Geek, Nerd, Techie: Simpson Healthcare Executives, LLC, a Global Leader in Biopharmaceutical Consulting, Plans to Continue to Build Knowledge and Skills in Organizing and Educating Healthcare Providers

“Our purpose is to support our clients to share the scientific story of the diseases they touch and therapies discovered for all in need.”

Marketing healthcare services and products presents unique challenges compared to other consumer goods and services because it deals with health behaviors as opposed to just purchasing behaviors. Health marketing includes awareness and education but also behavior adoption or change, which are difficult and can take time. Healthcare marketing is also influenced by a changing population and related problems, advances in research and other external factors.

Simpson Healthcare Executives, LLC, a disruptive scientific communications agency, is committed to providing the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical diagnostic and device industries with a wide range of services in support of overall marketing strategies. The products and services provided enhance a company’s value for the benefit of the stakeholders, while simultaneously disseminating new biomedical knowledge for the benefit of healthcare providers and their patients. Simpson’s high-quality, creative, strategic solutions are delivered with unparalleled customer service and include brand strategy, KOL development, advisory boards, speaker bureaus, live/virtual speaker training, content development, interactive patient case videos, sales force training, and community live events.

Simpson was established by Kelly Simpson-Angelini in 1998 and is headquartered in Old Lyme, Connecticut.

Kelly Simpson-Angelini, Simpson Healthcare, CEO spoke exclusively to The Silicon Review. Below is an excerpt.

Q. Why was the company set up? And how did you expand your company and its offerings over the years?

Simpson Healthcare Executives is a disruptive scientific agency currently entering its 21st year of business. In an ever-evolving healthcare landscape, we believe that providing great, connected brand and disease education to physicians and patients is essential to advancing the story of science that our clients need to tell. We have had the opportunity to work with heritage biopharmaceutical clients including Pfizer, Shire, AstraZeneca, Takeda, Janssen, Genzyme, Sunovion, Rhythm, Merck, and Genentech, to name a few, having focused our innovations on supporting them in the development of new therapies.

The scientific expertise and disruptive thinking methods among members of our organization span across a broad array of many major disease categories, including respiratory, oncology, cardiovascular, immunology, rare diseases, gastrointestinal, adult vaccines, severe asthma, and more.

Q. Building a culture of sustainability inside an organization is very important to maintain a reputation in the global market. How is it true about your company?

The Simpson Healthcare culture is central to our success, inclusive of growing our relationships with each other and with our clients. We have a formal Staff Experience Committee, led by our team of Senior Vice Presidents, with appointed multi-disciplinary committee members who meet weekly. Our team members are surveyed each week to measure their satisfaction with feeling supported and balanced. We believe we have the right people and we value the experiences that we share with each other and with our clients, as we build strong and lasting relationships. One quality that each person in our agency shares is that our team believes in what their purpose is and then works every day with each other to discover how we can be even more impactful in what we do. Aligned in our purpose, we have found that our decisions catalyze changes that make our world a better place to live. We strive to foster strong internal connections among our team members as we learn with and from each other.

Q. What do you feel are the reasons behind your company’s reputation?

When you build a company from scratch, you build three things: products and services, your people, and your culture. The Simpson Healthcare management team has historically prioritized company culture and we understand that great culture lends to an increased capacity to birth smarter disruptive innovations into the marketplace that set us apart from every other scientific agency. As such, Simpson Healthcare has been featured on the CT Best Places to Work List from 2017-2019, in addition to being named one of the 50 Best Workplaces to Watch by CIO Bulletin, 50 Leading Companies of the Year by The Silicon Review, Company of the Year: Business Services at the Stevie Awards for Women in Business, The Companies with the Most Disruptive Innovation by Insights Success Magazine, the 20 Most Admired Companies List by The CEO Views, and Business Excellence Award in Life Sciences PR Strategy at the 2018 Business Excellence Awards, to name a few.

Q. Are there any factors that have played key roles in shaping your organization’s road map?

We believe that the way to be most impactful is to focus on the delivery of positive experiences to our colleagues, our clients, and the patients—keeping in mind that the real value in healthcare comes from helping patients to live better. A few years ago, under my guidance, our leadership team revisited the mission and vision of the agency and transformed this into a purpose statement, one that we live by every day. Our purpose is to support our clients to share the scientific story of the diseases they touch and therapies discovered for all in need.

At Simpson Healthcare, we embrace our core values: maintain passion about making a difference by pushing the boundaries to create unique strategic value for our company, our clients, and our community; keep it real by developing strong, authentic relationships internally and externally with our clients; look to the future by never losing sight of the larger context and bigger opportunity; know we are better together and dedicated to collaborative teamwork to ensure the highest quality work product; and finally, we bring our best selves to work every day, which means we are committed to achieving personal balance and strength, both at work and in our own lives.

Q. Where do you see you and your company a couple of years from now?

The core stories of disease, diagnosis, and new therapies will continue to be new, disruptive, and abundant. Many organizations across healthcare are looking to better understand how they can harness disruptive thinking to develop their brands, strengthen their pipelines, and provide the most benefit for patients. We see huge opportunity to continue to build knowledge and skills in organizing and educating healthcare providers—we understand that advancements in science and technology will only continue to evolve. We will have more brands to build and more ways to explain them. We believe we will be supporting new types of products like gene therapies that are simple once in a lifetime treatment. A personalized and individualized approach to disease education and ‘my brand’ will be something to simplify and focus on. We are proud to support our clients so that the best therapeutic treatments may be available that can improve the health outcomes of patients in need.

Kelly Simpson-Angelini: An Entrepreneur at Heart

Kelly Simpson-Angelini, founder, is the Chief Executive/Strategy Officer of Simpson Healthcare Executives, LLC. She is a very experiences-focused leader, and this intentionality drives effectiveness and efficiency within her people and in the work that they deliver into the marketplace. She believes that brands of the future must be more personalized, connected, and precise as we prioritize

the overarching goal of healthcare: helping people live better lives. Shaping brand behavior and ensuring positive brand experiences for patients requires healthcare teams to tap into their innovative potential to uncover what physicians and healthcare consumers really want and to deliver that into the marketplace.

Kelly is dedicated to pioneering and stewarding smarter physician education experiences, including the creation of BeliefMap TM, a new product launched this year, and of future health forums—where world experts unite to explore global datasets, shifts, health policies, and patient needs for the coming decades. As a senior executive team leader and life coach, Kelly values growing meaningful relationships among her internal team and clients. She actively helps teams to discover and live their purpose through shared positive experiences that refine and shape internal beliefs.

“In an ever-evolving healthcare landscape, we believe that providing great, connected brand and disease education to physicians and patients is essential to advancing the story of science that our clients need to tell.”