Rajan Mohan does not describe Ascension Health as a typical business. He frames it as a mission grounded in faith, history and care, even as it operates at enormous scale. Ascension is one of the largest nonprofit Catholic health systems in the United States, spanning 15 states and Washington, D.C., with 91 wholly owned hospitals and more than $25 billion in annual revenue. Mohan is the system’s Chief Marketing and Digital Experience Officer, a role he has held for nearly two years and part of a broader four-year tenure at the organization.
In prior roles at Marriott International and Qatar Airways, Mohan built a career around loyalty, engagement and digital experience in industries where customers choose among many comparable options. In healthcare, the stakes and the dynamics are different. Still, he brings a hospitality and brand lens to a sector where consumers often feel disoriented, anxious and left to stitch together complex journeys on their own.
A mission with deep roots and a modern masterbrand
Mohan offers an unusual way to understand Ascension’s identity. “If you think about Ascension, we can either be 2000 years old or 25 years old, and sometimes even 10 years old,” he said. The 2000 years referenced the founding of the Catholic Church itself. The 25 years reflected Ascension’s formation as a holding company that later became an operating company. The 10 to 15 years referred to the more recent emergence of Ascension as a masterbrand across many local ministries.
He underscores that the language inside Ascension reflects its purpose. Leaders refer to ministries, not markets. The mission, he explained, is “to serve those who need health and well-being with special attention to those who are poor and vulnerable.” That ethos shapes how the organization sees itself and what it prioritizes, even as it manages a massive workforce of roughly 100,000 associates, several thousand employed physicians and tens of thousands of nurses.
The faith-based context also shapes Mohan’s leadership experience in an unexpected way. He noted that he practices Hinduism and had previously worked in secular environments where identity cues were often muted. “[At Ascension], you can bring your whole self,” he emphasized. “You don’t need to park a portion of yourself at the door.” He describes how that inclusiveness makes the mission feel lived rather than merely stated and how it influences his view of brand as something inherited and expressed, not invented from scratch.
Unifying marketing and digital around a single journey
Mohan joined Ascension as Chief Digital Officer and later added the marketing remit, a combination he described as both logical and overdue. In many organizations, he noted, there is tension between marketing, digital and IT. Consumers, however, experience none of those boundaries. “The consumers don’t see the difference,” he underscored, describing a continuous path from awareness through booking to care navigation, test results, physician communication and billing.
He emphasizes that marketing does not end at the moment of conversion and digital does not begin after awareness. “I remind my teams marketing doesn’t end and digital starts,” he said. Even something as mundane as paying a bill can be a moment to guide a next action that improves outcomes. The key, he argued, is to align both teams around the same outcomes rather than competing metrics. “They both have the new patient goals. They have engagement goals. They have return visit goals,” he offered, contrasting that with the old pattern of “tossed traffic over the wall.”
Organizationally, he signals the integration with a structural reset. He initially led the Ascension Studio, a classic digital team that included digital experience, research and design, product management, engineering and operations. When marketing came under his remit, he retired the Ascension Studio name and formed a combined organization called Growth Marketing and Digital Experience. The marketing side includes field marketing leadership across states, a strategy function that tailors support by local needs, brand and creative and demand marketing spanning paid search, CRM and related platforms. A channel strategy group bridges the entire system, including digital channels and contact center performance, with a focus on steering demand into the right channel for the highest conversion and best experience.
From encounters to journeys and shrinking time between need and joy
Mohan argues that one of the core challenges in healthcare is the fragmentation of what consumers experience. In hospitals and clinics, the language often centers on the “encounter,” a word he said reveals a transactional mindset. “By definition, that is transactional,” he observed, describing how consumers are frequently expected to build their own journeys by navigating referrals, insurance constraints, scheduling friction and the transitions between sites of care.
His team tries to make those transitions visible and measurable. “We have an obligation,” he noted. “How can you shrink the time between need to joy, as in how do you quickly end suffering?” That framing anchors a set of practical interventions that extend beyond appointments and clinical care into the gray areas in between, including instructions, navigation and preparation. He describes the role of digital experience and marketing tools in guiding people through details that can feel trivial to a health system but overwhelming to a patient, such as which entrance to use, where to park or what to do the day before a procedure.
The ambition is not to turn healthcare into retail, but to learn from retail’s rigor in understanding journeys. Mohan describes efforts to recognize the same individual across interactions and facilitate transitions from one site of care to the next, reducing the burden on patients who are often managing pain, stress and uncertainty. He emphasizes that the work is early and incomplete. “[We are] nowhere near done,” he suggested. “Lots and lots of work further ahead on that.”
Personalization beyond the clinic
When Mohan talks about personalization, he draws a careful line between clinical personalization, which physicians already deliver by necessity, and nonclinical personalization, which removes barriers that prevent people from getting care. “What I’m talking about is recognizing…[someone] does not have access to transportation,” he said, then using that insight to offer options, shift an in person visit to a virtual visit when appropriate or reduce other forms of friction that derail care.
Transportation stands out as a vivid example. Mohan cited internal analysis showing patients traveled “over half a billion miles in one year” to reach Ascension care. He translated that into thousands of hours lost to travel, childcare arrangements and time away from work, then argued that health systems often fail to see those costs even as they impose them. He also highlighted financial uncertainty as another barrier and described efforts to provide clarity on service costs and ways to pay before scheduling.
A conjoint analysis makes the point sharper. Mohan said transparent pricing and financing was “two times as attractive as same day primary care” and even “three times as attractive” as a specialist appointment within seven days. For him, the implication is that digital front doors cannot stop at physician bios and scheduling links. They must also address cost expectations and payment options because that is what consumers value and what reduces deferral.
A pragmatic view of AI
On AI, Mohan sets the context with an imbalance that healthcare leaders feel daily: demand for care is rising while supply of skilled labor is not keeping pace. He said wait times for primary care or pediatrics can reach months. Against that backdrop, he describes AI as a lever for access, cost and productivity. He pointed to unused appointment slots and mismatched demand as one area where AI could improve precision. He also described the consumer reality that self-diagnosis is already happening at scale and suggested future tools could augment constrained clinician capacity with diagnostic support and workflow assistance.
Inside the organization, he describes broad adoption of AI tools for creative work, CRM optimization, product story writing and software development. He cited about 15 to 20 percent of code being generated with AI assistance and said Ascension is testing Gemini and a smaller ChatGPT instance side-by-side. He added that many use cases will be delivered through existing platforms such as electronic health records, ERP and CRM, while bespoke AI will be built when it meaningfully differentiates.
Mohan also describes a measured approach to consumer-facing agents. Grace, Ascension’s first consumer agent experience, began with what he called the most benign use cases like verifying or canceling appointments. The point is learning, governance and trust before scaling. In a system where the mission emphasizes care for the vulnerable, the stakes of getting it right are unusually high. Mohan’s broader argument is that digital experience, brand and AI should not be separate agendas. They should work together to reduce friction, build trust and move patients from need to relief faster than the current healthcare journey allows.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. He has written three bestselling books, including his latest Getting to Nimble. He also moderates the Technovation podcast series and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on X @PeterAHigh.
