Oct 11, 2023

Mark Duman, the Director of MD Healthcare Consultants in the UK, focuses on patient engagement and digital health strategy, working with established life science companies to actually put patients at the center of their activities.  They are also working with start-ups to scale up their digital health services, navigate healthcare systems, and develop patient engagement strategies. The key to a patient-centric approach is working from the bottom up to find patients through local community and faith-based groups and patient advocacy groups.

Mark explains, "I'm a former pharmacist. I qualified in Aberdeen, in northern Scotland, back in 1990. I had a particular interest at that time in what we call over here pharmacy practice, the idea of supporting patients to take medicines, which, as we know, 50% of them sadly don't take as prescribed. That has been my focus throughout my career. I've worked in the National Health Service, which, as many of you will know, is the British healthcare system that is funded publicly. So I've dispensed medicines and talked to patients, and long story short, about 20 years ago, I got into the whole patient engagement side of things. No decision about us without the patient being included."

"On the life sciences side, lots of talk about patient engagement and, in many cases, lots of action, but it's often not coordinated. And it happens possibly within silos across even small businesses or small to medium biopharma. In the large ones, it's often even more diluted or siloed. We're being asked to look at where is the patient engagement strategy that joins this together. Where is the operationalization of this so that each part of the function doesn't just say it but truly engages patients and caregivers in the co-creation and co-production of their products and services?"

#DigitalHealth #PatientEngagement #Healthcare #PatientFocused

 Mark.Duman@mdhealthcare.co.uk

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