22-31 - TRENDS - Communications excellence

The pandemic has exacerbated existing health disparities in quality and access to care. Certain populations – such as those from ethnic minorities or low socio-economic backgrounds – struggled even more during the pandemic due to reasons beyond their control, for example, not being able to work from home. The government and healthcare industry has recognised the need to address this disparity, and it is that behaviour change we need to maximise. Looking at the science behind human behaviour can help us understand why people make the decisions they do. Our approach considers both the internal and external environments. We call it ‘Feel-Think-Do’.

We need to consider not only the logical argument but also our audience’s emotions and the world they live in.

Our decisions are shaped by our emotions – our hopes and desires – and by the environment around us. So why do we expect healthcare professionals and patients to be different? Traditionally our industry has focused on providing audiences with rational arguments, but now we also need to acknowledge and include the complicated reality and intricacies of people’s lives. People’s associations play a big role in how they respond to health information. Even simple measures like including relatable imagery can help to remove barriers and make it easier for underserved populations to engage in their health.

By looking at the complete system, we can uncover insights that predict seemingly irrational behaviours and develop strategies and interventions that effect change.

People pay attention to things that truly speak to them. It’s not just about the message, the delivery matters too. For example, a renowned expert might be seen as a trustworthy source by some people, while others may regard that same expert with mistrust. We need to look closely at how different communities consume information, as this will help us to better understand the biases prevalent in individual communities and implement multichannel strategies to dispel them. By engaging our audiences emotionally, rationally and practically, we can look to maximise the change happening and hopefully bring about lasting change.

Like many people with autism, Nicole Parish has a special interest – an intense focus on a specific topic. In her case, it’s insects. She explains the challenges of living with autism – from recognising sarcasm to avoiding meltdowns – through the lens of her passion for bugs.

“You can decorate based on your special interest,” she tells her followers on TikTok, gesturing to a wall mounted with giant fungi.

Parish, aka @soundoftheforest, usually films in front of another wall covered with pinned butterflies, moths and spiders. Sometimes – like a caterpillar in a cocoon – she dangles from the ceiling in a silk sensory swing with just her head protruding. “It’s kind of like a hug without the human contact,” she says.
Parish intersperses stories about sensory overload, social awkwardness and autistic burnout with facts about violin beetles, giraffe weevils and atlas moths.

Parish’s informative, engaging and often funny films have garnered her 2.4 million followers on TikTok. She is part of a growing breed of young patient influencers attracting large audiences on social media.

Patient influencers are people who share personal health stories using channels from Instagram and Facebook with the Daily Mail and Good Morning Britain to raise awareness and support others.

Unlike traditional influencers who have left audiences jaded with too many sponsored posts, patient influencers are on the rise, creating loyal communities as they consistently share authentic, relatable and relevant stories. Nine in ten patients say these communities play a ‘somewhat’ to ‘extremely’ important role in their health decisions, according to one study.

For pharmaceutical companies and the agencies that partner with them, patient influencers provide valuable insights into the day-to-day realities of living with a condition. They also provide a reality check on what it takes to engage with people in this era of digital content. Influencers like Parish are a reminder that if you want to ignite credible conversations in partnership with patient influencers, then safe, corporate, colour-by-numbers content is no match for bold, surprising, ultra-personal storytelling.

More than 20 years into my career in healthcare communications, I’m still fascinated by the capacity of the pharma and biotech industry to push the boundaries of innovation. From the gene therapies that are redefining expectations in some rare diseases, to the vaccines that changed the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare innovation is constantly evolving to harness the potential of new technologies and new scientific knowledge to deliver the breakthroughs patients need. This in turn is changing the way pharma and biotech organisations operate internally and, importantly, how they engage externally. Partnership, collaboration and agility between key stakeholders have never mattered more – ensuring that these clinical advances reach the patient community expeditiously.

