Blog

It’s been awhile since I last blogged, and even longer since I attended the Medical Marketing & Media workshop on patient engagement. While many of my memories of the workshop have faded, there was a powerful moment during the panel discussion that has stuck with me, and which I keep coming back to.

The panel discussion — “What’s the true meaning of patient-centricity and is anybody doing it?” — was moderated by Jack Barrette, the CEO of WEGO Health, who announced, “A revolution is underway!” He cited research characterizing patients as “the most underutilized resource,” a constituency that has “the most at stake.” Patients “want to be involved and can be […]

I recently received a call from an agency client I’ve worked with in the past. The agency is small and had recently landed a contract research organization (CRO) as a client. The CRO client had an idea for a series of blogs on topics related to research in a handful of disease areas, and had asked the agency to execute this idea. Lacking any staff members who had the time and expertise to perform this task, my agency client thought of me.

I checked out the CRO’s website, and found that the disease areas they were active in were all areas in which I have experience. Moreover, I have […]

In his keynote address at the recent Medical Marketing & Media seminar on Patient Engagement, Tony Romito, managing director of Accenture’s Life Science Practice, presented results of a 2013 survey of 2000 U.S. adults who were currently taking medication. The survey’s main finding was that the vast majority of patients (76%) don’t just want services from pharma companies, they expect them.

“Companies must be more accountable to patients as patients are being asked to take responsibility for their health,” Romito observed. “Patients want support from a life sciences company that understands their disease.” To get that support, 64% of respondents said they were willing to provide personal information in […]

The question arose from the audience at the recent Medical Marketing & Media “Skill Sets Live” seminar on Content Marketing, during a panel discussion. “I still love print,” stated Peter Woodrow, creative director of the Multichannel Marketing Creative Strategy Group at Merck & Co., “but our content must be packaged in a way [audiences] want to see it.” He added that consumers increasingly access content via smartphones, websites, and other digital media. When asked specifically about customer preferences, Woodrow responded, “We must be everything to everybody, at least until we reach the tipping point.”

What is that tipping point? Earlier in the session, Woodrow noted that most readers of healthcare content […]

I don’t usually think of Ernest Hemingway when I sit at my computer to create healthcare-related content, but perhaps I should.

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master,” Hemingway once wrote, and man, can I relate! Having toiled in this field for nearly a quarter-century, I have come to know medical writing as a humbling craft, a career-long apprenticeship that I will never truly master. But if I approach a medical writing project as a chance to tell a compelling story, mastery may be within my sight, if not my grasp.

The spirit of Hemingway suffused the recent “Content Marketing for Healthcare” seminar, […]

It’s a myth that pharma can’t “do” content marketing.

While it’s true that “pharma has a ton of content,” many industry watchers believe that “pharma can’t do content marketing.” According to Bill Meisle, senior vice president and director of Customer Engagement at ICC Lowe, that second statement is not necessarily true. “We have the ability to do content marketing,” he explained, “but we need to think of new ways to do it.” Speaking at the recent Medical Marketing & Media “Skill Sets Live” seminar on content marketing, Meisle encouraged the audience to “Think like a publisher: think of content marketing as an asset to be leveraged.” The problem that […]