What do MedComms agencies actually do?

Medical communications sounds fairly self-explanatory – it’s communication about medicine, right?

But what is actually being communicated and how is that communication happening?

I’m Eleanor Steele, and I’m the MedComms Mentor. I’ve been in medical communications since 2004, and over the years I’ve worked on a huge range of different types of projects.

Today, I want to focus on this range of projects that people in MedComms might work on, but I want to caveat this by saying I’m only going to be able to fit in a snapshot into a short video like this.

I’ve grouped projects together into big buckets, and I’ll give you a few examples of the kinds of project that would fit into each category.

I’ll be looking at specific project types in more depth in future videos, including giving you some of my top tips and tricks for actually working on these types of projects.

Given my background, I’ll often look at this from the perspective of medical writing, but every single project is a team effort, including client services, editorial, and often other teams like Digital and Design, as well as Medical Writers.

Obviously, we are also working with client teams in pharma companies, and for a lot of these projects there’ll be collaboration with external experts acting as authors, speakers, or advisors.

Everything in MedComms is a team effort, but today we’re going to have a whistle-stop tour through some of the things that MedComms agencies actually work on, and that’s going to be relevant for anyone in MedComms and anyone interested in a career in this fantastic, if somewhat hidden, industry.

Data release is a fundamental part of MedComms, and even when we are not working on projects that are focusing on data release, we’ll still be working with the data – supporting its generation or analysis, or broadening its reach once that initial release has occurred.

But I’m getting ahead of myself – let’s get back to basics.

When pharma companies are investigating a new drug, they have to perform a series of studies starting off with preclinical work to understand the potential activity of a drug, and then clinical trials in humans to understand how the drug actually works, how it should be used in different patient populations, and also any safety concerns that might need to be managed or mitigated.

Pharma companies then have an obligation to release the data from clinical trials in a timely fashion, so that the drug development process is transparent and that decisions made about the drug are truly evidence-based.

So clinical trials often generate a huge amount of data and can last for years, so data release usually happens in stages.

But no matter what stage we’re at, the first way that data will be released out into the big wide world is usually via an abstract submitted to a medical congress.

Abstracts are a short, preliminary submission, and when it gets to congress time, they will usually be followed up by a poster or oral presentation during the congress sessions.

The level of interest in the data, or how novel or impactful it is, will often determine whether you get an oral or a poster presentation.

Releasing data at congresses is very fast-paced, and will often happen soon after the data cut so that the pharma company and the investigators don’t have a lot of time to really dig into it and figure out what it means.

But presenting at congresses gives them an opportunity to get a reaction from the wider community in that field and get it discussed at that congress. After the congress presentation, the data will then be published in a peer reviewed journal.

This is a much longer process and includes that peer review step where other experts who weren’t involved in the clinical trial will review the paper and critique it.

They will often have questions that they want the authors to answer or requests for additional data, or maybe different analyses to be included, before the paper will be accepted for publication.

MedComms agencies will support pharma clients and the clinical trial investigators throughout this data release process.

So thinking about congresses, the timelines are usually so short that the agency will need to act as a hub, keeping everything moving and ensuring that everyone in the client team and investigator team do what’s needed to get everything submitted and presented by the deadlines.

And for publications, coordinating with multiple authors who are often in different countries across time zones, often speaking multiple languages as well, the agency will help keep things moving again, but also ensure that all authors have the appropriate opportunities to input into the content.

All of this will include medical writing support, but it’s not ghost writing.

Good Publication Practice and other industry guidelines are followed to ensure that the entire process occurs in an ethical way, as well as happening in a timely fashion.

There are strict criteria for authorship on publications and agencies will often help make sure that authors are fulfilling these. And as Medical Writers, our job is to listen to the authors and work with them to create the best possible version of their work, rather than go off on our own and write something without their input.

Another core component of MedComms work is education, and this can take many different forms and be for a variety of audiences.

Pharma companies need their internal teams to understand their own drugs, both the ones that they are developing, and the ones that are already launched and being used to treat patients.

But they also need to understand the wider therapy areas that they work in, considering the disease itself and the patients who have the disease, plus the healthcare professionals who treat them.

Pharma teams might also need to understand other treatment options – the competitors. So that might include how a disease is currently treated to understand where there are unmet needs for patients, and then how the new drug that they’re developing is going to potentially meet some of those needs.

They also need to be aware of other drugs being developed for the disease, including drugs that work in the same way as their own drug or drugs that might work in a different way. These might have advantages or disadvantages in comparison with their drug that they need to understand.

Agencies will often create and update educational materials for internal pharma team use. This will often be developed in PowerPoint, but then uploaded into an online learning platform so that team members can go through the different modules as and when needed at their own pace.

Agencies will also support pharma clients when developing educational content for healthcare professionals. This kind of content is often a bit more varied than the slide decks we develop for internal pharma clients, so it might include meetings, websites, apps, videos, animations, webinars, podcasts – basically any kind of educational content you can think of.

These kind of projects can be very creative and will include Medical Writers working on the text and technical content, but also involving collaboration with Designers and Developers to bring it to life.

Now, this content may be focused on disease awareness, so maybe introducing doctors to a new rare disease that they may not have come across before, or helping them identify patients who might be at risk of a disease so they can be treated early enough to prevent long-term complications.

It might be introducing doctors to advances in the science around a familiar disease too. So this is often necessary when a new drug is being developed that works in a different way from the current standard of care for that condition, and doctors may not understand how it works or why there might be potential benefits for using this new approach.

There might also be content specifically around drugs, particularly when there’s been new data released.