The days in which product communications, corporate communications, internal communications, market access, medical and patient engagement worked in silos – each with their own objectives and personnel – are becoming a thing of the past. Instead, even the biggest pharma companies are moving towards enabling their people to work collaboratively and flexibly across functions and act nimbly to realise the promise of the next generation of healthcare innovations. This is creating the need for a new approach to innovation communications consulting – an approach based on nimble teams combining communications, commercial and scientific expertise to maximise the value of healthcare innovations.

What our clients increasingly seek are customised teams of proven experts designed to meet their unique needs, with the ability to be redesigned as those needs change. Annual plans will always be valuable for guiding strategy, but there is also great value in the ability to pivot rapidly and to assess the impact of one initiative before designing and implementing the next. This is a way of working we embrace and champion at Arc Bio Communications.

As communicators I believe we can play a vital role in helping healthcare innovators transform people’s lives by delivering more innovations to more patients. To do this, we must challenge ourselves to keep evolving and keep embracing new opportunities in order to bring the value of healthcare innovations to life.

The inclusion of the patient voice in healthcare has the potential to bring value for all stakeholders – patients, clinicians, pharmaceutical companies, regulators, payers and healthcare systems. Yet historically, we have seen patient engagement occur as individual or isolated activities, failing to leverage the potential synergies of a more integrated approach. Despite a common appreciation of the moral or ethical rationale for patient engagement, this lack of a co-ordinated approach was perhaps driven by a poor appreciation of the return on investment of patient engagement.

More recently we’ve seen a growing trend for increasingly meaningful, integrated and strategic patient engagement that embeds patient perspectives more authentically throughout the product life cycle.

So what has been driving this trend? We gained a better understanding and appreciation of the value of the patient voice in clinical development. Suggested benefits include avoiding costly protocol amendments, improvements in enrolment, adherence and retention – all of which have the potential to accelerate research and development. Perhaps more compelling is that it has been reported that new treatments are 19% more likely to launch when clinical studies are co-developed with patients.

What may drive this trend in the future? Medicines regulators have an influential role in cementing this more co-ordinated adoption of patient engagement. Earlier this year, the European Medicines Agency updated its framework for engagement with patients and patient organisations. This reinforces its commitment to strengthening the inclusion of patient voice in regulatory activities to ‘improve the quality of, and trust in, the regulatory decisions and in new medicines placed onto the EU market’. Similarly, the US FDA engages in several initiatives, such as patient-focused drug development meetings, designed to ensure that patients’ experiences, perspective, needs and priorities are incorporated into drug evaluation.

What was once a question of ‘can we afford the time and resources to develop an integrated patient engagement plan?’ is quickly becoming a question of ‘can we afford not to?’.

Many strategic processes start with a focus on the target audience. While it is of course important to understand the audience you want to reach, a more holistic approach can increase impact.

The advantage of this is a strategic plan with an earlier starting-point of a crystal clear, single-minded vision. In turn, this brings a cohesive way of thinking, and one that bakes in the direction needed to ensure the results best serve healthcare professionals (HCPs) and patients.

Therefore, we think a strategic healthcare comms process ideally works best across five stages:

Aspiration: What is the aspiration pharmaceutical clients have for their brand, for their therapy area, for their patients, for themselves? A clear picture of what success looks like. This also involves understanding the HCP and patient aspirations to ensure their needs are considered.

Reality: What is the comparable picture today? Where are they starting from and which barriers to achieving the aspiration do we need to overcome?

Inspiration: Distilling down the insights from the real picture enables a refinement of discussion points. What will actually enable us to achieve the aspiration? What is the fundamental shift we need to make? This is the essence of the direction – the start of the strategy formation.

Strategy: A strategy can then be developed, based on the complete picture we have built up through interrogating the insights and aspiration, and with the benefit of a clear, agreed direction.

Execution: The tactical plan aligns to the strategy and maps out what will achieve the aspiration. Realities (and sometimes aspirations) change, so the process is agile and requires regular KPI monitoring and refinements based on results.

