Problem:
A mid-sized biopharma created a new Health IT center of excellence (CoE) to better monitor, understand and coordinate responses to the evolving HIT landscape, including vendors, partnerships, technologies, regulations and industry practices. However, most of the senior leadership team was unfamiliar with the basics of health IT and its growing impact on the biopharma industry and its customers, and were unsure of how their functional areas should engage with and take advantage of the new CoE’s expertise.
Approach:
The CoE leader engaged Health Accelerators to develop an internal communications strategy and plan to increase awareness of the CoE’s expertise, scope and value among key stakeholders within the company, and create a ‘burning platform’ to underscore the urgency of mitigating health IT’s impact on the company and its most important customers.
Health Accelerators began by conducting interviews with the leaders of key functions in the organization, including Marketing, Sales and Managed Health Systems. We synthesized their perspectives about key business challenges, and demonstrated how many of these challenges were directly or indirectly connected to health IT. Using the company’s preferred approach we then developed an organizational communications and change management strategy, key messages, internal branding, and program roadmap that included town hall meetings, explainer videos, presentations, position papers, articles, interviews and case studies that the CoE used to engage employees, executives and brand leadership about the opportunities and risks of health IT.
Results:
Similar to the rise of Managed Care, the Internet and Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) in previous decades, health IT was both very important and very misunderstood by the leadership of this biopharma company. We partnered closely with CoE staff to systematically and quickly create awareness, modular education and a clear path for action for executives, brand teams and healthcare organization (HCO) account directors. We stripped out the health IT jargon and reframed opportunities and challenges in a language that the audience already understood.