What is medical communications?
Are you thinking – Aussie flying doctors using the radio alphabet as they connect to base? Orders shouted by staff in busy ERs? Panicked calls to emergency medical services?
Actually, it involves our knowledgeable medical writers and their creative mix of scientific knowledge alongside marketing and strategic communication programmes. Medical communications should convey an engaging message that supports pharmaceutical companies and their product throughout its brand lifecycle.
“It is the agency’s role to ensure that a new therapy remains on the radar of potential prescribers, regulators, payers or patients throughout its product lifecycle.”
What does a medical communications agency do?
A medical communications agency provides specialist healthcare communications and marketing support to companies in the pharmaceutical industry as well as other healthcare-related companies.
In particular, they advise pharmaceutical companies on how best to educate a particular target audience on the benefits and risks of a new therapy and provide strategic consultancy to brand teams on how to build receptive and well-informed markets throughout a product’s brand lifecycle.
In a nutshell, a medical communication agency will help pharmaceutical companies to convey clinical evidence, to the right audience, in the right format, at the right time while ensuring that such messaging is backed by key opinion leaders.
Agency Services
A medical communications agency will provide multiple communication services to the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry. The services they provide broadly fall under two categories – promotional and scientific. These include:
Why is it so important to get right?
A good strategic communication plan will effectively and efficiently create a house from the stones…or more specifically - a compelling scientific story from the facts. Pharmaceutical companies can’t afford to ignore it. It’s vital that they get it right because it’s tougher than ever to bring a product to market. The challenges are:
- medicine regulations becoming increasingly stricter
- market conditions becoming tougher
- healthcare costs rising globally. There is also the added issue of the rising costs of developing new medicines, with figures ranging from $ 75 million to $ 4 billion per molecule (From vision to decision Pharma 2020).
In addition:
- The research and development process takes time - on average it takes up to 13 years from laboratory to market
- Only one or two substances out of ten thousand developed in the laboratory will successfully become a marketable product.
While services are employed during the research and development (pre-clinical and clinical) stages, there is an important and clear role for strategic medical communications during and after the drug approval stage.
Who we are and how we can help you
If what we’ve just described reads like your dream spec, then InkLab is the partner for you!
You can see from our photos that we can’t offer crazy, mad-scientist hair, but we are friendly, vibrant and passionate about our work. Look a little deeper, and you’ll see that we offer:
- proven medical research expertise and a passion for life sciences
- extensive experience of providing bespoke, synergistic medical communications solutions
- the unique added extra of the design and development know-how and creative energy of our in-house digital and instructional design team
Sample our learning courses
Get in touch with Inklab
Contact us for all of your medical communication needs, from healthcare communications to consultancy services, we are here to assist the medical and pharmaceutical industries.
InkLab Medical Communications needs the contact information you provide to us to contact you about our products and services. You may unsubscribe from these communications at anytime. For information on how to unsubscribe, as well as our privacy practices and commitment to protecting your privacy, check out our Privacy Policy.