A deep understanding of your aspiration and reality is essential in healthcare communications planning. A proven process, like this five-step framework, helps pharmaceutical clients to discuss, challenge, understand, align and achieve goals, whether on a small or large scale, in a country or across regions, and should always be the foundation of any brand plan.

If the potential benefits of hybrid working are obvious, then so are some of the potential drawbacks. Perhaps a team that is both here and there is neither. Maybe mixed in-person and remote meetings mean people miss out, and what if hybrid working just breeds disengagement?

When it was safe to do so, dna went hybrid with some trepidation last year. However, a recent team survey found that 91% of our employees feel part of the team and say that their manager genuinely cares about their well-being. So, we must be doing something right! It hasn’t all been plain sailing though, so what have we learned so far?

More than ever, we need to put ourselves in our team’s shoes because their working environment is suddenly unique to them. I don’t know if you are working from a cupboard or doing unreasonable hours unless you tell me. The signs of someone struggling have become hidden, which means it’s more important than ever to ask open-ended questions, take an active interest in people’s lives and create a mutually supportive environment. We also have nominated and trained mental health first-aiders to provide an additional layer of support if needed.

The pandemic allowed many of us to be more human at work. It became the norm to be open about competing commitments, share more personal stories and even admit to a little vulnerability. Technology became a great enabler of this. I have certainly felt closer to our clients and colleagues on other continents since the adoption of video calling which, let’s be honest, is a much more human experience than huddling around a crackly spider phone. Interestingly, being further away physically has made intimate conversations easier to have, but they do require greater effort to ensure that they happen.

You get out what you put in when it comes to team engagement. You need to identify the right platforms to adopt, drive uptake and schedule more one-on-ones than might feel necessary. You never know when someone will be ready to share the insight that helps make a group of physically distanced people feel like a winning team.

Two years after the World Health Organization confirmed COVID-19 as a global pandemic, the Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: Trust and Health conducted in February in ten countries (Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, South Korea, the UK and the US) shows that trust in healthcare is under enormous pressure.

More than half of respondents say that the COVID-19 pandemic has decreased their confidence that our healthcare system is well-equipped to handle major health crises. When asked if they worry that medical science is becoming politicised or being used to support a specific political agenda, 55% say that they do. And people have even lost confidence in their own ability to make health decisions for themselves and their families. Since 2017 there has been a global ten-point decline, with double-digit decreases in confidence in nearly every market studied.

Clearly the loss of trust in the healthcare ecosystem is concerning but why is it so important? Well, because research found that trust influences individual health outcomes. There is a 21-percentage point difference (82% vs 61%) in vaccination rates between those with higher and lower trust in the health ecosystem across the nine markets in our global average. There is also a 19 point gap (66% vs 47%) in the number of respondents having routine check-ups.

Trust also facilitates acceptance of public health measures and evolving health guidance. Those with higher trust in the health ecosystem are 16% more likely (58% vs 42%) to agree with putting the health risks of others ahead of concerns over personal freedoms. Those with higher trust are 21 percentage points more willing (72% vs 51%) to assume that, when health experts change their recommendations, it is because they have learned more about a health issue and the new recommendations are better than the old ones.

These findings (and others in the full report) highlight the critical role of trust as a determinant of health. The research also underlines how important it is that everyone within the health ecosystem, including and especially healthcare communicators, play their part in addressing the issues and inequities that have eroded trust in healthcare systems the world over.

Medical affairs can’t ignore social media as key channels for engaging healthcare professionals (HCPs).

Some medical affairs teams, but far from all, are active social media engagers, with initiatives focused in four key areas:
Social listening: Simply defined, go to where your audience is, learn what they are saying. But there are subtleties. HCPs use many platforms to communicate with each other. While Twitter and LinkedIn are known to all, some are country-specific, like WeChat in China and some are subject-specific, like Clubhouse. Different congresses may lean towards one platform. Tease out those subtleties.

