Healthcare companies with visible evidence and expertise will win under Labour

This week, many global business leaders who were invited to the government’s investment summit also made space to meet Sir Kier Starmer as they ready their companies for a potential change in political power next year.

There’s good reason. Latest opinion polls put Labour’s lead over the Conservatives at 23 points (YouGov, 16 Nov) and it appears that a Labour win is increasingly likely.

Sir Kier Starmer meeting with global business leaders this week

So how should healthcare leaders and entrepreneurs adapt their business strategies to give their organisation the best chance of being successful under a Labour government? And how can effective healthcare PR help?

The Labour priorities

Labour’s shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, could well be running the Department of Health and Social Care by this time next year - that would put him in charge of 83% of the UK’s £280.7bn healthcare expenditure. This week, in an interview for the i podcast, he said:

I want those entrepreneurs that are coming up with cutting-edge treatments and technologies to know that when they come up with a great idea that can deliver better outcomes for patients and better value for taxpayers’ money, they’re not going to struggle to get through the front door of the NHS.

Why is it, for example, that where a treatment or technology is proven to work, proven to deliver better outcomes for patients and proven to deliver good value for taxpayers’ money in one NHS trust, do those innovators then have to try and tout their wares one by one around every other NHS trust?”

This sounds like great news for innovative healthcare companies who have been frustrated by the slow pace at which their proven technology is being adopted.

However, national adoption could also reduce the spread of opportunities available for a UK health tech sector comprising 4,300 companies - where 80% of the £30bn revenue is generated by just 400 companies and only 20% reaches the other 3,900. Competition will become tighter and opportunities fewer and further between.

In this post, I’ll explain why, to ensure the best chance of seizing those opportunities that do arise - and to avoid getting left behind - health tech, med tech and private healthcare businesses should work to establish a widely visible evidence base that demonstrates improved patient outcomes and reduced costs, while also forging a position as expert leaders in their field. I’ll also describe how you can do this.

The power of a widely visible evidence base

In recent years, universities have driven academics to increase their focus on the effective dissemination of their studies, rather than risking building knowledge for its own sake. As Imperial College London puts it: “Dissemination of your research is critical if the knowledge gained from the research is to have an impact.” They also point to how it can help generate funding for further research.

The same principle applies to evidence dissemination for health tech, med tech, pharma and other healthcare organisations. The only way your evidence base will have tangible impact on the success of your business - and, by extension, on people’s health - is if it finds its way into the hands of the right people. That’s where strategic healthcare PR and communications is vital.

Earlier this month, Evergreen PR won the CIPR’s ‘Healthcare PR Campaign of the Year’ for our Getting Veterans the Care they Deserve campaign. The campaign was recognised for driving a 645% increase in the number of GP practices signing up for the Royal College of GP’s ‘Veteran Friendly’ practices accreditation programme (spoiler alert, we beat that record this Remembrance Day!). A big driver in gaining widespread support for that programme has been our effective communication of evidence from the University of Chester that this programme improves patient outcomes. We have been disseminating this evidence periodically for the last 18 months, working with the BBC, NHS England, various healthcare professional associations and a wide variety of top tier healthcare trade media outlets, as well as featuring it prominently across the programme’s landing page on the RCGP website and on its social media channels. The growth in the success of the programme since that point has been applauded by the College, NHS England and the Government.

We had similar success with our Diabetes Referrals at-Scale campaign for Meddbase, which was based on a pilot project with the North Yorkshire and Humber Integrated Care Board (ICB) and looked at whether Meddbase’s clinical software could increase patient engagement with the NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme (NDPP). With that project, we helped the researchers to identify the kind of evidence that would most interest the media, stakeholders and other NHS ICBs and our integrated campaign led to that evidence being disseminated across 13 high quality articles, driving 1,300 visitors to a landing page housing an evaluation and learnings report, attracting 100+ organic NHS decision-maker attendees to a webinar and, ultimately, leading to sales to NHS ICBs and talks with other commercial and public sector partners.

Establishing an evidence base that connects your solution with the priorities of your buyers is vital. Wes Streeting has highlighted patient outcomes and saving tax payers money, the NHS waiting lists are a huge priority and ICBs have been tasked with reducing health inequalities, but each audience group will have their own priorities too. At Evergreen PR, we use our behaviour science-driven MERTO Framework to uncover the priority audiences that can affect the decision, the priority messages that will activate them and the most effective route (the priority activity) to winning their attention and moving them down the sales funnel at speed.

Building sector leadership

As mentioned earlier in this article, the majority of health tech revenue goes to a relatively small group of companies and, with Labour floating the possibility of a national NHS technology adoption process, that pool could get even smaller.

In order to minimise risk, it is likely to be those health organisations that are already recognised as leaders in their field that get the biggest and best nationwide NHS opportunities. So how can you start to establish your organisation as a leader so that you’re as well-placed as possible to be among those considered?

As this TED talk asserts, the first rule of leadership is ‘It’s Not About You’. To be recognised as leaders in their field, health tech, med tech and private healthcare companies need to spend less time looking inwards and more time looking outwards. That means less time thinking about how to describe sophisticated (and sometimes quite dull) product features and USPs and more time unravelling the big issues and identifying the valuable knowledge held by the company that others could truly learn from.

We took this approach with our Virtual Physiotherapy Campaign for Ascenti, which was based around two white paper reports - one on the impact of home working on MSK health and a second providing a comparison of the effectiveness of virtual physio vs in-person treatment. The home workers report contained guidance for HR and People teams on implementing healthy home working set-ups, while the second provided recommendations to the physiotherapy industry on when and how virtual physio could be best implemented. The leadership positioning allowed Ascenti to spread its message far more widely, securing some 40 articles - including The Guardian, Business Insider, Huffington Post and many others - as well as a placement with respected industry body, the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy. Ultimately, it led to tangible revenue, as Ascenti secured 10 new high value contracts in the PMI and Occupational Health markets as a result of the conversations initiated by this activity.

Being a leader healthcare organisation requires understanding the big healthcare problems, identifying your company’s role in the solutions and providing a valuable contribution to the wider discussions.

Everything that Labour is saying suggests that it will be those healthcare companies that it trusts to improve patient outcomes and reduce costs that will be first to the big opportunities. Making your company’s evidence and expertise as credible and widely visible as possible will be paramount.

At Evergreen PR, our team has a long history of working with healthcare scientists, researchers and technologists and supporting them to distil and disseminate messaging that leads to their target outcomes. Would you like to understand more how we could support you and your organisation with this? Contact me (Leigh) on 0114 437 2487 or email leigh@evergreenpr.co.uk for a free consultation.

Leigh Greenwood Chart.PR is the founder and managing director of Evergreen PR, the healthcare PR agency that drives tangible outcomes.