Health Union’s Meghan McNally Hits the High Notes

Meghan McNally grew up in a house where science and health were very much top of mind. Her mother, Rosemary Santulli, was a scientist at Janssen/Johnson & Johnson who worked on assays for what would eventually become PCSK9 inhibitors. McNally warmly remembers visiting the legendary Spring House R&D facility on Take Your Child to Work days and being wowed by the experiments and robots rolled out for the occasion.

McNally, however, just wanted to sing. “I was in all the choirs and all the musicals,” she recalls. “I always thought entertainment and the arts were going to be it for me.” To wit, she kicked off one of the Take Your Child days by singing the national anthem.

McNally performed throughout her years at Northwestern University, from which she graduated with a dual degree in theater and history. She added the history component belatedly, after contemplating the challenges that come with a high-profile career in the performing arts. “I loved school and I was really nerdy with all the academics. In the back of my head I must have known it wasn’t the best idea to pigeonhole myself into theater.”

Years later, with McNally entrenched as VP, integrated marketing at Health Union, she looks back at her evolution with both wistfulness and genuine appreciation. “I think I was overly focused on having a job that was perceived as cool,” she says. “I’m lucky I found my way to where I am today.”

‘I wanted the bigger budgets’

It happened largely by chance. After graduation, McNally milled around Chicago for a while, working in music promotion and engineering partnerships with Miller Lite, Captain Morgan and other beverage brands. Motivated both by wanting to continue her education and to get out of the cold, she moved to Arizona and received her Master of Business Administration degree from Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business.

The program was broadly focused. “In the late 2000s, digital strategy was still emerging as a discipline. Schools weren’t teaching SEO or digital media planning yet,” she explains.

McNally nonetheless gravitated to the space. She spent three years in Scottsdale, Arizona, as a digital marketing specialist at a firm that managed loyalty programs for travel and leisure companies. After a move to San Diego, she honed her digital planning and advertising chops at CBS Local, working with clients that included Sony Music and the California Lottery.

She enjoyed the work, especially its connection to the world of entertainment, but soon grew disenchanted with the comparatively low stakes. “Because I was on the radio side, the media buys were smaller and localized. I liked the idea of something bigger,” she explains.

That came courtesy of an introduction facilitated by one of her former CBS colleagues. In late 2014, Sharecare acquired QualityHealth, which kicked the platform’s growth into a higher gear. What it lacked, however, was a strategy function befitting an organization of its stature. McNally arrived in late 2015 as an integrated marketing manager and stayed for nearly nine years.

She never felt hobbled by her dearth of direct health or pharma experience because, at the outset of her Sharecare tenure, she wasn’t sure how long she’d stick around in the industry. “I was definitely interested in health and, tangentially, I felt I knew a little bit about that world thanks to my mom,” she says. “But mostly I saw it as an opportunity to break into an area of digital media that had potential to grow. I wanted the bigger budgets. I never thought I’d be spending the rest of my career in health.”

McNally’s perspective changed immediately. What others saw as obstacles, she viewed as opportunities. “As soon as I started digging into it, I realized how much more complex pharma marketing is than CPG. The regulatory stuff – some people see that as a barrier to being creative. I think it forces you to be better.”

Shared vocabularies

McNally attributes her rise in large part to generous mentoring from Sharecare SVP, integrated marketing Lori Flynn and former Sharecare chief revenue officer, life sciences, Scott Schappell. Upon her promotion to VP, integrated marketing, she found herself overseeing a team for the first time and adopted their pay-it-forward approach to leadership. “The life sciences business was barely formed when I joined. I felt that it was my job to level up the next generation.”

Schappell left for Health Union in 2022 and, over lunch a year or two later, floated the possibility of McNally joining him. McNally, who had moved back to the Philadelphia area during the pandemic, was intrigued by the possibility of taking what she’d learned and applying it in the realm of patient communities.

“We sat down and Scott asked me, ‘Do you want to run the marketing team here?’ He sold me on it,” McNally says.

What appealed most to her was the chance to reinvent Health Union’s marketing function, which to that point had been PR- and communication-oriented. McNally arrived with a mandate to develop a truly integrated marketing model, as well as liaise with the company’s product marketing and sales teams.

She wasn’t cowed by the step up in responsibility. “I was confident. I knew how to do this,” she says. “And here was a chance to do it on my own.”

During her Health Union tenure, McNally has played a leading role in the development of products like My Journ.ai, an interactive tool that curates personalized reading lists for patients, and Unconditionally Me, a video series featuring patient influencers. “It’s all about connecting people,” she stresses. “None of this is to disparage Sharecare, which I have only good things to say about, or anyone else. But you know how every company talks about how everything they do is for patients? This company walks the walk in a way I’ve never seen before. It’s in our DNA.”

A few months after McNally arrived at Health Union in 2024, the organization acquired HCP data and digital engagement firm Adfire Health. The deal gave Health Union entry into the world of HCP communities, which McNally believes opens additional doors for the company and the patients it serves.

“The goal is to create a shared vocabulary that can accommodate both groups,” she explains.

A great majority of McNally’s time and energy outside the office is devoted to (and absorbed by) her two young children. That said, she hopes to travel internationally and would like to start singing again on a regular basis. “I play a few instruments poorly – a little piano, a little guitar. It would be great to get back into music more formally,” she says.

Professionally, McNally hopes to remain in the trenches with her “small and mighty” Health Union team for years to come. Flynn, however, envisions an alternate path. “I see her as a CMO somewhere,” she says. “A startup would be perfect, as she is fast, nimble and a jack of all trades.”

Either way, McNally isn’t sweating what comes next. “The hardest thing for me has always been that there’s so much I want to do,” she says. After a pause, she adds, “But really, that’s not the worst problem in the world.”

This profile is part of the solli Elevate series, celebrating the Next Generation of Pharma Media Leaders. View all profiles here