Social media amplification: Using social media to amplify existing HCP events, like symposia, is a great first step for Medical Affairs teams – capitalise on existing in-person events and piggyback your message onto the event’s social media traffic.

Independent social media events: Create your own engagements on your own schedule and chosen platform. Our recent Twitter livestream launch deconstructed the typical congress symposium and reconstructed it on social media. There were five events, five topics and five presenters over five nights. Each lasted 15 minutes and resulted in 62,000 live views and 1.8 million replay views And none of this was tied to a traditional event.

Digital opinion leaders (DOLs): Social media has bred a whole new flavour of KOL. Every specialty has DOLs now, HCPs who widely share their views or insights online with pre-engaged peers, usually via social media.

We worked with one DOL to develop a Tweetorial, a Twitter conversation that allows the DOL to build a narrative on a specific topic. The DOL told the treatment story in a series of 11 tweets. The tweets included disease-specific hashtags, tags to colleagues and experts, polling, links to unbranded disease state materials and PubMed, congress abstracts and published articles.

Within 24 hours, the tweets had over 200 likes, 46 retweets, three quote retweets, a reach of more than 22,000 and an impact of more than 86,000.

Building successful relationships and content with DOLs gives you access to the DOL’s pre-engaged audiences which can’t be had elsewhere.

From our pharma experience, we estimate only 20% of Medical Affairs teams are currently engaging digital opinion leaders and implementing independent social media events to engage HCPs. However, audiences, respected voices and channels are changing. So must Medical Affairs.

Patient reported outcomes (PROs) provide patients’ perspectives about their health status, quality of life and overall well-being associated with the care or treatment they have received. Patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) are tools or instruments used to report PROs, whereas analysis of patient-reported experiences measures (PREMs) are a meaningful way to identify where improvements in patient experience are required and to evaluate how to change the patient journey. Furthermore, it is increasingly being recognised that it is also important to ask patients what matters to them, referred to as patient reported important measures (PRIMS).

Along with clinical physiological endpoints, PROMs and PREMS are now widely accepted as fundamental ways to improve patient-centred care. The measures are key in informing healthcare decisions made by key stakeholders, including medicine regulators and health technology assessment (HTA) bodies.

It shows important progress that the value of patient experience is becoming increasingly recognised by healthcare stakeholders. However, without the inclusion of diverse research participants in clinical trials, it is difficult to understand how these measures will translate into the real world.

With the lack of inclusion of segments of the population at the design stages in clinical trials, the PROM and PREM measures are not likely to capture the experiences of wider communities, making the findings less generalisable. If patient perspectives from diverse backgrounds are not included in the study of an emerging treatment, it makes it difficult to determine how the therapy in question will work in the general population.

Research highlights two key issues that need to be addressed to ensure ‘true value’ in study results – tackling systemic barriers to increase diversity in clinical trials and integrating strategies that minimise patients’ race, age and education being a factor in them not consenting or not being invited to participate in patient reported data capture components.

Engaging diverse communities using evidence-based strategies, such as community partnerships, personalised approach, increasing understanding and trust and tackling logistical barriers may help improve representation of underserved groups in clinical trials, which would improve the external validity of associated findings.

With the ongoing geopolitical conflicts causing people to be displaced across the globe, it is even more important for clinical study designs to reflect real-world populations. Resulting representative study data will support the advancement of patient-centred care that benefits all segments of the population.

We’re not just fighting a pandemic; we’re fighting an infodemic,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) in February 2020. Two years on and not much has changed. Despite some efforts from social media giants like Facebook and Twitter to crack down on health misinformation, spotting and effectively debunking this content is increasingly challenging.

According to a 2021 WHO survey, more than half (59.1%) of Gen Z and Millennials are ‘very aware’ of ‘fake news’ surrounding COVID-19 and can often spot it. The challenge is in recruiting them to actively counter it, rather than letting it slide, with over a third (35.1%) choosing to just ignore it.

