Speaker bureau educates HCPs and drives adoption of novel diagnostic agent

Client

Brand team within global, integrated healthcare services and products company

Situation

After acquiring a novel diagnostic agent, the brand team wanted to increase understanding of the benefits, risks, and appropriate uses of the new product among health care professionals (HCPs) who might use it. Because of product complexities, requiring cooperation between two hospital departments, HCPs needed additional education on the product itself as well as practice management strategies to incorporate the product safely into their clinical workflow.

Solution

Leverage Point Advisors (LPA) assisted in recruiting and contracting key opinion leaders (KOL) in targeted specialties to speak to their peers about the product and their experiences with it from an approved slide deck. The speaker program goals were, and continue to be, to educate HCPs and accelerate product adoption. LPA coordinated a speaker training program to ensure speakers were educated in the speaker program steps and processes, as well as compliance protocols to speak on label.

Working with the sales or brand team, LPA schedules speakers’ individual live and virtual programs as well a series of large national webinars. The national programs have two speakers each and require aligning eight speaker calendars for 16 webinars to be held in a two-month time period. Each webinar averages about 70-100 attendees.

Program management for live and virtual programs includes:

• Training new speakers on compliance protocols
• Schedule and confirm programs with 8 HCP speakers, sales team and brand team
• Oversee compliance approvals and tracking
• Submit and track HCP speaker payments and expenses
• Contract HCPs in partnership with compliance and legal teams
• Collect and update speaker profiles for speaker introduction
• Report on registration and attendance of peer programs, including tracking sales regions, promotion sources, and unique customers

Results

LPA has managed speakers for this peer-to-peer speaker program since it launched in 2017. The program has grown from five speakers to eight, with four curriculum topics and about 30 programs per year. The sales team finds the programs invaluable in helping customers understand how to integrate the product into their clinical practice and its potential benefits for both patient outcomes and clinical workflow. The educational programs contribute to the closing of over $2 million product sales annually.