UDG Healthcare (formerly United Drug plc), a leading global outsourced healthcare service provider, announced the integration of its sales, marketing and medical service offerings within a new, single division—Ashfield Commercial and Medical Services. This new division combines eight areas of expertise under the Ashfield division umbrella, including:
Ashfield Commercial: Provides innovative, customized sales teams and complementary services to assist clients in the launching of new brands and to maximize opportunities for existing products.
Ashfield Clinical: Offers clinical nurse educator/advisor support teams to assist physicians and their patients to improve clinical outcomes.
Ashfield Healthcare Communications: Healthcare communications agencies that support global, European and U.S. medical affairs and commercial teams through development of scientifically robust, clinically relevant and commercially sound medical content.
Ashfield Meetings and Events: A full service, global event management company specializing in serving the healthcare sector and providing seamless local delivery of meetings throughout the healthcare product lifecycle.
Ashfield Insight and Performance: Delivers services to support the industry from early-stage insight gathering, through business analytics and research, to assessing and delivering excellence in sales, marketing and leadership solutions.
Ashfield Pharmacovigilance: Recognized as the go-to specialist in delivering world-class safety and risk management services to meet the ever-changing complex regulations and demands for product safety.
Ashfield Market Access: Offers comprehensive, experienced consulting and account management to support strong formulary positioning and retail distribution.
Ashfield Medical Information: Offers a dedicated call center comprised of pharmacists, nurses, physicians and other healthcare communicators, along with technology solutions such as apps and micro-websites for delivering medical information.
“This transformation of our business allows us to deliver more for the industry, healthcare professionals and patients through our combined expertise and insight, while retaining the ingenuity and energy for which our companies are known,” explains Mary Anne Greenberg, Regional President in North America for Ashfield Commercial & Medical Services. “We have always put our clients and customers first and uniting these businesses in one division will help us address their challenges even more effectively.”
The eight service areas incorporated in this division include companies in 22 countries, bringing together many well-known industry names, including:
- Ashfield: A contract service organization (North America, Europe & Japan)
- Pharmexx: A contract service organization (Canada, South America & Europe)
- Drug Safety Alliance (DSA): A pharmacovigilance provider
- Synopia Rx: A market access solutions provider
- InforMed and Watermeadow: Medical communications agencies
- Universal WorldEvents: A healthcare meetings and events provider
Although Ashfield is primarily known in the North American market for its sales teams, nurse educators and call centers, under this new organization and branding, Ashfield hopes to solidify its position as an expert in outgoing and incoming transfer of information within the healthcare environment.
“I believe this reorganization and branding under the Ashfield name makes it more obvious to our clients how the areas of expertise existing within our Division align to support their brand commercialization needs,” says Dan Piggott, CEO at Ashfield Commercial and Ashfield Medical Information. “It will hopefully enable our clients to see how both synergy and efficiency can therefore be found when accessing services from across our division to support their commercialization needs.”
The Ashfield portfolio provides solutions throughout the product lifecycle. From the pre-launch phase, in which services include everything from managing investigator meetings and developing scientific communications through to organizing advisory boards and conducting the market research required to develop brand strategy. After product approval, Ashfield can provide marketing consultancy, design and organize launch conferences, develop market access and payer strategies and implement sales force effectiveness programs to ensure launch success. Ashfield can also deliver sales solutions via the company’s multi-channel field and call center services. In addition, Ashfield provides the clinical education, patient support programs and medical information services to ensure patients and healthcare professionals receive the information and support they need to improve patient outcomes.
Gavin Houston, CEO, Americas at Ashfield Meetings and Events explains the benefit of uniting all of these offerings under a single division: “As part of the Ashfield Commercial and Medical Services Division, we have access to an incredibly broad range of services and capabilities from which to create truly ingenious, customized solutions. For instance, we can draw upon the expertise of our Medical Communications service area to provide our clients with content support, PowerPoints on disease state background, and create a post-conference brochure for attendees—all totally integrated with the established meeting objectives.”
Gareth Davies, Divisional Marketing Director, adds, “This integration across the Ashfield division is a response to the major change our clients’ businesses are going through. The healthcare industry wants to work with fewer vendors and more business partners who can bring breadth of expertise with a strong consistency of quality and compliance coupled with a spirit of innovation to cost-effectively accelerate their success.”
