Move over, Hollywood—the real stars of the show are the ones helping patients in hospitals across the country.
That’s the premise behind Community Health Media (CHM), a medical education and insights company that gives community physicians and key opinion leaders the celebrity treatment, making them front in center in its content aimed at distributing physician perspectives on clinical trials, therapies and treatment options.
Through peer-to-peer interviews, multiple podcast series, live events and more, the company merges market research with high-quality content to bring “credible medical expertise” to the table, CEO Seth Laderman explained in an interview with Fierce.
Laderman landed in the health communications sector after a lengthy career in the entertainment world, with his work spanning from reality television production to an EVP role at Lionsgate. He founded CMH alongside entrepreneur and marketing exec Hugo Cubias as well as Marcus Allen, who is known for co-founding Washington, D.C.-based R&B music festival Broccoli City. Together, the founders brought their entertainment and production experience to the healthcare space, where physicians are “the talent.”
“If we can make these physicians feel a little bit more comfortable in their surroundings, if we can make them feel better with how they look and how they feel when they’re having these conversations, we’re going to get better conversations,” Laderman said. “We equate them to talent on a television show or movie.”
The physicians CMH works with, Laderman says, are truly “celebrities in their own right,” spending their days helping to save and prolong lives. That’s not to say that doctors who work with CMH are seeking notoriety or fame, but instead share the same goal of providing useful understandings and education to their colleagues and the wider healthcare community, with CMH offering “the right situations” for them to do so.
CMH’s content structure involves 45-minute open conversations with doctors centering on new clinical data, emerging treatments and more. With the help of its medical team, CMH then chops up the recording based on a “funneling model,” clipping shorter segments and editing those into even briefer “sizzle reels” to promote back to the full-length conversation.
“I don’t think we’re really reinventing a wheel,” Laderman said. “We’re just bringing a model that’s been done in other industries more into this industry right now, with the ultimate goal to educate and capture as much data as we possibly can.”
The content is available on CMH’s website but is also distributed on social media channels that community oncologists use to better “let our content go to you” as opposed to making the target audience seek out the content specifically. Eventually, Landerman explains, viewers will see the shorter reels enough times that they’ll funnel over to the longer-form content.
The process all hearkens back to the original concept of CMH, which was to allow a way for stakeholders to gather insights beyond the standard stand-alone meetings and foster the best environment to do so. Beyond helping out life sciences companies, the content can also speak to busy oncologists looking to stay abreast of new data, Laderman notes.
Compared to specialized oncologists focusing on specific cancer types, community oncologists treat a wide array of patients on a day-to-day and perhaps don’t have as many opportunities to focus in on new disease-specific emerging therapies. Oncologists who have specialized insights to share, CMH has found, are eager to help educate their colleagues by tapping into their “breadth of knowledge” around specific therapies.
“Things are changing and moving so fast, and these therapies that these companies are creating are giving months, years to people's lives,” Laderman said. “If one physician watches one piece of our content and they learn something from it and they then treat a patient and that patient ends up surviving a little bit longer or getting cured because of something that we did, that just feels amazing.”
CHM’s content structure and distribution style fits into the increasing adaptation of social media-friendly content for health educators and pharma marketers alike. Back in March, a report from Assembled Intelligence and inVibe found that healthcare practitioners cited social media and streaming content as common avenues for increasing their awareness and interest of new treatments.