2016 Insights & Strategies Conference May 18-20, 2016 in New Orleans

Speaker(s)

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  Scott von Lutcken – Merck

  Director, Market Research Excellence, Merck

  Scott von Lutcken leads the Customer Strategy Team for Merck’s Global Customer and Brand Insights Group. He supports adherence, health literacy, and customer engagement. Scott has been an advocate for the customer and the patient throughout his career and has led numerous projects identifying ways to optimize messaging to customers and patients. In his current role, he is leveraging health literacy and numeracy to create patient-centric materials for both health care providers and patients that are clear and easily understood.

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  Heather Collins, PRC

  Director of Operations, Baltimore Research

  Heather Collins serves as the Director of Client Services for Baltimore Research, an innovative full-service marketing research firm and focus group facility. In her capacity within the company, Heather helps to oversee business strategy, project execution, and personnel. Heather, who joined Baltimore Research in 2002, has served in many capacities but has spent the majority of her career specializing in the execution of pharmaceutical research. She has vast experience fulfilling hundreds of projects related to Rx-to-OTC switch, label comprehension studies for OTC products, patient package inserts, and supplemental materials comprehension. She has worked with her team to develop ways to successfully include respondents with lower health literacy into the research sample.

  Heather has always been driven by advocacy and volunteerism. She has been an active member of the Marketing Research Association (MRA) and the Pharmaceutical Marketing Research Group (PMRG) for years. Heather has chaired the Education Work Group responsible for conference and webinar content for the MRA in the past and currently co-chairs the PMRG’s Health Literacy Initiative. She is dedicated to the standardization of the marketing research profession and holds her Professional Research Certification. Heather is a graduate of the University of Maryland at College Park where she studied Public Relations and Applied Communication in organizational settings with a minor in Biology.

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  William Stone

  Director of Content Strategy, Sommer Consulting

  William Stone is the Director of Content Strategy at Sommer Consulting, a Primary Qualitative Market Research firm with extensive experience in Health Literacy Market Research. Bill, a graduate of Johns Hopkins University, brings a host of experience to his role at Sommer as a former clinical trial patient recruitment project manager, medical journalist and editor, and medical marketing executive. In his 17-year career, Bill has managed physician and patient communication initiatives for more than 40 pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical device companies (for-profits), medical/scientific societies (non-profits), and global life sciences agencies representing hundreds of brands across wide-ranging medical specialties. Bill's diverse healthcare communication roles have contributed to his ability to assess, optimize, and fashion messages that are accessible to the many distinct audiences to whom he writes, even when their health literacy level is low and the complexity of the subject matter is high. Bill began working on Sommer Consulting's Health Literacy engagements in 2010 and plays an integral role in the firm's robust Health Literacy pipeline, including custom primary qualitative research of Patient Package Inserts (PPI), Instructions for Use (IFU), Website Development, Educational Materials, and Human Factors in the Life Sciences and Biotech industry.