Side effects of this infodemic include greater distrust in government information, poorer mental health and the rise of conspiracy theories. These theories have emboldened anti-vaxxers and encouraged vaccine-sceptics, contributing to lower vaccine uptake, higher hospitalisation rates and a drawn-out pandemic.

But COVID-19 is only the most recent example of the dangers of health misinformation online. Misinformation isn’t going anywhere – outrageous, fearmongering content gets engagement which provides revenue for social platforms. To counter this, we need to teach people how to not only identify false health information, but actively challenge it. We need to increase health literacy.

Cue the pharma industry.
There is not only a moral but a business obligation to increase health literacy. Many impacts of health misinformation and poor literacy are at the expense – literally and reputationally – of pharma companies that rapidly brought life-saving vaccines to market. Increasing health literacy can help people:

Identify and evaluate health claims
Feel empowered and motivated to counter misinformation
Have more productive conversations with healthcare professionals.

Start by leveraging social media. Unbranded campaigns, short-form video – yes, especially TikTok – health influencer partnerships and live workshops should complement additional offline efforts.

The same WHO survey cited earlier found 43.9% of people find scientific content worthy of sharing. If health literacy information can be created in the formats people want to use, by people they trust, with tangible actions, there’s a fighting chance of tackling the infodemic.

You’re up, pharma. And we’re here to help.

COVID-19 changed everything. Overnight, the realities of lockdown imbued every task with an extra challenge. Every component of delivering a programme tested our capacity to respond with ingenuity, if only to remain operational. Whether filming remotely without sacrificing quality, or collaborating virtually without affecting productivity, every established process required revision.

It taught us a lesson. There is almost nothing that can’t be solved if you refuse to capitulate but, crucially, there is almost nothing that can’t be improved with additional creative thinking.
Forced to discard now-obsolete models and engineer novel solutions, creativity became our greatest asset. We have emerged stronger, with a reinvigorated approach to practically everything we do, where creativity is elevated alongside and fused with scientific expertise.

This was a critical revelation at an important time. We’re all aware that general consumer trends call for increasingly complex and sophisticated communication strategies. Changing engagement preferences and the proliferation of channels, accelerated by the pandemic, have added multiple fronts to the battle for hearts, minds and eyeballs.

Competing content grows exponentially as attention spans remain finite, diluting the potency of our outreach. In 2019, the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) report by Peter Field revealed the continuing decline in the efficiency of creatively awarded campaigns.

Targets may now be more accessible than ever but locating them, and being heard, gets harder by the day. Arresting creativity has always been a marketer’s best hope of generating a signal to pierce through, but now it’s indispensable.
To be successful in that endeavour requires mastery, which comes from immersion and surrender. Necessity led us to re-examine the role of creativity in our business and reach the same conclusion as legendary designer Charles Eames, who said: ‘The art is not something you apply to your work. The art is the way you do your work.’

How you do anything, is how you do everything. We don’t make creative work anymore, we just are. Sometimes looking inwards brings greater clarity to the needs of the world outside. Whether it’s new or not, a creative mindset is our normal.

While many of us hit the ‘pause’ button on our lives during the pandemic, the speed of change within the healthcare system accelerated at pace. From vaccination approval to digital health delivery and systems reconfiguration, the urgency and uncertainty of COVID-19 saw a collaborative, multi-stakeholder effort to bring innovation and intervention to the public at record speed. Presumably due to the need to act decisively and quickly, patient and civil advocacy groups were not regularly invited to participate, meaning the ‘patient voice’ was not consistently included in critical health and policy decisions.

More people than ever reported that their long-term relationship with the healthcare system had been damaged by their pandemic experience, leaving them feeling isolated or unheard. In hindsight, patient input could have predicted, and perhaps mitigated, the consequences of massive service redesign and reduction in healthcare services, and contextualised change against patients’ lived experience. Patient input could have shaped information provision, enabled community support and anticipated the challenges of telehealth programmes. Critically, patients would have given voice to the inequality in access and delivery for harder-to-reach communities, those digitally excluded and those living with disability, or severe or chronic conditions.

