Creating awareness about a new paradigm in cancer treatment.

Inflection Point

A pharmaceutical company was expecting their clinically-effective cancer therapy to be approved for use as an earlier line of treatment. The pending approval would increase the number of clinically-eligible patients, but those patients would have a number of possible treatment options. Knowing their therapy was a complex new paradigm, our client wanted to develop a patient education campaign to increase patient openness to this new class of treatment, and ultimately increase the share of eligible patients receiving the company’s product.

How We Helped

We created a robust omnichannel education campaign to support patient understanding of the treatment and encourage patients to explore this option with their healthcare teams.

To arrive at the most relevant educational content, we engaged patients, caregivers, healthcare professionals, advocacy organizations, and our clients in a multi-day co-creation workshop. Together, we built tangible drafts of patient education that addressed patients’ and caregivers’ top-of-mind concerns. The outputs from co-creation became the foundation of the campaign, informing everything from branding to specific wording.

The campaign was delivered under significant time pressure, and effective collaboration was critical to its on-time delivery. We worked closely with legal, medical, and regulatory teams to translate complex medical information into content that was both compliant and patient-friendly. We collaborated with our client’s in-house development teams to build a website and partnered with the media buying agency to drive traffic to the sites across a wide variety of channels. We worked closely with a patient engagement agency to integrate a patient-to-patient mentorship program.

Outcomes

We delivered a multi-faceted, multi-year campaign to reach patients in a variety of ways:

• A campaign brand identity rooted in patients’ educational needs
• A patient-friendly website with educational content, visuals, and videos
• Materials for the field team to share with their HCP customers.

Since the campaign’s launch, website engagement rates have consistently exceeded industry benchmarks. In head-to-head comparisons, 64% of patients and caregivers described themselves as very/extremely open to the therapy after viewing our materials, compared to only 54% who had seen equivalent information from hospital and government sources. Patients and caregivers also rated our materials as easier to understand (98% vs. 86%).