PR’s Top Pros Talk: Ryan Lilly

Ryan Lilly, Senior Vice President and Managing Director of MWW Health, describes the dos and don’ts of building a healthcare practice at an agency. Ryan explains how healthcare communicators are continuing to lead with a value-based care approach. Ryan also discusses the importance of patient privacy.

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TRANSCRIPT:

DOUG: Ryan, you have the unique experience of building a health practice at an agency, and now you’re getting a chance to do it again at Mike World Wide. What would you say is the key thing to keep top of mind when trying to build a health practice within an agency?

RYAN: Yeah, I think it’s a great question, you know, and an answer that probably looks different today than it did 2 or 3 years ago. You know, I think balance is really the key when you’re talking about modern health care, comms and marketing. Health care absolutely is complex. It’s highly regulated. It requires specialization to sort of understand and all the nuance, all the pitfalls, you know, with that said, you know, you can’t approach it purely from that lens, you have to let some creativity in as well. So, I think, you know, focusing on that specialization and the ability to get in the weeds and speak the language, but not allowing that to get you stuck into sort of because we’ve always done it that way methodology, you know, where you can still push the creative envelope a little bit.

DOUG: Are there any markers, say three months out, six months out, a year out, that you should be targeting if you’re at an agency looking to develop this type of practice or in any kind of vertical?

RYAN: In my experience, inherently your early days building are going to be spent doing more pursuit, doing more outreach, going to more conferences, shaking hands, kind of some of that old school prospecting. But I think in parallel, it’s absolutely critical that you do brand building, you do eat your own dogfood and very quickly, hopefully within six months, 12 months, you know, you start to see the ratio shift a little bit from, you know, full out pursuit to driving a more consistent inbound pipeline. And that, you know, that will come with brand reputation, brand equity is validation of the work you’re doing.

DOUG: Health care obviously has been going through a transformation and how does that specifically affect the communications function?

RYAN: Even before the pandemic, health care was sort of in the midst of really a generational transformation. You know, really what I’m talking about is the financial model on the provider side of medicine, where we are moving increasingly towards value-based reimbursement, value based outcomes. And we’re looking for value instead of volume, right? Traditionally, in a fee for service model, we run as many tests as your insurer will pay for and we’re going to get reimbursed for those, you know, and that really sets the foundation for how the health system operates across some verticals. Um, you know, so now we are moving towards value-based care, which is a tremendously positive thing for anyone that’s a patients. And we all are. Um, you know, so I think that was already happening. And then layer on top of that, a global health pandemic which really brought 20, 30 to health care a decade earlier, you saw mass adoption of telehealth. We saw digital therapeutics become mainstream. We saw Operation Warp Speed bring a vaccine to market on a global scale in months where that would have traditionally taken years.

So, I think, you know, the combination of, of the market is evolving, the industry is evolving itself, but also bars have been reset in terms of what stakeholders expect. But really across, you know, whether it’s health system executives, pharma execs, physicians, nurses, everyone sort of expectations have been reset, I think.

DOUG: Interesting you mentioned value-based care. Probably five years ago we did zero projects related to value-based care. Since then, they make up a significant portion of our portfolio explaining that to the public. One issue that’s been a challenge for health care communicators or an excuse, depending on your point of view, is the fact that it’s a regulated industry. Are things that you can do within that risk averse environment? No one would suggest pushing the envelope, but can you still do good communications in that risk adverse environment? And how do you go about that?

RYAN: This kind of goes back to that theme of balance for me, right? Because the risk aversion is in many ways warranted. It is highly regulated. We are dealing with personal health information protected data. The stakes are high. Whether we’re talking about, you know, a patient’s survival or well-being or a DOJ investigation or, you know, getting, running afoul of the FDA. These are all very. Real things that you have to keep in mind. Um, with that said, you can’t fall into this, we’re going to reuse the playbook over and over. We’ve solved this once and then we’re going to do it a thousand times. I think you do that by forcing yourself to ask, you know, why? Why are we doing it? Who’s the beneficiary? Who are we talking to? And increasingly I think we’re taking communicators or taking that all the way down the path to the patient, to the human level, you know, which forces you to get out of the weeds of the regulatory of the science, of the bits and bytes and speak a little more to the human impact. And I think anyone that’s in health care comms hopefully is interested in what that human impact looks like.

DOUG: Just want to clear up and get your take on a couple of quick regulatory things. Obviously marketing off label is not a cool thing to do and things that affect patients’ privacy rights, that would be a place that you can’t go as well. What are some other don’t do’s that people need to be aware of if they’re trying to even be more aggressive with communications?

RYAN: I think always protecting the patient and privacy is, you know, bubbles up to the top really quickly, you know, and you sort of mentioned, I think there’s increasingly a number of ways that you can violate that sort of privacy, whether that’s through data mining or, you know, non-ethical use of that data or just exposing a patient. You know, I think often this happens in a way that we think is veiled enough and then it turns out that it might not be. So, I think no matter what, do no harm, protect the patient, protect the people has to be sort of the North Star for any health care comes from.

DOUG: Do no harm is the hippocratic oath of PR as well. You talk a lot about a patient first approach. Can you explain what you mean by that?

RYAN: You know, again, I think it’s not losing sight of the end result. Right? So even if you are a B2B technology vendor that is selling into hospitals and health systems around workforce management or physician credentialing or whatever it may be, you know, really these are operational tasks. They’re practical problems, these are solutions. But at the end of the day, those solutions are empowering the human capital, the physicians, the clinicians to provide care to patients. Right. And I think if you look at almost any health care brand, you can connect the dots to to the end result, which is hopefully improving quality of care and taking care of patients. And I think by doing that, it forces us again to sort of get out of the weeds, you know, drop some of the lingo. Let’s talk, let’s dumb this down and tell a story that is really meaningful to a larger audience, not just a handful of admins and hospitals and health systems.

DOUG: Yeah. And obviously the pandemic made health care communications even more important, where I remember saying to my team, there’s no such thing as a non-pandemic related story because everything was related when it first hit. Um, we also find that the TV producers constantly say health care is their number one interest when it comes to subject. More than 81% of them said that in our last survey. Anything that you see, if you look into the crystal ball in the future that health care communicators should be thinking about maybe putting more emphasis on as we wrap up the conversation.

RYAN: Pushing the creative envelope a little bit. Right. And again, it’s balanced because, you know, this is one of the biggest challenges I’ve found is, you know, how can we push our clients a little bit on the creative front, but also knowing that if we cross that line, we lose credibility, we put them at risk. So, I think increasingly knowing how to sort of toe that line, um, and how to sort of borrow PR and marketing lessons from other industries, right? And you could look at banking or finance, you know, complex, highly regulated, you know, so I think continuing to push in that direction, you know, while still acknowledging that the risks are real, the guardrails are real, and they’re there for a reason. But we can’t allow that to be an excuse to just do the same old thing over and over and over again.

DOUG: Yeah, that’s a great point. And you’ve clearly shared that your approach isn’t to do the same old thing over and over again. Thanks so much for spending time with us.

RYAN: Thanks for having me, Doug. Appreciate it.