Built on 25+ years of real human experience

About Doug Vanisky

I've spent 25+ years at the intersection of healthcare innovation, technology, and creative execution. It all started in an unusual place—in clinical practice while also working as a freelance copywriter with the leading San Francisco digital shops of the 00s.

Before leading creative and building teams for blockbuster brands, I worked at a startup owned by the California Pharmacists Association, was trained as an acupuncturist (MS, Traditional Chinese Medicine), interned in renowned stroke and oncology clinics, helped develop an integrative medicine curriculum at the UCSF School of Medicine, and pioneered the first DTC social media campaign for a medical device—work that was covered in both AdWeek and Ad Age—proving social media work could be done in a compliant way.

As an SF blogger, I was invited to TechCrunch events to witness the birth of websites, apps, and platforms that now live on all of our devices. I consulted on internal Genentech health tech and Merck digital transformation efforts. I built the brand and marketing plan for a breath analysis startup focused on breath-based screening for wellness and oncology markers at the point of care.

When I write about patient experiences, I've likely seen patients up close living through those experiences. When I navigate regulatory constraints, I know I’ve done the impossible before in compliant, successful ways. When I develop disease education, I've studied the pathways. That clinical foundation combined with 20 years of launch experience is why the campaigns I work on connect with both patients and practitioners.

About Create Care

Once upon a time, I wrote a book to help brands understand the creative process. It was called So You’re a Client. One of the main theses of the book was that creative work couldn't be done in an Agile construct, but there was a way to sync up creative and digital processes. A few years later, I found myself recruited to serve as a creative director on Merck’s internal #togetherwithpurpose campaign. Then, remarkably, I was recruited to join a Merck oncology Agile team—going directly from writing about Merck’s efforts to joining one of the teams.

Merck taught me I was wrong. Creative work could be done in an Agile construct. I took the book off the market.

Create Care was built from what I’ve learned since then. It was methodically designed during an IDEO AI x Design Thinking class.

Immediately after the class, in January of 2026, I finished writing LONGWELLGEVITY, a wellness book. While editing the book, I discovered my editing approach, digital experience, and long years of developing modular and omnichannel content could be applied to optimize nearly any data analysis and messaging challenge a health, pharma, or life science brand may encounter.

Create Care combines principal-level creative direction, human-centered design thinking, and proprietary AI methodology—the AI Insight Lab™, MicroPersonas™, AI MicroMessaging™—all custom built for healthcare communications.

From the heart, but agent empowered. Because AI doesn't care. People do.