Jan 28, 2025
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We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Katie Kristofic a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Katie, so good to have you with us today. We’ve always been impressed with folks who have a very clear sense of purpose and so maybe we can jump right in and talk about how you found your purpose?
Growing up, I wanted to be a doctor. In high school, it became clear my skillset wasn’t in math and science, but I still wanted to help people. I played to my strengths and received a degree in communications and journalism. The first five years of my career were spent in the bookstores and libraries of college campuses with medical and nursing programs throughout the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the US. If I couldn’t be a student in that field, I could ensure the students had the text and reference books they needed to learn.
When I was tired of the travel, I settled into a marketing communications position with a pharmaceutical ingredients company. This was my first introduction to the patient-centric mindset. The company specializes in drug delivery systems. If you’ve ever taken an orally disintegrating tablet (ODT), the kind that disintegrates in your mouth, that was us. As it turns out, 60% of the population has dysphagia, or difficulty swallowing pills.
I loved that, not only were we helping people get better, we were making the process of taking medication easier for patients and for those who were responsible for ensuring the medication was taken properly. The central focus was always the positive experience of the patient. My career started there with managing a handful of tradeshows and updating literature but soon morphed into launching their social channels, managing PR, and eventually, crisis communications.
When the Covid-19 pandemic started, I was fully focused on a major product launch. We had to quickly pivot when everything shut down. As a global company, we needed to have plans and react quickly as covid spread. We had to ensure our operations kept running to provide people with the medicine they counted on, but we also had a responsibility to keep our employees and their families safe.
My role went from promotional marketing to crisis and internal communications in the blink of an eye. I created a virtual community to keep people informed and engaged. In addition to sharing the latest guidance from local governments where we had operations, I shared activities
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