“Who are our patients, and what do they really need?”

These are essential questions that all teams approaching patient initiatives should be able to answer, with real insights to back that answer up.

This week, I had the pleasure of meeting with Matt Eagles, who is the Head of Patient Engagement at Havas Lynx Manchester. He is a passionate, dedicated and talented individual who is determined to truly reshape how we view “patients” and how we approach our communications to them. He has been asked to speak at numerous internal and external industry events, where he has been able to share this vision. In just the hour that I spent talking with him about his role and aspirations, I was truly inspired and filled with new ideas about ways to get our ideation processes going in the initiation of these types of projects. Side note: he also happens to have Parkinson’s disease, but he will be the first to tell you that this doesn’t define him by any means, as diseases do not define the patients that live with them, it is just one of their many characteristics.

First of all, he was sure to make the point that the way we typically define “patients” is not always accurate. For example, on Dictionary.com:

First of all, as he pointed out to me, and has pointed out to many people before, not all patients “suffer” or are defined as being “sick people.” On the contrary, they do in fact have a voice and play an active and important role in their own health outcomes. Not only that, but they are the true experts in their own condition, they have stories to tell, and provide invaluable insights.

Second of all, there is a real need to do the due diligence to dig in to their lifestyles, and find out what they truly need from us in order to effectively reach them. At the end of the day, what we all want is to improve patient’s lives, and in order to do that, we need to find out what they need, and deliver to the best of our ability.

Coincidentally, I was also able to attend an extremely insightful LXAcademy session this week on “Writing a Better Content Strategy.” What’s interesting here, was that a there was a very similar takeaway during this session. Not only that “Content is king,” but…

Of course, the content needs to be good, that’s a given. But furthermore, for any targeted campaign to truly succeed, the content needs to be relevant to the audience. In order to create this relevant content, we need to understand our audience, their lifestyle, and what they really need.