The Diagnostic Odyssey: What Healthcare Gets Wrong About Patients

So Stephanie, you indicated that your role is all enabling medical fair professionals to have better scientific engagement.

So many of our gurus out there are at early stages of innovation.

So can you share with us why this is so important and how it helps make an impact on the patients they serve?

Yeah, I think one of the most important things you can do in our line of work in health care, which is a sensitive area.

I always used to say when I'm precepting students, we are dealing with people that are sick, meaning that they may have symptoms.

And so the importance of really having empathy and connection and patient engagement and HCP engagement is top of mind.

For HCP specifically or healthcare professionals, we develop medicines and therapies and the doctors, the pharmacists, the nurses, They all go through continuing education, but clearly they can't keep up with all the new things that are happening.

And so in medical affairs, our role really is to translate the complex scientific concepts and data points into real world clinical applications so that as clinicians are making decisions with and for their patients, that they're using all the evidence possible to be informed about what the best approach should be.

So having, you know, Great scientific exchange leads to all kinds of new things, new hypotheses, new research venues or ventures, new understanding in terms of safety profiles.

And so it's just super important that scientific engagement and patient engagement go hand in hand and that we really are thinking, not losing our why, which is really helping to change lives.

Yeah, I love that, right? As a veteran of many years in this business myself, I always considered a privilege and always try to think about the patients that my customers are serving.

Is that how you feel?

Yes.

I think we have a sort of, for lack of a better word, a sacred responsibility to honor that relationship.

Because a lot of times we're meeting people at one of their most vulnerable times in life.

And so if you are working in an industry that really, for the most part, we have profit models that say we are essentially profiting off of the sort of illness of someone else.

I think it's important to keep at the heart why we investigate and research new diseases and really try to change lives.

That's essentially...

the crux of it.

We're trying to alleviate suffering and change lives.

And in doing so, we just have to be, you know, we have to really approach that with care.

And one way, you know, the way we honor that is to, you know, build trustworthiness, making sure that we're doing everything in an ethical and responsible manner, that we're being thoughtful around how we engage and how we bring people to those therapies and how we support them too, right? Like there's lots of folks that get on therapies and sometimes, you know, I say, sometimes the treatment is just a treatment.

It doesn't erase some of the other things that might be happening.

And sometimes your symptoms don't go from a hundred to zero.

You're still living with a disease.