Lorna Weir
Founder & Managing Partner
Elevate Healthcare
Champion of the Challenger
Ask any of her clients what makes Lorna Weir’s leadership truly special and they’ll respond that it’s her ability to embrace their causes and surmount their challenges. The array of leadership roles Lorna has assumed for clients is staggering: Building marketing plans, leading strategy and brand development, helping to drive sales training, or even acting as marketing director.
One recent example was the successful relaunch of EVZIO, the first intelligent take-home naloxone auto-injection system with voice and visual guidance. This relaunch was achieved during the spiraling opioid epidemic, new competition, and a rapidly changing social and policy landscape.
“Her leadership on the EVZIO brand has literally saved lives, because more people at risk for overdose have been prescribed EVZIO since the campaign’s launch,” says Todd Lambert, VP of Sales, Commercial Ops, and Training at kaléo, the maker of EVZIO. “How critical a factor was Lorna’s leadership in our success? Sales of EVZIO have increased more than 400% since the launch of the Seconds Count campaign that Lorna championed across all teams at kaléo.”
Lorna has put her beliefs into action in her latest endeavor—an agency dedicated to helping challenger brands succeed in the dynamic healthcare marketing landscape. Lorna has assembled a team of agency veterans to launch Elevate Healthcare. In just its first year, Elevate has already been named one of the top 100 agencies in healthcare and one of the most innovative startups of 2016.
Elevate has given Lorna an even more direct opportunity to champion another cause she believes in—the challenges faced by women in the traditionally male-dominated world of pharmaceutical marketing. Lorna has risen to those challenges throughout her career, first on Wall Street, then as an attorney, and now in the C-suite and boardrooms of pharmaceutical companies.
As one of the first female presidents at two prominent pharmaceutical marketing agencies, Lorna made it a priority to significantly raise the percentage of managers who were women. And now as co-founder of Elevate Healthcare, where the majority of senior managers are women, she has made inclusion and open opportunity a key hallmark of the agency.
