Going Beyond the Video Call
Webinar Key Takeaways
01 Pros and Cons of Real-Time Virtual Meetings
Key Takeaways
Meet the Speakers
02 The Advantages of Over-Time Virtual Meetings
03 Common Use Cases For Over-Time Meetings
04 A Key Benefit of Within3: Engagement Analytics
05 What the Future Holds
View Key Takeaways
Watch the Webinar
Additional Resources
Sponsored by:
How to Position Your Life Science Team to Work Faster, Smarter & More Strategically
Pros and Cons of Real-Time Virtual Meetings
While frequently used, especially during the pandemic, real-time virtual meetings have many drawbacks. For larger groups, such as an advisory board, scheduling can be difficult. During real-time meetings, people are often multi-tasking and are not engaged. And, with larger groups and groups focused on complex topics, getting everyone to participate and to share their perspectives can be difficult.
Key Takeaway
Video Conferencing When Participants Grow to 5 or MORE
Share this page
1
Previous | Next
"Your mission statement should serve as a guideline to direct all content."
- Joe Pulizzi, Author and Founder of Content Marketing Institute
Real Time Meetings: Pros and Cons
Virtual meetings defined and why real-time meetings are challenging with large groups When life sciences teams refer to virtual meeting technology, they are talking about ways that people and teams can have two-way or bi-directional dialogue to have discussions, share ideas, review information, work on projects together, or engage in interaction or collaboration. They are NOT talking about technology that involves one-way communication, such as pushing a video clip to someone.
Real Virtual Meetings Often when people think about virtual technology, they are envisioning a real-time virtual meeting. This requires that everyone participates in the meeting at the same time.
“Video conferences for two-way dialogue can be really effective but become less so the bigger the group gets or the more detailed the information gets."
- Lance Hill, CEO, Within3
The Advantages of Over-Time Virtual Meetings
What over-time virtual meetings are, how they work, and some of the main capabilities Another type of virtual meeting technology is for over-time virtual meetings, which are more like an online university approach to collaboration. In this area, Within3, founded in 2008 and used by 20 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies, is the industry leader. Within3 is used for thousands of over-time virtual meetings each quarter. Over-Time Virtual Meetings With over-time virtual meetings, instead of all participants having to show up for a real-time video call at the same time, a virtual room is opened, and people can log in on their own time. Content is added—including documents, videos, and polls—and participants can add content, offer comments, and interact with other participants, whenever they want. Then, all of the output is consolidated into a highly usable format. Over-time virtual meetings overcome many of the obstacles associated with real-time meetings because they remove logistical issues. Over-time meetings are all effective for deeper, more detailed dialogue. Main Capabilities of Over-Time Meetings Key features of over-time meetings include:
2
Excerpt from Webinar
Discussion Threads Participants engage in highly structured virtual conversations that allow answering questions, replying to comments, and tagging people in comments, which prompts an email notification to the tagged person.
Qualitative and Quantitative Questions Interactions might involve follow-up comments or may be closed-ended questions, such as ranked voting. Participants can view and respond to each other’s comments.
Document Discussion Participants can collaborate on a single document, providing version control and eliminating email exchanges.
Language Translation and Speech Recognition All participants can participate in their preferred language and speech recognition is supported.
Consolidated Outputs All interactions are consolidated into comprehensive transcripts.
Common Use Cases For Over-Time Meetings In Life Sciences
Advisory boards and physician engagement Two areas where over-time meetings are a particularly good fit for life sciences organizations are advisory boards and physician engagement. Advisory Boards Life sciences organizations often coordinate multi-stakeholder advisory boards with numerous participants discussing detailed, complex topics. Due to logistical issues and the complexity of the material, real-time virtual meetings pose obstacles. Over-time virtual meetings overcome the logistical issues and allow for multiple discussion threads, document collaboration, and simplification of the advisory board management process. Mary Stober-Murray learned about the Within3 over-time meeting platform when she was serving on an advisory board. She found it a great way to communicate with other advisors to ask and answer questions. When charged with managing advisory boards at the National Minority Quality Forum (NMQF), she used Within3. She said, “This platform enabled me to get the job done.”
3
“What I think is most impactful is that you get their engagement when they’re ready and willing to be engaged.”
- Christian Meyer, Sr. Director, Head of Sales, Akili Interactive
Physician Engagement During the pandemic, physicians stopped interacting face-to-face with representatives from life sciences companies, causing companies to scramble. Nicole Lowe of AstraZeneca observed that many community physicians who had high-volume practices “weren’t open to [real-time] video calls. It just didn’t fit into their busy days.” However, using Within3, AstraZeneca was able to bring multiple physicians together to share their insights— “at their leisure, when they get home or have a few minutes . . . It was the ideal situation.” Christian Meyer of Akili Interactive, a digital therapeutics company, noted, “The days of the representative knocking on the door and seeing the doctor when and where they want are certainly paused . . . we’ve had a lot of challenges engaging with our doctors.” Somewhat to his surprise, physicians have proven to be extremely engaged by the Within3 platform. Meyer has seen that some doctors are engaged for 60 or 120 minutes, while others went in 10 times for 5 minutes each. The bottom line is that Within3’s over-time virtual meetings platform has proven successful at engaging physicians.
