About
An empowered consumer is a healthier consumer.Merit Create is a consumer experience agency helping health plans and healthcare organizations work with their consumers and stakeholders to improve outcomes.
We were founded by two leaders who believe first and foremost in meeting people where they are. Drawing on decades of marketing experience, our goal is to make healthcare more accessible, more equitable, and generally easier for consumers to understand and navigate.
By focusing on consumer experience and engagement, we help organizations get more intimately connected to their consumers and stakeholders and leverage this connection to drive desired health outcomes.
Ashley Conger
Chief Executive Officer
Ashley has spent more than two decades working with organizations to define and elevate their brand, navigate disruption and drive consumer engagement and loyalty. She specializes in developing and scaling programs for complex, heavily regulated industries that answer to multiple stakeholders. Ashley leads with empathy and continues to achieve success by creating meaningful, actionable experiences that combine the best in digital innovation with grassroots community outreach.
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As the Chief Communications & Marketing Officer for Cardinal Innovations Healthcare, Ashley led communications, engagement, marketing and public affairs strategy. She spearheaded digital transformation across the organization and created multiple programs to improve health equity and outcomes. Ashley built an award-winning content and outreach strategy that effectively met members and providers where they were and unilaterally improved engagement and customer satisfaction.
Prior to her role at Cardinal Innovations, Ashley led a global Marketing Communications team for a multi-billion dollar specialty manufacturing company. While there, she improved share of voice and increased market share for key business segments through messaging and content strategy, successfully launched multiple new products, and rolled out a five-year strategic plan to over 5000 employees in 63 locations around the world. Ashley was also previously the Director of Marketing and Communications for Lime Energy, a national, publicly traded energy efficiency firm where she led the development and implementation of a national customer engagement and satisfaction platform.
She has provided coaching, mentoring, and leadership development consulting through the Behavioral Healthcare Leadership Academy, Wingspan Performance and E4 Carolinas. Ashley is a proud mama, Demon Deacon, and long-term resident of the Lake Norman area.
Kristen Wilson
Chief Problem Solver
Kristen is a digital and community marketing strategist with over a decade of experience in marketing technology, user experience, and marketing strategy. She is passionate about helping people and believes every person has the right to the care and resources needed to best manage their health or to find resources in their community. She helps clinical, financial, regulatory, marketing, and technology teams in managed care organizations improve member experience to drive measurable health outcomes.
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As the Director of Marketing for Cardinal Innovations Healthcare, a specialty health plan responsible for over half a million members, she led the strategy and execution of omnichannel marketing. Kristen’s focus on user experience and engagement resulted in the launch of a mental health screening program, social determinants of health resource tool, and a nearly 100% increase in engagement across digital platforms. She built a business partner model to ensure a cross-functional approach to all member-facing programs and led efforts to integrate CRM with community, member, and network engagement.
Prior to joining Cardinal, Kristen spent five years in the medical device technology space working with technology to improve patient outcomes and the experience between patients and their caregivers. As the Director of Marketing for Monarch Medical Technologies, she led efforts to improve the patient outcomes of inpatient glucose management. She spearheaded a new web and content strategy along with lead generation, customer retention, and Net Promoter Score® (NPS) programs that produced an average NPS of 81 along with nearly doubling sales leads and web traffic in under a year.
Before Monarch, Kristen was the Marketing Communications Manager at Capsule Tech, a market leader in healthcare data integration. Capsule’s offering is designed to put the patient at the center of all decisions and improve collaboration between care teams while simplifying clinical workflows. Simply, its technology gives caregivers more time with patients and more information to make informed decisions. Kristen successfully launched three products while introducing marketing automation and increasing lead generation through a revamped content distribution strategy.
Kristen lives in the Lake Norman area of North Carolina with her spouse, young child, and furbaby. Her family is active participants in their community and feels driven to use the opportunities they have received in life to give back to the community they live and work in.
what we do
empowerment
Most organizations deploy a top-down approach to program design, driven predominantly by clinicians, data analysts, actuaries, and regulators. Solutions are developed and incubated internally, informed by brilliant and experienced minds who are NOT the end consumer. Rather than spending millions of dollars and human hours on designing programs that underwhelm and underperform, we help organizations meaningfully incorporate consumer voice into their programs so that they perform from the outset.
engagement
Consumers have natural relationships with their health care providers because providers are the front line when trying to stay well or treat disease. But with health plans, you are a background player at best or a benefits battleground at worst. For both health plans and healthcare organizations, creating content and programs that meet people where they are drives healthy outcomes that are critical to objectives – improved quality scores, high accreditation, cost management, disease prevention, and brand of choice.
equity
Addressing health equity starts with a simple question: Does what we are working on improve health equity? If the answer is no, we stop and rework until the answer is yes. We challenge our clients to take a hard and holistic look at their programs and content to help redesign for accessibility and equity. We also support teams and leaders who want to evolve their organizational culture and internal processes to a person-centered approach.