L&M Blog
No doubt, if you’ve ventured out into the world of restaurants and dining over the past several months, you’ll notice a major change at many of your favorite spots. The impact of COVID on how we interface with our surroundings has forced us to look for technological solutions to what once seemed like a tried-and-true process.
The same can be said for Bureau operations in the time of Virtual events. What seemed like a simple process of signing in and tracking attendance on paper, or putting your finger to a communal iPad, really isn’t so simple anymore. Consider the basic health concerns surrounding sharing pens, a stylus or a tablet screen. Even more concerning are the issues surrounding the proper capture of attendance at a program when all of the attendees are accessing the program remotely from their homes or separate offices.
Importantly, if an attendee has been provided a delivered meal, your reps must receive evidence of proper program participation to ensure accurate transparency reporting. Is it a valuable use of their time to go chasing HCPs down for a signature? Think about it….the health issues mentioned above get repeated all over again!
L&M Healthcare has deployed a seamless and simple solution to a vexing problem for many of our clients. Wrapped up with our fully integrated, customized, and comprehensive Bureau Portal Technology STARS, we can ensure your Peer-to-Peer program remains highly compliant even during these challenging times.
We would be happy to demonstrate the Attendance Verification feature in our STARS portal. Please contact me if you would like to learn more.
Thanks for reading.
Adam Margolis
CEO, L&M Healthcare Communications
I entered “Zoom fatigue” into Google to see what’s been written about it. Turns out, lots. In fact, Google delivered twenty-nine results, pages worth of peer-reviewed studies, scholarly articles, newspaper features and videos on the topic.
Fortunately, you don’t need to read all these articles to understand Zoom fatigue. Just think about your own relationship with video conferencing and how you feel about it now vs. a year ago. If you are like most folks who spend hours each week video conferencing, you get the point that Zoom fatigue is a legitimate syndrome and not some made up catch phrase.
Most of us have accepted the current reality that our most common everyday experiences are now on-line, remote events. Think client meetings, Ad boards, conferences, work status meetings, capabilities presentations, sales meetings, happy hour with friends, checking in with Mom. Is it any wonder that so much has been written to describe this very prevalent problem?
So what is the alternative? Are we stuck in these meetings for another year in the same tedious grid or are there dynamic alternatives?
While ZOOM-style meetings definitely have their place, and this article does not intend to dismiss ZOOM or similar VC platforms entirely, we should all be aware that not all meeting types default successfully or effectively to a grid-style meeting platform.
You might consider a 3-D Virtual platform that offers templated virtual meeting environments that are designed to match the meeting objectives. For example, for a promotional or educational speaker program, a virtual environment that places a single speaker or multiple remote speakers directly behind a desk, a lectern, or on a dais with other remote speakers and a moderator would add tremendous production value to your event. The speakers can be anywhere in the world. Just put them in front of a webcam and they are now part of the set. Add a few panels behind the desk or to the side to show slides, streaming video, charts and graphs. Add some branding, polling, white boards, some windows, a city skyline on a sunny day. Your design options are only limited by your imagination.
How about a virtual National Sales Meeting or POA. You can choose a virtual meeting hall, or maybe a college lecture hall environment. If you can’t bring your reps in to HQ for training, let’s gather them into a 3-D virtual training center so they are engaged, well-trained and ready for the new drug launch.
These 3-D meeting environments exist now and are ready to service your needs for whatever virtual events you have planned in 2021 and beyond. Your meeting attendees will be more engaged, more productive and you will have their attention longer.
L&M Healthcare Communications can easily demonstrate its 3-D Virtual Studio and recommend how to incorporate the right space into your meetings plan. Let us know when you are ready to see the 3-D Virtual Studio for yourself and re-energize your virtual meetings.
Now get some rest! You have five Zoom meetings tomorrow.
Thanks for reading!
Adam Margolis, CEO
Speakers Bureau 2021: The Expert Encounter
One of the most unfortunate side effects of the COVID disruption for our industry is the near total shut down of live meetings and events. As a result, meaningful face-to-face, educational interactions between physicians and their peers is now non-existent. The classic dinner or lunch event, with a speaker, PowerPoint deck and a reasonable meal accommodation, has essentially ground to a halt. But the need to educate your target audience continues.
You must meet your audience where they are, and not sit back and cross your fingers that the local live event will return soon. In the absence of a herd immunity via the vaccine, and the progressive march towards the spring months, the return of significant local live events is months or more away.
What are the alternatives to live events?
Small format, rapidly deployable events are the name of the game. Marketers can select from a wide range of Speakers who have agreed to make themselves available for personal, one-on-one presentations and discussions of approved, on-label content via Zoom and other communications tools.
