Celebrating comms excellence

Healthcare professionals (HCPs) are always thinking about how to make their care more patient-centric. Their PubMed searches prove it: between 2013 and 2024, the number of publications featuring the term ‘patient-centricity’ increased by 2,550%. And increasingly at major medical conferences, you’ll see patients speaking from the podium along with their key opinion leader counterparts.

All this reflects the medical community’s growing recognition of patients’ roles in their own care. Internet-savvy patients and caregivers are looking up information on their condition from sources ranging from Reddit to major medical journals, whether those sources are tailored for them or not. And they go to their HCPs filled with questions based on what they’ve seen and heard. This means every HCP needs to be able to untangle misconceptions and treat with empathy for patients.

Medical education for HCPs should bridge the gap between highly technical information about a condition and its treatment and the down-to-earth conversation that happens between an HCP and the patient. Yet, too often, pharma-sponsored medical education pushes content that companies want HCPs to hear rather than what HCPs need.

How do we bridge that gap? By making medical education patient-centred. The very best pharma medical education doesn’t just offer data in support of new option – it gives HCPs the language that resonates with their patients and their personalised needs.

Imagine medical education that, instead of just reporting a therapy’s Crohn’s Disease Activity Index (CDAI) score, enables an HCP to help the patient understand what a day with a lower CDAI looks like.

Imagine, instead of just presenting a Kaplan-Meier curve of progression-free survival in metastatic breast cancer, medical education that makes it possible for HCPs to help their patients visualise what living with cancer under control allows them to do.

At HCG, our goal is medical education that helps HCPs meet their patients where they are. Our commercial and marketing powerhouse brings a patient-centric mindset to crafting medical education – so that hard facts can become compassionate conversations.

Levy Reyes is SVP, HCP Strategy and Patient-Centricity at HCG