GLOBALHealthPR

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Last week, Frannie Marmorstein and I were thrilled to head up to New York City to attend the PR News Platinum Awards Luncheon. We attended on behalf of Spectrum and GLOBALHealthPR, our partnership of international health care communications specialists, as a finalist in the “Pro Bono” category for our work on The Progeria Research Foundation’s (PRF) “Find the Other 150 Campaign”. And we won! This recognition, among the best of the best in the industry, was an honor for everyone involved in the campaign, and hopefully it will inspire others in the industry to leverage global collaboration for a cause they are passionate about.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Progeria, it is an extremely rare, rapid aging disease that causes children to age prematurely. Children with Progeria die of heart attacks or strokes at an average age of 13 years, so time is not on our side as we work to identify children around the world.

But this award isn’t the first time an important win has come out of this campaign. Every time a child is identified as a result of the campaign, it’s a win: a win for the child, because he or she will get the unique medical care he or she needs, a win for the child’s family, and a win for PRF, because these children help to advance research toward treatments and the cure for Progeria. We’ve identified 26 to date, a 48% increase in just two years (and 2 more since we submitted our entry for the award)!

We’ve blogged about the “Find the Other 150” campaign before. But the results keep getting better and better. In October 2009, only 54 children living with Progeria had been identified around the world. But experts believed that another 150 children around the world had not yet been identified or diagnosed. GLOBALHealthPR approached PRF about launching a global awareness campaign to search for unidentified children with Progeria. When the campaign began, PRF’s medical director said that if even ONE child was identified, the campaign would be a success. No one expected that we would be so successful so quickly.

So here we are two years and 26 children later (now totaling 80 children around the world with Progeria), and our campaign is going strong. Receiving the PR News Platinum Award at last week’s luncheon was a wonderful reward for our great work. But this campaign is nowhere close to finished. We will continue to work with our GLOBALHealthPR partners until we accomplish what we set out to do – Find the Other 150. And every time a new child is found and gets the support they need, that’s a win for us.

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The evolution of Health 2.0 in our data-driven world calls for a shift in the way health organizations locate and communicate with their target audiences. While health challenges abound in local communities and on a global scale, so does the potential within the communication tools and technology that we hold.

Spectrum’s team of health communicators from across the globe will converge in Washington, D.C. on May 18th from 9-10:30 a.m. ET to present data and reveal insight from a global listening program. The listening program was conducted in 11 countries to assess the impact and conversation around malaria. During tomorrow’s event, the International Healthcare Social Media Summit team will discuss the implications for the data found, as well as offer insight into strategies for using digital tools to benefit national and international healthcare organizations today. For more information about the summit and to register, please visit the event page. You can also view live-streaming of the summit or follow the conversation on Twitter: #ihsms.

We are thrilled to be working with our GLOBALHealthPR network on this first of its kind event. Bringing the partners together, in one centralized place, to explore the ins and outs of social media is something that I’m personally really excited to be a part of. In the days following the event, Spectrum is hosting GLOBALHealthPR’s 2011 Annual General Meeting. Network partners from South America to Europe to the Asia Pacific will meet at our D.C. office to discuss network business, exchange best practices and enjoy each other’s company.

Stay tuned for photos, tweets, videos and more from the IHSMS and the annual meeting…

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April 2nd – 3rd, GLOBALHealth PR agency heads, including Spectrum’s CEO and Chair of GLOBALHealthPR John Seng, met for the annual face-to-face planning meeting. Here is John’s take on the trip.ghpr

I visited Italy with my colleague Rosalba Cano for the 8th Annual General Meeting of our GLOBALHealthPR partners, and hardly two days after the meeting ended in Venice, the earthquake struck the town of L’Aquila, which is much closer to Rome. (Martin Slater, the president of our Italy partner firm Noesis, suggested the Italian Red Cross among reliable relief organizations for readers interested in supporting assistance efforts.)

From Japan to the US to Latin America and throughout Europe, our partners connected to discuss our individual company performances for 2008, our prospects for 2009 and beyond, and to take a closer look at the different pharmaceutical approval and marketing regulatory environments for each of the 10 markets covered by GLOBALHealthPR worldwide.

For readers who don’t know, GLOBALHealthPR is the largest health-focused network of independent public relations firms that collaborate on an international basis. Spectrum Washington is the network’s headquarters.

I co-founded the organization in 2001, incorporated in the UK, and have served as chair for three years. A native of Mexico, Rosalba works closely and expertly with our team in Washington to coordinate all network services and marketing aspects.

In Venice, we were particularly excited to welcome two new partners, – PR Partners of Mexico and Tino – Projetos em Comunicação of Brazil. These two agencies join what I truly believe are best-in-class firms specializing in health care from Argentina, Spain, France, UK, Germany, Japan, and of course, Italy and the U.S.

Inspired by the winding canals of Venice, we adopted “Navigating the Challenges, Delivering the Opportunities” as our theme, which in reality spoke more to how the GLOBALHealthPR partners plan to compete successfully on behalf of clients and our own businesses in the face of the full-blow worldwide recession. Happily, each firm gave realistic yet positive overviews of the challenges in each market, and nevertheless, cautiously optimistic forecasts for pharmaceutical marketing communications needs.

A common trend across all international markets was the need for continued education about major disease states, and the opportunity to help global scale health industry and patient advocacy organizations develop overarching strategies as well as offer practical, in-market media knowhow that our competitors claim but really don’t deliver. (We know because many of our agency principals, including yours truly, have worked for the big-name PR firms.) This communications savvy applies increasingly in the digital media zone.

We also reviewed the new GLOBALHealthPR web site, as well as the all-new, second edition of The Global Guide to Pharma Marketing Codes, an easy-to-use reference to help international product management teams avoid costly and embarrassing Rx marketing communications faux pas.

We closed with a commitment to work more closely together in networking with clients in common such as Pfizer, Merck, AstraZeneca and Lilly, and reaching out to prospective clients to communicate what we know we can offer in terms of superior value due to our independent nature and commitment to health care. Hence, our tagline “A Better Way.” Watch this space on a regular basis, and I’ll keep you updated.

Finally, again our sympathies, prayers and sentiments go out to our friends in Italy as their fellow countrymen begin rebuild their lives and worlds amid too much sorrow this past week.