As we look to a deceleration phase of the pandemic, we should reflect on why the relative lack of inclusion of the patient voice in policy-making and healthcare decisions was an unfortunate casualty of COVID-19. Collecting, understanding and integrating the views of patients is a key component of responsible and ethical regulation. Policymakers, healthcare professionals and the pharmaceutical industry can find ways to get meaningful feedback about the patient experience during the pandemic and the impact of the decisions and systems they implemented. The creative use of technologies, innovative research methods and a range of consultation processes can reduce barriers to getting this insight. While measuring the short-term impact of the pandemic, let’s also ensure this COVID-19 oversight will not become a longer-term gap in healthcare-shaping decisions. The pandemic can be a catalyst for a truly multistakeholder approach, one that ensures the patient voice is included in future.

It’s one thing to talk about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DE&I) in the workplace, quite another to drive meaningful change. It takes hard work and commitment to do things differently. It’s less about the post on LinkedIn and much more about our people feeling like they ‘belong’.

The more we share our DE&I learnings, the better for our whole industry. So here are six things I’ve learned as an agency leader:

Recruitment is hard. Train out unconscious bias, look for candidates in different places and, most of all, invest in partnerships that can help. We have had great success partnering with The Industry Club for our apprenticeship scheme to help create a more diverse agency.
Setting up a DEI+B team is crucial. We learned pretty early on that a team with the passion and experience to drive change was the most effective way to make a difference. We consult our team for input on our people strategy, our communications and our employee experience. My key takeaway working with them is that language in this space is everything. And it’s changing all the time. We all have to keep learning and evolving.
Employee voice is our barometer. Likes on a corporate LinkedIn post mean zero if your employees aren’t able to bring their whole selves to work. Shaped by the DEI&B team we gather feedback from our people regularly. And then we act on it.
Start before you start. It’s about asking the right questions before beginning a campaign; conducting proper, inclusive research, avoiding the ‘rinse and repeat’ of previous campaigns and going beyond the easy-to-reach narratives to discover the unseen people, the unheard voices and the untold stories.
Client and agency partnership are key. Being upfront and collaborative about bringing an equitable approach to our work has to be done together. Stitch diversity into the client and creative briefs, and call out where the work has the power to create change.
We need to tell everyone’s story. We have a responsibility to bring stories to life that truly represent the audience we’re trying to reach. We can always make communications more targeted and work that much harder by being more representative of the people they’re intended for.

A vast number of articles and opinion pieces have been published on the ‘new normal’, describing the emerging challenges and opportunities in a post-COVID-19 world. There’s no doubt that the pandemic has significantly impacted the pharmaceutical industry – driving a digital transformation, with remote access to healthcare, decentralised trials, and virtual meetings and marketing strategies becoming the norm. But does this translate into a need to reshape our approach to strategic planning?

The ‘new normal’ is defined as a ‘previously unfamiliar or atypical situation that has become standard, usual, or expected’. We are seeing a new normal, but it’s been accelerated rather than driven by the pandemic. Treatment landscapes are evolving rapidly, fuelled by increasingly crowded markets, pricing pressures, complexities of novel treatments such as cell and gene therapies and more input from payers, patients and caregivers. Strategic planning must reflect this.

It is critical for strategic planning to be initiated earlier and earlier in the product life cycle, with collaboration across functions and regions required to identify evidence gaps, conduct integrated evidence planning and develop a scientific narrative to support product differentiation. Central to this is insights generation – identifying and incorporating the needs of healthcare professionals, payers, patients and caregivers into strategic planning and communications. Patient-focused strategies are an imperative, with companies seeking to personalise treatments and develop beyond-the-pill services to optimise all aspects of the patient experience, from clinical trials to clinical practice. Revolutionary technology is also being maximised to support our strategic decision-making, with big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence assisting everything from drug development and patient identification to trend monitoring.