Expert Encounters
Expert Encounters are clinical conversations between HCPs that allow for flexible timing, comfortable at home or in office setting, and when properly managed by a dedicated bureau staff, compliantly and technologically seamlessly executed. Representatives make these programs available to their HCP audience, and participate in each interaction. Scheduled through our Bureau web portal, STARS, the L&M coordinator quickly picks up the logistical planning for a seamless event.
In addition, these interactions are highly cost efficient. The absence of travel, meals, A/V and travel time compensation, maximizes the educational cost efficiency of each interaction. When properly marketed, Expert Encounters will offer the field-based sales team a unique program offering, and the HCP a customized, meaningful interaction with an approved speaker of their choosing in a completely compliant online venue.
L&M Healthcare has implemented hundreds of Expert Encounters since March 2020, with staff coverage of each and every event. We can assist you with a creative and rapidly deployable program to fill your HCPs educational needs.
Thanks for reading.
Adam Margolis, CEO, L&M Healthcare Communications
Speakers Bureau 2021: Return on Education
We all are very familiar with the term Return on Investment. (ROI) You put money into a given strategy and ultimately you hope that the strategy yields a return over time which is significantly greater than the investment you made. The same can be said for your educational Peer-to-Peer campaign. Only let’s call this a Return on Education – ROE. This article will discuss how investment in an educational campaign can be much harder to track to the dollar results, and often is buried within a myriad of other activities which you utilize to target your critical audience.
What if you quantified your results differently?
While increases in prescription volume following a program are a common benchmark, this metric does not have a 100% correlation. You also need to consider other Key Performance Indicators of a programs such as:
- Is your audience more aware of your Pharmaceutical or Biotech Company?
- Are people much more aware of the educational program and what it offers to them?
- What types of questions are you getting at your programs? Can they inform future educational events or product evolution?
- What types of attendees is your program drawing?
- Are you consistently getting good attendance?
- Is the audience drawn to your program offering as opposed to other competitive events?
Your educational campaign can serve to fulfill many aspects of your awareness goals without necessarily directly correlating directly to sales numbers. Peer-to-Peer programs support the overall brand plan and are a critical way to help your target HCPs to round out their treatment armamentaria. In a recent Skipta Quarterly HCP Survey, 93% of HCPs consider Peer-to-Peer education as an effective means of communicating new treatment information to them and 86% of physicians note that using online lectures will be important for disease education, treatment, and new drug information in 20211.
L&M offers a wide range of educational formats to support your brand needs. Through a variety of methods, we can assist with maximizing your ROE including:
- Audience generation and qualification
- Speaker-audience matching
- Advanced Responsive Architecture built pre and post program surveying
L&M Healthcare can implement tools to accelerate your Peer-to-Peer program in 2021.
Thanks for reading.
Adam Margolis
CEO, L&M Healthcare Communications
Zoom, Adobe, Teams, Go-to, Ring, FaceTime, all extremely valuable tools, have become indispensable for our work productivity on a daily basis in the age of COVID-19. Almost immediately after the lockdown was instituted in early 2020, these platforms became the new way we worked, socialized, celebrated holidays, and observed life’s milestone events. This article will discuss alternative virtual learning environments that will allow you to effectively implement your peer-to-peer education initiatives even as COVID-19 has recently spiked to alarming levels worldwide. The hard truth is that virtual communications will remain vital for the foreseeable future.
Our reluctance to travel on airplanes out of state or out of the country, coupled with our concern about sleeping in hotel rooms and meeting in large groups has effectively eliminated face-to-face interactions. In other words, Virtual meetings and events will continue to be the main form of peer-to-peer communications as we move through 2021. As a result, you must ensure that you are offering a virtual learning experience that is creative and compelling that will attract and engage your target audiences and motivate your speakers to deliver the best presentations possible.
Get Your Virtual Events off “The Grid”
Consider planning your programs throughout the day, not just at a typical dinner hour. No longer are HCPs interested in coming home from the office, clinic or hospital only to go straight to a computer or tablet to watch another interaction on screen. Like most of us, HCPs suffer “Zoom-fatigue”. Offering alternative formats will give them a very compelling reason to join you online.
Creative formats can include:
- 3-D Virtual Studio Broadcasts
- Virtual Studio Archived Programs
- Clinical Connections/Expert Encounter 1:1
- On Demand Expert Encounters
- Highly interactive Hub and Spoke Programs
- Bureaucast multi-office Programs
L&M Healthcare Communications is at the forefront of the industry in offering virtual programs like the ones listed above that accommodate HCPs when, where and how they want to engage. Our Peer-to-Peer formats range from the elegant and visually spectacular to the basic and just-in-time. We have successfully helped our clients pivot to the virtual world with stellar engagement results from the very earliest moments of the COVID-19 environment. As we enter 2021 let’s make sure every single interaction is meaningful and drives the awareness your brand deserves in a format your audience will appreciate.
