Unlocking the Power of Omnichannel in MedComms: Insights from Jennifer Ghith
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Episode Summary
Welcome to the Transforming Medical Communications podcast brought to you by MedComms Experts; I am your host, Wesley Portegies. This podcast explores the dynamic landscape of medical communication strategies, innovations, and challenges. We aim to facilitate insightful conversations that contribute to advancing effective medical communications practices.
Joining us today is Jennifer Ghith, Senior Director and Omnichannel Strategy and Innovations Lead at Pfizer. Tune in as we discuss the importance of omnichannel in the medical communications field. Jennifer shares her insights on the challenges of connecting different channels and functions, understanding the audience, and the future of medical communications.
Guest at a Glance
Jennifer is based in Pennsylvania, United States and has over fifteen years of industry experience, which helps her lead cross-portfolio omnichannel scientific communication strategies that amplify emerging data across publications, congresses, and digital platforms. She believes that omnichannel communication is about serving the audiences in personalized ways.
Host at a Glance
Wesley Portegies is the CEO and Founder of MedComms Experts, a company that creates effective medical communication strategies for pharma. Wesley is an experienced entrepreneur, starting his first company at 19 years old and building multiple successful companies from scratch. Driven by a passion for medical communications, Wesley has over 20 years of experience in the medical industry – both agency and client side.
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Key Highlights
- 07:38 – 08:57 – The Biggest Challenge Facing Medical Communications
The first challenge is the pace at which things are moving. Next, the sheer volume of published information makes it difficult to keep track of new developments. The number of channels used to disseminate information is also rising. Then, there is the impact of AI-generated information, AI is not a subject matter expert but instead relies on the training of its language model. Hence, discerning the truth from fake facts becomes very challenging.
“I think that keeping up, upskilling, and staying on top of what’s most important and accurate and reliable are the hardest things that we do these days for sure”.
- 23:24 – 26:45 – The Need to Keep Medical Communications Short and Concise
HCPs spend an average of two hours a week updating themselves with the latest data. The two hours are broken into short sessions between seeing patients so it’s vital to know the channels they prefer and keep the message short and concise. The practitioners frequently reach out to the experts in their contact group for updates. Thus, you need to keep the group updated. On the other hand, a different audience, like people writing grants or leading clinical trials, have different needs and would prefer to read a detailed paper.
“We have papers, and we have adaptations of content that are short form and are designed to get the point across quickly. Then we have an audience where the publication is kind of the record of the trial or the study, different audiences, different needs, and different communication formats”.
- 36:03 – 38:27 – Demystifying Omnichannel in Medical Communications
Jennifer explains that omnichannel is about understanding your audience and reaching them with the right information that suits their needs at the right time and in the right format. We can get confused when we try to overcomplicate the definition. It’s much easier to just try to blast out content across a bunch of different platforms; the incentive to do that is very strong and it’s the easy way out. But if you really try to be omnichannel, you have to reset the conversation and bring it back to answering questions like do you really know if you’re reaching the audience? Are you really enhancing their understanding of the content?
“I think it’s still aspirational in a lot of ways, in a lot of different capacities and companies. But I think over time, it’s becoming more possible because of technology and because of what we’re going to be able to do in order to reach people”.