The healthcare sector is constantly evolving, but its fundamental aim remains the same – bringing treatments to market for the patients that need them most. Adaptation is essential for strategic planning to successfully achieve this, but the new normal is predictably unpredictable. Today’s new normal will likely be tomorrow’s old news, which makes it an incredibly exciting time to be a part of our industry.

Examples of healthcare outcomes being dependent on successful communication are not just numerous, they are ubiquitous.

Research has shown that even when knowledgeable, if healthcare professionals (HCPs) aren’t able to develop good channels of communication, they might actually be no help at all. The benefits of effective communication, however, are numerous. They can stretch from encouragement of a self-care revolution in wound care or self-catheterisation, where patients are sufficiently educated about their condition that they (or a carer) can confidently carry on their treatment at home, through to the communication of early and potentially avoidable risk factors for lifestyle diseases such as type 2 diabetes, encouraging effective changes to health habits and subsequent risk reductions – all of which help to lessen the healthcare burden. Where a physical presence isn’t possible, we look to well-developed patient information resources and HCP training materials to carry the flame for communication.

For patients, the notoriously subjective issue of pain is often clouded by an inability to accurately describe what is being felt, with potentially vague visual analogue scales still, to this day, often being the preferred method of analysis. Could this be a barrier to effective and comfortable communication? In a situation of a cancer diagnosis, how might different bedside manners affect both the absorption of potentially life-changing information, or the ongoing commitment to treatment?

Communication is the basis of forming relationships with others and it isn’t just about talking – it is equally about active listening, building empathy and putting yourself in others’ shoes to understand their world. Talking, and the ensuing listening and understanding, can be therapy. When dealing with the intricacies of mental health, and with 21% of the adult population of Great Britain experiencing some form of depression in early 2021 following the coronavirus pandemic, the importance of this mutual trust and understanding, and the bonds it can forge have been further highlighted.

It is hard to deny that communication can be the best medicine, yet we need to do more. We are responsible for the impact of our ability to talk and listen. Let’s start viewing the world through that lens.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the uptake of remote patient monitoring (RPM), breaking down obstacles to its adoption by necessity.

The benefits of RPM for patients, clinicians, healthcare systems and society as a whole are becoming ever clearer. Virtual wards for monitoring people with COVID-19 and other conditions is now a national policy, with £450m being provided over the next two years for implementation in England.

RPM makes regular, frequent monitoring of a patient’s clinical observations possible, leading to a closer understanding of how a patient’s condition is responding to treatment. The opportunity to gather data systematically through RPM can support healthcare professionals (HCPs) in predicting a patient’s response to treatment and greater understanding when dose adjustments may be required. These real-time insights thus have the potential to generate improved patient outcomes through better informed clinical decision-making, leading to personalised and optimised treatment regimens.

For patients, RPM offers convenience – freeing time spent at GP or hospital appointments for work or family commitments. Being able to monitor their own condition can also be very empowering for patients.

RPM also frees up HCPs’ time, playing a key role in making the NHS more sustainable by optimising precious resources and allowing HCPs to allocate their time more efficiently – focusing on those patients needing more support. There is also the prospect of RPM being used to alleviate the NHS backlog, reducing waiting lists by allowing many patients to be monitored at home and keeping face-to-face appointments for those with more urgent needs.

However, remote healthcare has not been universally welcomed and barriers to adoption still remain, not least the fear of leaving vulnerable patients behind if the UK government’s ‘digital first’ policy in reality means ‘digital only’. As healthcare communication experts, we can acknowledge that without the jolt and urgency of COVID-19, it would have taken a long time to shift behaviours and change mindsets from the status quo. However, our focus now should be on ensuring RPM can work for everyone.