Doctors, well, they’re very busy and we can’t rely on them all having the time to trawl through all the journal articles that are published in their field. So pharma companies will often produce useful bite-size educational content to help them get the highlights quickly and easily so they can stay up-to-date.

When pharma companies are creating this kind of educational content for healthcare professionals, it has to be non-promotional, and the content is definitely fair and balanced, including appropriate information about all treatment options, even competitors.

Sometimes healthcare professional educational content can be accredited as Continuing Medical Education or ‘CME’ activities, which HCPs can use towards their professional development requirements.

This kind of content has to go through accreditation by specific associations or professional bodies who decide how many CME points or credits people who do the activity will get.

There are different rules about how CME content is developed and how pharma companies can be involved in this across different regions, and some agencies focus specifically on creating CME activities.

Working in an area as fast-paced and complex as pharma means that our clients need to have a lot of support to gather insights from different stakeholders and then interpret these insights and turn them into specific actions.

Pharma companies need to understand current clinical practice, which is always evolving and can be very different between global regions, but even sometimes across different regions within the same country.

They also need to understand what unmet needs patients are experiencing based on this current clinical practice, but also how this is affecting their families, maybe parents or caregivers, and also the healthcare professionals who are treating them and helping them manage their condition.

MedComms agencies often support insight gathering activities, and these are more likely to be focused on getting insights from healthcare professionals, though some agencies may be involved in insights from patients too.

So what kind of projects might we actually be involved with here?

If we’re interested in understanding how a condition is currently treated, we might perform interviews with grassroots prescribers.

A MedComms agency might develop interview questions and identify healthcare professionals to be interviewed. Sometimes they might also perform the interviews, or some of them, and sometimes they might just be involved in collating the responses and analysing that data to create a report.

When a pharma company needs to gather insights from top tier experts, they might hold an advisory board meeting. Again, the agency might help them identify who to invite and provide support with creating the agenda, developing presentations and discussion questions, and then actually running the meeting on the day.

This is a real team effort and I think ad boards are one of my favourite types of project. You get to hear the experts’ perspectives, and sometimes they have very different views. It brings our work to life in a really fascinating way, and once we’ve heard all of the discussion, we then need to write up all of those insights into a report that our pharma clients can use to plan what they’re going to do next.

Our pharma clients also need insights on competitor treatment options, both those that are already available and those in development. I already mentioned this in the education section earlier, but this is where they find out the insights that they’re going to need to educate their teams on in the future.

MedComms agencies might help the pharma company look across the therapy area and current clinical practice, plus the development pipeline of future treatments to decide where they need to focus and what questions they are specifically trying to answer.

Then we might perform literature searches to understand exactly what the published evidence base supports in terms of differentiators between their drug and competitors.

We might also need to attend congresses to be there for the initial data release of new data to see where the field is going and to hear the discussions and reactions from other experts as it happens.

We would then need to take all of that information and synthesise it into a report that may include recommendations for our clients on what they should be doing next and how they should be doing it. And this is something I’m going to come back to later.

Pharma companies are commercial enterprises. They want to sell the drugs that they produce, and some MedComms agencies are also involved in promotional activities.

Now, this can seem like quite a controversial thing to do, but it is incredibly tightly regulated and all promotional content must be evidence-based and balanced. There are strict review and approval processes to make sure that everything is factually accurate and adheres to all the necessary guidelines, but also makes sure that it’s targeted to the appropriate audiences.

For example, I’m based in the UK and any promotional content for prescription medications can only be targeted to doctors and other appropriate healthcare professionals.

But I think the fundamental thing that I found when working with pharma clients, is that they genuinely want the drugs they produce to be prescribed to the right patients at the right time and in the right way so that it can help the people who need it. They don’t just want to sell drugs willy-nilly.

Yes, there are horror stories out there about unethical promotional practices, but I really want to reassure you that this is a minuscule minority of cases, and that the very few times that I’ve had to advise clients to ensure that something is done in an ethical way, it was always because they hadn’t had that information before, or weren’t aware of differences in guidelines or regulations between different regions.

It’s a complex area to work in, and agencies do sometimes need to push back on clients and say, ‘No, we can’t do it like this,’ and explain the rationale for this.

Whenever I’ve been in that situation, the clients have been grateful for that advice and gone with the ethical approach.

So what kind of promotional content might we work on? There are teams within pharma companies who go out and talk to healthcare professionals. This includes the sales team and also the field medical team who focus on talking about the science and the data.

Agencies will often produce content to support these healthcare professional interactions such as detail aids, which the team having the conversation with healthcare professionals will use to guide their conversation and leave pieces, which they will leave behind.

And we have to make sure that we are including appropriate information for different healthcare professional audiences that the field teams might be talking to, but making it visual and easy to use while also including all of the details that they might need to answer any questions from their healthcare professional conversations.

We might also work on congress booths.

So back in the data release section, I talked about submitting abstract to congresses and then supporting with posters or oral presentations. That’s a big part of what we might do at congresses, but the booths are another kettle of fish.

Congresses usually have a huge exhibition space where pharma companies can pay to have a booth, giving information about their products, and also giving healthcare professionals somewhere they can go to ask questions.

Again, these are incredibly tightly regulated, but they can include promotional content, which can be amazingly creative, while also linking back to the therapy area and the drug.

So maybe particular challenges that patients experience could be brought to life with a virtual reality activity, or there could be a game that actually illustrates at a cellular level how a drug interacts with its target receptor.

These kind of things can be really fun to work on, and again, will be a massive team effort across the agency. And they’re also a fantastic way of engaging with healthcare professionals in a more innovative way than some of the other projects that we work on.

5. Strategic support