My name is Wendy Balter and as the President of Cadent Medical Communications, I wanted to create a blog series where I can post ideas, observations, links, and insights for you on a regular basis. Readers will find opportunities opened, assumptions challenged, and solutions offered. I hope you’ll visit often, and tell your friends and colleagues to come visit too.
I believe what the medical communications industry needs most today isn’t another crystal ball that shows the future—we already have plenty of pundits talking about that. At just about any clinical congress you’ll hear speakers describe what tomorrow’s medicine will look like: precision, individually targeted, potentially curative. Very expensive. Very valuable. We have a good sense of where things are going.
What we need are great ways to get there. That’s what I’ll be writing about. That’s why I’m calling it Vision 2020. Because the year 2020 is right around the corner and we need to be ready for the decade that follows.
I came to this insight when, after a very long stint within a major communications conglomerate, I finally stepped outside its corporate walls and looked around for new directions. I saw a world in the midst of dynamic change. Joining Cadent Medical Communications as Managing Director, I’ve been fortunate to tap into a new and broad set of insights built on real world data analytics. I’ve been able to take a fresh, zero-based look at the industry and the way we go about influencing medical choices. It’s exciting.
It’s clear to me now that to prepare for the next decade we need a better lens with which to see as well as better tools to deal with the realities that surround us, both opportunities and barriers, on the path to and through the 2020s. Realities like:
- Too few primary care providers trying to cope with an exponentially expanding medical knowledge base they’re nevertheless accountable for
- Multicultural health consumers confronting a health system that doesn’t know how to communicate with them
- Adherence as an afterthought
- Silos separating diagnostics, devices, drugs, and delivery networks
- Survival of the sickest, and the strains on the system that imposes
- Health records and registries that don’t intercommunicate
- Millennials taking over as the middlemen delivering medicine
For many of these, real answers lie in real insight and real-world data such as we’ve never had before. This blog series will be about putting these realities into sharp focus so we can bring to bear powerful new tools to address them. It’s about how innovators are transforming peer-to-peer medical communication in myriad, often magnificent ways.
Welcome. I trust you’ll find it interesting here.
