By Joe Doyle, EVP Digital Health and Sachim Makani, EVP Scientific Strategy

Digital transformation is a driving force for pharma communications teams and today it is rising in medical affairs, with a feast of channels and touchpoints for scientific learning. So when the Medical Affairs Professional Society (MAPS) group advertised a tech and innovation summit my colleague, Sachin Makani and I attended to join a new medical education world. Here’s our takeaways:

Leveraging Technology and Data to Create Innovative Solutions

Charged with caffeine, we took our first dive into the innovation syllabus with insights in artificial intelligence from Kevin Hartman, Practice Leader – Data and AI Solutions, UC Berkeley.

Joe – AI is a reality for our teams at Virgo Health, and Kevin shared great insights – such as, “hallucinate is when AI makes up a result that is incorrect, but close.” His students’ projects for healthcare included a clinical trials chatbot that optimizes real-world evidence and one that helps search relevant pub med articles for medical questions stood out the most.

Sachin – Totally agree about that real-world evidence and mining through PubMed examples, Joe. I was excited as I imagined how much time something like that could save us. This was the first of many instances we heard that day of how AI can make us more efficient.

Digital Transformation in Medical Affairs: Is it a Complex Goal?

Vruti Patel of Xeris moderated a group that included experts from IBM, Astellas, Pfizer, Inizio, and Alucio. The Q&A featured ideal thought starters for the day.

Joe – My favorite question from the moderator was “You can’t be super proactive with medical information; how do you balance that?” The panelists referred to a time just five years ago when we didn’t even say the words Marketing and Med Affairs in the same sentence. Jessica Wong of Alucio explained that our pharma data, especially peer-reviewed examples, is public, and corporate entities are helping health professionals find it for the betterment of patients. Rishi Ohri, Astellas, added that he’s been able to achieve more by helping legal and compliance understand the importance of digital amplification. Virgo Health works with a couple of brands where this is a reality, and it makes all the difference.

Sachin – This was my favorite panel session, the discussion that didn’t have anything to do with AI or medical affairs per se but team-building and collaboration. One approach highlighted by the participants was to “highlight junior members” and “celebrate small wins.” Another highlight was 6-3-5 Brainwriting Ideation, where 6 people come up with 3 ideas each, in 5 min. (After 6 rounds, this = 108 ideas). Good when the objective is to generate many ideas without a single voice dominating the room.

Missing Link Between Organizational Vision, Strategy, and Execution for Medical Affairs

Another all-star cast was led by Bratati Ganguly of Planet Pharma. She guided a group of executives from Biogen, Ipsen, Servier and Syneos Health.

Sachin – Main takeaway for me here, whether we’re talking about a technological, personnel, or organizational innovation, is to fail small, fail fast, and fail forward. By failing small, the sunk costs are small, and by failing forward you set yourself up for the next step, which will hopefully be a success.

Joe – Our med affairs partners crave digital opportunities, but don’t always have the internal staff to help make new programs and channels successful. Hearing Shashi Singh of Agile N2N use the magic words “audience first” made me smile. Gerard Deisenroth of Ipsen added that it helps when your med affairs team has change management expertise, or your company has a COE with storytelling experts to envision success for decision-makers.

The Promise and Potential of Augmented Intelligence for Medical Affairs

If the morning keynote tackled the origins of AI, the afternoon session followed perfectly with a call to action – AI is here, it is time to use it – with entertaining guest speaker, Matt Lewis, Chief AI Officer of Inizio.

Joe – It was nice to see focus on the human side of technology. Matt made us feel at ease by pointing to one fact – humans start and finish every use of AI. And AI can motivate employees, taking away the drudgery and opening it up for employees to think more, to be more strategic. A great question from the room asked about web3 technologies (bitcoin, metaverse, AI, etc.) and which is the right innovation to get behind. Matt pointed to one fact – AI is the only innovation that is already here and widely used.

Sachin – We know this: AI is here and it’s not going away. We are currently integrating AI with client partners to create the most positive impact, safely and ethically and identifying the next generation use cases for AI to assist our teams with creativity, efficiency, and quality. Leveraging new capabilities and channels will be vital for future medical affairs communications, Matt’s real-world examples were a great validation that we are headed in the right direction.

New capabilities and channels for future medical affairs communications gave us all assurance that we are getting more personalized to bring health with a human touch.

By Natasha Weeks, Executive Director, Virgo Health  

I can’t quite believe I joined Virgo Health almost 18 years ago. I started out at our first office in Richmond as a JAE working across a range of pharma clients. At the time I was one of around 20 people and we were on a mission to create Communications without Compromise. Perhaps it was my journalism training, but my passion was and still is storytelling – I wanted to tell health stories to consumers. 

So as Virgo Health hits its 20th milestone, apart from making me feel old 😉, I can’t help but reflect on what it is about Virgo that’s made me stay so long. 

Yet it’s simple really – because I love the people I work with and the work that we do.  

And it’s stayed that way, as the one thing that hasn’t changed in all this time is Virgo’s ethos and values. From Day 1 Virgo was a people-first agency, driven by our mission not to compromise our people or our clients. Over the years our culture has been kept alive by the old-timers and made more relevant by Virgo’s new generations. 

