Dirk van den Boom is CEO & Co-Founder of Juno Diagnostics and co-author on over 95 peer-reviewed publications.
Your healthcare business is only as successful as your reach. You must be able to put your product into the hands of the people who need it most. That’s where your clinical advisory board can really come into play. This board of working medical professionals can give you a unique insight into your brand and patients, assess your product and messaging from an outside perspective and provide scientific and medical based-expertise.
When building a consumer-facing product in the healthcare industry, a CAB can assist a company in striking the right balance between patient-friendly messaging and medical credibility. The right CAB members should provide valuable guidance on clearly communicating complex medical concepts to potential patients and customers.
Choosing the right members for your board is crucial, but it’s only the first step. To best use your CAB, you must create a culture that emphasizes the importance of stakeholder diversity and encourages candid feedback.
The Role Of Your Clinical Advisory Board
The members of your CAB provide honest, constructive feedback that allows you to navigate the different developmental stages of your products, services and strategy. When you’re first getting started, your board must be there to support the company in a fact-finding capacity by answering questions and giving advice as you prepare to take your product to market.
For example, at my company, we knew that to educate pregnant patients about our prenatal tests, we would have to meet them where they were. Our CAB has been instrumental in helping us hone our brand messaging to bridge the gap between consumers or patients and medical professionals to avoid alienating either demographic.
Your advisory board also offers guidance on issues such as product messaging, informed consent, privacy and confidentiality. This can help ensure you’re approaching these topics in a way that is both patient-friendly and medically credible.
Their feedback should generally answer two main questions.
• Are we on the right track with our business plan and goals?
• Do we need to adjust anything to ensure all stakeholders are aligned, and we can effectively make our mission a reality?
However, it’s important to note that a CAB is not there to make final business decisions. It is up to the management team to leverage external perspectives and guidance while maintaining control over your brand’s direction and decision making.
Choosing The Right Members
As a new brand or startup, your first instinct might be to find the biggest names in your industry to add to your advisory board, but that’s not necessarily the best or most economically sound approach. Honest, actionable feedback from industry professionals is much more valuable than having a big name to plaster on your company website.
Before recruiting CAB members, you must work with your team to create a clear mission statement and define which stakeholders you want to represent on your board. Clearly outline your target groups and determine which tools you have at your disposal to connect with that given audience.
For example, when creating the CAB at my company, we looked for professionals with a vast range of pregnancy-related experience, including maternal-fetal medicine specialists, OB/GYNs, nurse practitioners and genetic counselors. Within our group of potential candidates, we prioritized people whose interests and passions aligned with our mission.
Next, we discussed diversification, not only in the board members themselves but also in the patient populations they represent. While this includes a diversity of age, gender, race and ethnicity, we also wanted to ensure we chose people with diverse skill sets and professional experience. We made it a point to seek out those who could directly engage with patients and personally resonate with pregnant people and families.
Creating A Strategy To Get The Most Value
As you prepare to build your CAB, you must determine member roles and how you’ll compensate them. To prevent bias, I suggest avoiding offering stock options or retainers. Instead, you can pay your board members for their time advising your company with hourly or half-day rates.
Your CAB members will likely be practicing physicians with busy schedules. So, it’s essential to keep board members engaged and enthusiastic while remaining flexible and respectful of their time. Create a robust agenda to guide your conversations and meetings, allowing each CAB member to make the most significant impact.
Maintaining Open And Honest Communication
Your CAB is there to tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. So, you must ensure board members feel comfortable giving honest feedback. Start by building relationships with your board members and creating a company culture that welcomes open communication.
An advisory board must be invested in your company’s overall success—beyond financial stakes. For instance, in anticipation of a new product launch, we sought to rally together a team that intrinsically understood our product and mission. Through close collaboration with our CAB partners, we have been able to work on maximizing the impact of our products.
As you connect with potential candidates for your CAB, consider engaged and passionate board members who stand with and behind your company, mission and endeavors. This passion is attributable primarily to the values of mutual respect, open communication and a firm commitment to transparency.
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