24 hours. Those are good numbers and they're real. But "save five hours a week" and "stop charting on vacation" and "cut your clicks in half" are all pointing at the same truth from very different angles, and some of those angles land a lot harder than others.

Droxi works natively inside your EHR, so there's no new system to learn, no separate login, no implementation project that requires a committee. It auto-closes routine labs, consolidates duplicate refill requests into a single clean decision, and distills lengthy consult notes into the three things that actually matter. Physicians still make every clinical call. The administrative noise just stops.

What I'm Taking Into Our Messaging

I'm not reinventing our positioning. I'm adjusting the altitude. Instead of leading with what the technology does, I want to lead with what Monday morning feels like when it's working. Not "AI-powered inbox management" but the version of this job where you actually leave on time.

Jared was generous with his honesty, and the core of what he said was something I already believed but hadn't fully acted on: physicians have finely tuned radar for hype, and the way to get past it isn't to be louder or bolder. It's to be specific. To name the boring thing you're actually fixing, and to resist the temptation to dress it up as something more exciting than it is.

The inbox is not a sexy problem. It's just the one that's stealing evenings, weekends, and eventually the enthusiasm of people who spent a decade training to do something they love. That seems like enough reason to take it seriously, and to talk about it plainly.

Ofira Engelberg leads marketing at Droxi. Droxi's AI processes the clinical inbox directly in your EHR, handling routine labs, refill requests, and documents so providers can focus on patients.