But of course, even the nicest place to work doesn’t mean much if you can’t find purpose in your work. I’ve been fortunate enough to find plenty, from creating ‘Emma: Work Colleague of the Future’, the most awarded health campaign of the year in 2020, to supporting parents through lockdown with Waterwipes, increasing representation during Breast Cancer Awareness Month and being part of an incredible media team that launched the world-first bivalent Covid-19 vaccine for Moderna. 

I do wonder if Virgo and I simply grew together, first as a young PR in a fledging agency it was wonderful to be part of building something new, then when we were acquired by Golin my life was also changing as I started a family. Being part of Golin also offered new challenges and opportunities, providing access to a global network and I’ve been lucky enough to spend time at Golin in Chicago and New York and work with colleagues across the world.  

A real highlight for me, as Consumer Health lead, has been working in collaboration with the Golin consumer teams to work on big consumer brands benefiting from healthcare expertise. Our hybrid working model is something that continues to set us apart and I’m hugely proud to work on Asics and Specsavers with the best creative and earned media minds in the business. 

Of course, across 18 years it wasn’t all plain sailing, moving from Richmond to Central London and being part of a network was a huge transition, and then there was lockdown-working with two young kids! But the magic has been, and hopefully will always be, Virgo’s strong sense of purpose as an agency that wants the very best for its people and its clients.  

Who knows if I’ll be writing this column again in another 20 years, but if I’m not, I imagine someone else saying something very similar. 

That’s the Purple Power. 

By Amanda Moulson, Executive Director, Virgo Health  

As I was doing my nightly social scrolls – checking in on my faves like noodle vids and cat reels – I noted @mother_pukka taking on Lord Sugar and Jacob Rees Mogg, among others, for urging people to get back to the office full time. ‘Flexible working is inclusive working!’ she said – and I thought ‘YES!’ as I shared to my own feed, quoting her.

She’s right! Flexible working IS inclusive working – and it’s not just about opening up geography or accommodating lifestyles, like being a parent or a carer. It’s also about allowing people with disabilities to work in environments that are created for them. It makes neurodiverse people feel psychologically safe. And, despite the fact that we’re in PR and presumed to be loudmouths, it accommodates the shy, the quiet and the introverted (who can still be loudmouths – a personal example – albeit loudmouths in need of a good recharge).

One thing that really frustrates me is that in the early flush of our post-pandemic ways, we saw possibility; we spoke about re-inventing things that needed an update. On the top of the list was the future of work, so we bandied about phrases like ‘digital nomadry’ and we expounded about the role of culture in hybridised places. Sadly, a lot of those conversations began, and ended, with a vision, and since many have retreated to the same old, same old.

We had an enormous opportunity to create a new future, and my fear is that too many companies squandered it. But luckily, that’s not true of Virgo Health, where Smart Hybrid policies keep us future fit and dead flexible.

Because we’re all different, we all need different things at different times. Virgo’s Smart Hybrid policy takes all of these needs into account. While deep and heads-down work can be done at home, when we’re in the office, there are communal spaces for us to meet, create, eat and play (and let me tell you, the mini breadstick game is STRONG). And for people with in-office requirements who enjoy quieter time, we have designated areas to focus, ‘meditation spaces’ and outside space.

In agency life, our clients demand creativity. Since employee experience is the start of the client experience, I couldn’t be happier to work with a team that took the challenge to reinvent the future of work seriously.

By Amanda Moulson, Executive Director, Virgo Health  

Virgo Health’s Amanda Moulson shares the secret to nurturing your creativity.

I’ve felt lucky in my career to be branded as ‘creative’ – a brand that becomes self-fulfilling when ideas are requested in various brainstorms, workshops, or in the on the fly ‘hey can I just grab your brain for a minute?’ chats. As someone with this label, I am often surprised when people say, ‘I’m not creative’, or when I read self-assessments in which my colleagues worry that they are not creative enough.

Nonsense.

We are all creative. Because creativity is about solving problems in unique and novel ways. And we can explore all those ways when, to paraphrase psychiatrist Carl Jung, the creative mind plays with what it loves.

What do you love? It can be as ‘basic’ or intellectual as you like. Tik Tok, Emily in Paris, dogs, rugby, Proust. Any or all – and the more the better. These references are the jumping off points for ideation, so never hesitate to bring what you love to your workplace.

Me? I love words. I love reading. Once I read a book, I deeply dive into its subject matter and those ideas re-emerge in ideation (my team will not forget the ‘gaming phase’ that followed my read of the truly spectacular Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow). I also love the feeling of being astonished by a sentence that expresses a universal notion but in the most incisive possible way, and I am inspired to work my own copy to that point of precision in my daily work at Virgo.

Virgo, a healthcare communications agency, zodiacally-destined to be organised and professionally obligated to be analytical, evidence-driven and compliant. Where’s the creativity in that?

Well, I’m glad you asked.

Sure, we ‘healthcare people’ deal in the left-brained stuff. But remember, we can be creative with maths; it is about relationships. We can be creative with science because what is science if not a study of creation? We can be creative about how we communicate about data because data is the currency of the modern world. And we can be creative about healthcare because there is no space more deserving of inventive problem-solving than the one that, when fine-tuned, allows all of us to thrive in every possible way.

Thriving itself is an outcome of creativity – of imagining the new and the better possibilities for the things and the people you love (self-included). So, whether at work or at play, I beg you, find what you love. Shout about it to whoever will listen and surround yourself with people that protect and nurture those things. Trust me, it really is going to make those ‘hey can I just grab your brain for a minute’ chats that much more fun!