Thanks for reading.
Adam Margolis, CEO, L&M Healthcare Communications
Speakers Bureau 2021: A High-Quality Speaker Program Depends on Having High Quality Speakers
There are a myriad of components that go into managing a successful Peer-to-Peer program in support of your brand. Technology, compliance and content remain vital components to ensure a program’s success. This article will explore how your approved speakers must be trained to skillfully engage with the material and the audience in a virtual environment.
Speakers are an extension of your team. They are contracted to provide a service to your company by delivering an effective and engaging presentation which elicits participation and interest from the audience. But like any other member of the team, they require effective skills training on all of the scenarios they may face. Right now, we are experiencing a seismic shift in the skill set required to execute Peer-to-Peer programs properly.
Hello? Can You Hear Me?
Like many of us in the age of COVID, speakers have been forced to interact with audiences using technology and virtual platforms that are new and largely unknown to them. While speakers have vast experience in front of a live audience using a laptop, slides, a screen, laser pointer and a podium, now they are using a small screen and a webcam in a remote location.
A live audience allowed for important interaction with the speaker through discussion, questions, body language and other visual cues. These days…we stare at a green light glowing over a faceless webcam while we fiddle with “sharing our screen,” or seeing people in a “waiting room,” or acknowledging a chat box question or hand raise. 🙋♀️✋
Be prepared…
In a future post in this series, you will learn about the various virtual program formats to consider. But in the meantime, how do we get our speakers ready for all of these new scenarios? Speakers need to be coached. They need to practice in real time in the environment. Rehearsals are critical to ensure that speakers are comfortable and confident with the buttons to be pushed and the formats they’ll face. Additionally, speaker skills and training need to evolve to deal with sound, camera, lighting, posture and voice to make the speakers the best they can be on screen.
Speaker training in the COVID and post-COVID age must evolve to provide robust training on how to be the most effective Virtual Program Speaker they can be.
L&M Healthcare can be your partner for highly effective speaker training, which readies your speakers for the new age of Virtual.
Thanks for reading!
Adam Margolis
CEO, L&M Healthcare Communications
As we round the final turn of this truly bizarre and challenging year of 2020, we must look back and commend ourselves on the monstrous pivot we all undertook, made necessary by the COVID pandemic1. We must also ensure that changes implemented as a result of COVID continue to enhance, evolve and refine how we roll out successful speaker programs in 2021. This article will provide you with specific actions steps you should consider to ensure continued success in your Speaker Bureau activities in 2021.
The lingering effects of a global pandemic, gradual economic recovery, political instability and re-thought personal priorities will be critical to keep in mind with regards to your efforts to support Peer-to-Peer education and communications moving forward.
Whether you’re an employee of a pharmaceutical or biotech firm or an agency support company, there are numerous critical issues to think about as we head into 2021. We have the luxury of hindsight to inform us that we must anticipate that a highly unsettled global environment will force adjustments to your once tried-and-true plans and tactics and an evolution of your thinking. A current and reactive Peer-to-Peer program will ultimately enable deeper engagement between your company and the health care community.
Several critical issues must be explored and integrated into your Peer-to-Peer programs:
1. Nurture your Key Opinion Leader and Speaker relationships:
• Provide opportunities for your speakers to participate in the educational process and evolve their critical speaking skills
2. Create content and learning environments which engage your target audience regardless of the educational venue:
• There are a myriad of new program formats being implemented which go beyond the Zoom grid, and which take advantage of different times of day and learning preferences for your critical audience.
3. Constantly evolve and innovate your data management and portal technology:
• Now is the time to ask yourself, is your Speakers Bureau portal the best, and most modern system it can be? Are there features you’ve longed to have, and still can’t seem to implement?
4. Work with legal, compliance and operations to maintain rigorous and standardized operational processes and workflow but leave room for creative thinking:
• View your extended team through the lens of keeping your program safe and compliant, while allowing for new programs and business rules to accommodate these radical new times. Provide evidence and plan to your professionals, so that the automatic answer isn’t always….no.
5. Remain highly compliant through accurate transparency and reporting:
• The current environment poses a myriad of challenges, not the least of which are compliance and reporting issues. You must remain vigilant about sign in sheets, expense reporting, and timely payments. There are some amazing technologies, which represent relatively simple solutions, to critical problems.
Watch this space in the coming weeks for additional posts on this topic. We at L&M Healthcare Communications will share our expertise to help you address these vital changes for you and your clients.
Thanks for reading.
Adam Margolis
CEO, L&M Healthcare Communications