A Key Benefit of Within3: Engagement Analytics
The platform provides extensive data on who, when, how long, and more Typically, at a conference, a post-session survey asks attendees to rate the session. Participants often respond, “That was great. We loved it.” But, that doesn’t mean that they were truly engaged. Within3 provides detailed analytics about each participant’s engagement on the platform along with the collective engagement of all participants. It provides data on who logged in, when they logged in, how long they stayed, how long they focused on certain questions or topics, and much more. As Mary Stober-Murray said, “It helps to have the metrics afterwards so we can see the different times where people were actively engaged. It is also insightful for us to know which questions got the most engagement.”
4
What the Future Holds: A Hybrid, Omni-Channel Approach
The panelists see over-time virtual meetings as a perfect tool for ongoing advisory board meetings, for working groups, for continuing conversations on certain topics after conferences, and as a tool to keep internal teams abreast of certain topics.
5
Even post-COVID, life sciences companies plan to use over-time virtual meetings After COVID, people will continue to be choosier with their travel and their time. They won’t rush back to attend all in-person conferences or advisory boards; there will remain a critical role for virtual meetings. Nicole Lowe observed, “There’s so much benefit to the virtual engagements. I don’t see it going away.” She also sees her organization thinking about an “omni-channel approach.” Going forward, the panelists from life sciences organizations of varying sizes envision a hybrid model with multiple tools for different situations. Mary Stober-Murray commented, “I think this [Within3] is really a permanent part of our capability.”
“We see a lot of companies that look at this as something else in their tool bag. They mix and match technologies based on when they work best.”
“Fast forward six months, when hopefully this whole COVID thing is behind us. I know our team will still use this.”
- Christian Meyer, Akili Interactive, referring to Within3
Lance Hill
Chief Executive Officer, Within3
As Chief Executive Officer of Within3, Lance Hill brings his own brand of energy, leadership and vision to the company. With the belief that deeper engagement among healthcare professionals results in improved healthcare and better patient outcomes, Lance strategizes with global healthcare decision makers on how to integrate digital collaboration solutions into their businesses as an effective new channel of communication. A veteran in the technology industry, Lance dedicates himself to work he strongly believes in — improving healthcare by providing an easy-to-use, always accessible, digital collaboration solution for healthcare professionals and industry leaders to connect, communicate and collaborate.
Nicole Lowe
Women’s Cancer MSL West Regional Director at AstraZeneca
Nicole received her PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology from the University of California, San Diego and San Diego State University. After completing postdoctoral research, she spent the first several years of her career in increasing roles of responsibility for medical advertising agencies, first as a medical writer, and eventually overseeing a team that conducted national and international speaker programs and advisory boards. Before joining AstraZeneca in 2020, Nicole worked for Sandoz in key medical affairs positions including medical science liaison and medical director. She is regularly recognized for her leadership, cross-functional collaboration, and innovation with approach to health care provider engagement.
Christian Meyer
Sr Director, Head of Sales, Akili Technologies
Christian Meyer is a pharmaceutical executive with 20+ years of commercial experience. He currently serves at the Head of Sales for Akili Interactive facilitating their launch of a digital therapeutic. Christian has spent time in the sales field as a representative and manager, "in house" with operations and marketing, as well as externally working for ad agencies, marketing partners, and as an individual consultant. He received his BS from West Virginia University and his MBA from Villanova University.
Mary Stober-Murray
VP of Collaborative Action Network, NMFQ
Mary Stober Murray has more than 15 years of experience in health equity, pharmaceutical development and management, with a particular focus on the diverse populations of people living with cancer and chronic diseases. In her current role at the non-profit National Minority Quality Forum, Mary leads collaborative efforts, such as the Diverse Cancer Communities Working Group. These efforts bring patient representatives together with industry and providers to share tools and co-create successful approaches for improving equity in care access, quality and outcomes for people living with chronic disease, such as lung cancer, asthma, heart failure and now coronavirus.
Speakers
(moderator)
Watch the WEbinar
Going Beyond the Video Call:
Watch Webinar
How to Position Your Life Science Team to Work Faster, Smarter & More Strategically. We look for places in the life sciences industry where communication is expensive, complicated, or time consuming and build technology solutions to solve them.
WEbinar
Pros and cons of virtual meetings
WHITE PAPER
Download White Paper
Advantages of over-time virtual meetings
White Paper
Common use cases for over-time meetings
Previous
Resources
Engagement analytics
What the future holds