COVID-19 looks set to stay, albeit as it moves towards a more endemic disease – an attenuated version of the public health emergency of 2020–21. Why has medcomms played such a pivotal role during this uncertain period and what impact does it have on the sector’s evolution for the future?

Collaborative working has unquestionably helped us remain resilient. Indeed, it is something that our healthcare and pharma partners have been successfully embracing for a while. This was exemplified by pharma companies and university research institutions joining forces to develop vaccines more swiftly than ever before, with clinical trials and regulatory journeys streamlined and fast-tracked to answer the COVID-19 crisis.

To ensure the latest medicines, devices and therapies reach the patients that need them most, pharma companies rely on the medcomms sector for supportive collaboration with healthcare professionals (HCPs), to challenge existing standards of care and improve clinical practice. The pandemic has forced HCPs to conduct phone appointments, patients to delay reporting health concerns and healthcare waiting lists to grow. However, the sector’s apparent growth would suggest that this challenging environment has acted as the fire through which the role of medcomms has been forged.

The fast pace of digital transformation has without doubt helped to drive this growth as medcomms companies have adjusted to increased online communication, virtual and hybrid congresses and a home-based workforce. By embracing the burgeoning digital health ecosystem, HCPs and patients can benefit from new technologies and further automation (and efficiency gains) across the healthcare sector.

The ability to create a compelling human story around healthcare and medicine is central to what we in medcomms do. As an intrinsically human trait, it represents a way of connecting with each other, understanding the world and passing on information. During the pandemic, perhaps more than ever before, the need to make sense of the seemingly apocalyptic situation was imperative. Medcomms was integral in the supply of clinical information and public guidance to rationalise anxiety and concern.

We may not ever be free of COVID-19, but with our newly honed skills, technology and flexibility, we can ensure medcomms keeps pushing towards better experiences and outcomes for patient–physician communications.

The pandemic has shown us the importance of inclusion in healthcare. The need to understand the impact of COVID-19 on age groups, on those with comorbidities and on those from different communities has shown us that not everyone has the same risk for the disease. As health communicators we’re used to seeing disparities in risk but now, as the world understands the critical need to ‘level up’, we must make tackling health inequalities a priority.

In the UK, we desperately need to improve outcomes among the poorest 20% of the population for conditions such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, respiratory diseases, maternity care and mental health. We also know that people with limited financial and social resources are far more likely to have limited health literacy and this is linked to more hospital visits, longer hospital stays, poor adherence to treatment and increased mortality.

We need to work harder to change this. We must invest in proper research embedded in the communities we’re trying to reach to understand what will work. We need to test literacy levels and the language we use and, while we know the right messengers are crucial, we also need to be more creative to make the messages count.

Our industry is up to the task and our teams and the new talent entering the sector are more aware of the need for inclusion than ever before. Many campaigns are working harder to make a difference. At Virgo we’ve engaged women from diverse audiences for Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we’ve used rhythmic rhymes to reach men at risk of prostate cancer, voice tools to speak to people who can’t access patient information and we’re rethinking how we engage on social media to build online communities for people with diabetes.

There is a big job to do but the pandemic has also shown us the world’s ability to rapidly change behaviours to prevent illness as well as to learn – not least what a spike protein is, what antibodies do and how immunity wanes. We have seen the power of what is possible and now we must step up.

Communications excellence

Maximising the behaviour change that was kick-started by the pandemic

It’s a bug’s life for this patient influencer

New frontiers in healthcare innovation call for a different approach to healthcare communications

From nice to have, to must have – the power of the patient voice

Bringing clarity to strategic healthcare communications planning

Maintaining employee engagement and morale in the hybrid workspace

The importance of rebuilding trust in the healthcare sector in a post-pandemic world

Medical affairs goes social

How important is diversity in clinical trials?

The infodemic: can pharma find the cure?

Creativity in healthcare in the
new normal

Another COVID-19 casualty: the absence of the patient voice in pandemic policy

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2022: the year of representation for health communications