SHSMD Honors Karen Corrigan with Award for Excellence

Healthcare Strategy Society’s Highest Award Recognizes Pioneer in Integrated Marketing

Chicago (September 21, 2012) — Karen Corrigan, the founder and chief executive officer of Corrigan Partners, a management consultancy based in Norfolk, Va., was announced today as the recipient of the 2012 Award for Individual Professional Excellence from the Society for Healthcare Strategy & Market Development (SHSMD) of the American Hospital Association. SHSMD’s Award for Individual Professional Excellence is the highest honor the Society can bestow on one of its members.

Corrigan accepted the award from SHSMD President-elect Holli Salls at the Society’s Annual Conference in Philadelphia.

A leader in the field of healthcare strategic marketing, Corrigan is credited with having created one of the first true integrated marketing departments in a healthcare organization. “Karen has an uncanny ability to seize on trends before they become evident to others, combined with a dynamism that enables her to quickly master and respond to changing forces in the brand and marketing discipline,” Salls said.

Over the course of her career, Corrigan has worked as a health system executive, chief strategy officer, chief marketing officer and entrepreneur. As corporate vice president for system development at Sentara Healthcare from 1992 to 1998, she led strategic planning, brand management, marketing, public affairs and development. In 1998 she founded and served as CEO of The Strategy Group, a strategic planning and marketing consultancy. In 2010 she founded Corrigan Partners, which provides strategic counsel on brand, marketing and digital strategies.

A thinker as well as a doer, Corrigan has written, coauthored or contributed to three books on healthcare marketing and has published more than a dozen articles on healthcare marketing, innovation and leadership. She is the publisher of “Chief Marketing Officer,” a blog for healthcare executives, and she serves as a facilitator for the CMO Project. The CMO Project is a unique forum designed to help marketing executives create, discover and adapt ideas to advance the discipline and practice of healthcare marketing.

Corrigan presents on the national stage several times each year, focusing primarily on competitive strategy. She also has held leadership positions in a variety of professional organizations at the state and national levels, including the Virginia Society for Healthcare Marketing & Public Relations, the Alliance for Healthcare Strategy and Marketing and SHSMD.

About the Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development
The Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development is the premier organization for healthcare planners, marketers and communications and public relations professionals. A personal membership group of the American Hospital Association, SHSMD serves more than 4,000 members and is the largest organization in the nation devoted to serving the needs of healthcare strategy professionals. The Society is committed to helping its members meet the future with greater knowledge and opportunity as their organizations work to improve health status and quality of life in their communities. For more information, visit shsmd.org.