Raymond Wong
Associate Director, Medical Information
Gilead Sciences
Transforming Medical Information
Raymond Wong is transforming the way clinicians access medical information to a 24/7, fully accessible digital platform. For Raymond, it is quite simple. “Clinicians should be able to find the information they want when they want it and download it. Period. That is not how it happened before. We wanted to give them the ability to answer questions on their own time instead of on our time, to best support patient care.”
So, he led the development of a groundbreaking website that is a searchable database of hundreds of pieces of medical information letters on all of Gilead’s brands, allowing clinicians to find the information they need when they need it.
As with most things in the past year, COVID-19 was really the catalyst behind the site’s rapid development. Gilead needed a way for information related to Veklury (remdesivir) to be accessed as easily and quickly as possible. The website would become an important channel for information and resources that were being constantly updated, given the fluid nature of the situation and the science.
Raymond and his team got the website up and live in 2.5 weeks. “Since it was the first FDA approved treatment in October 2020, we had significant traffic from HCPs, consumers, and patients looking for information about our medicine,” he notes. “We were measuring our benchmarks based on those from a pharma industry consortium. Our website traffic volume significantly surpassed the industry benchmarks, which speaks to the incredible need for timely, high-quality medical information—particularly during the pandemic when new data are rapidly unfolding and there is an urgent public health need.”
If you want to see those numbers for yourself: Since the site’s launch in March 2020, Q4 ended with more than 41,000 visits and 72,000 page views. Furthermore, after nine months in market, AskGileadMedical.com is averaging 4,500 monthly visits and driving an average of 400 monthly searches. The site is on track to exceed a yearly benchmark of 5,200 total site visits by 10x.
