June 16, 2026
When you’ve had the opportunity to connect with a patient — to hear firsthand about their daily struggles living with a disease or condition — the experience is unforgettable. Patient perspectives are critical to effective healthcare communication. As AI continues to reshape the landscape and trust in traditional institutions declines, more patients are seeking insights from peers than ever before.
Patient engagement was the focus of GCI Health’s recent Impactful Exchanges (formerly known as Inspired Exchanges) session. Moderated by Global CEO Kristin Cahill, the panel featured Kim Sammons, Executive Vice President, Global Director, Advocacy and Patient Engagement; Robyn Leventhal, Executive Vice President, Patient Ambassador Lead; Melanie Sollid-Penton, Group Senior Vice President, Patient Recruitment and Relationship Lead; and Simone Elviss, Senior Director — all seasoned experts in global patient engagement.
The discussion centered on the rapid evolution of patient-centricity and how GCI Health’s specialized patient ambassador offering, Inspiring Voices, is helping clients forge meaningful patient partnerships.
Patient-Centricity: Table Stakes for Pharma
Patient engagement has come a long way. Kim Sammons reflected on how “patient centricity” first gained traction through a push driven largely by regulatory changes. Today, it has matured into an essential business practice.
“Most clients understand the fundamental value of talking to patients and caregivers,” Sammons shared. “Lived experience guides everything from disease awareness campaigns to clinical trial design, and it plays a massive role in elevating an organization’s corporate reputation as a ‘patient-first’ company.”
Sammons emphasized a key shift in how patients are perceived: “We’ve worked with clients to help them see that a patient has the same level of expertise and experience to share as a researcher, a doctor or a policymaker. Seeing patients on that equal level has changed everything.”
Inspiring Voices: Blending Strategy and Empathy
As clients recognize the need for authentic stories, they frequently run into a major hurdle: finding the right patients. This is where GCI Health’s proprietary offering, Inspiring Voices, has become a gamechanger.
“Our clients realize that when patients have questions, they want answers from someone who has walked in their shoes. This is especially true in rare diseases where finding someone else with the same condition is incredibly difficult,” explained Robyn Leventhal. “We think critically about the target population, handle complex compliant contracting and compensation and build deep relationships to help ambassadors feel comfortable telling their deeply personal stories.”
Melanie Sollid-Penton highlighted how the team’s background as strategic communicators stands apart. “We are storytellers at heart,” Sollid-Penton said. “When we interview patients, we have a relationship interviewer, who absorbs the emotive aspects of the story, and a detail person tracking the clinical specifics. We then connect the dots back to a client’s strategic imperatives.”
Navigating Global Nuance and Stigma
While the U.S. market benefits from a highly sophisticated network of patient advocacy groups and robust ambassador programs, patient engagement looks very different across borders.
Simone Elviss shared her experience navigating these complexities across the UK, Europe, APAC and the Middle East, noting that outside the U.S., the focus is entirely on unbranded disease awareness and illustrating unmet needs.
Cultural stigma also remains a significant barrier. “When I moved to the Middle East, the stigma around medical conditions was much larger than I realized,” Elviss said. “Patient communities were largely underground in private WhatsApp groups. People worry about how a public diagnosis will affect their family’s reputation.”
Elviss recalled a project in China where a patient wanted to share her cancer journey but refused to show her face on film to protect her family from social repercussions. “The takeaways outside the U.S. are clear: be prepared to be scrappy, leverage relationships with key opinion leaders (KOLs) and nurses as gateways, and always make sure the patient feels safe and respected.”
Patients as Strategic Advisors
One of the shifts happening across the industry is enlisting patients as high-level strategic advisors. From shaping clinical trial protocols to co-creating marketing materials, patient advisory boards ensure that healthcare initiatives align with real-world needs.
Sammons pointed to a landmark, multi-country initiative GCI Health executed for a major pharmaceutical client. By bringing patients, advocacy groups and medical providers together across 20 countries, the unbranded campaign opened doors in APAC and other regions that had previously been closed to pharma. “It redefined what it meant to go ‘beyond the pill’ and proved that we were focused on what was clinically meaningful to patients, not just what was important to scientists,” Sammons said.
Sollid-Penton shared another flagship success with a client where GCI Health built and managed a highly engaged network of 55 patient ambassadors. “We have established ourselves as the gateway and manager of this complex network, building immense trust with both the ambassadors and the client. These ambassadors are now helping shape brand planning and are providing insights that actively drive the business forward.”
Empathy in the Fine Print
As GCI Health looks toward the future, the integration of policy, access, advocacy and communications will only deepen. When asked what truly differentiates GCI Health’s approach to patient engagement, the panel agreed: it is an unyielding commitment to empathy and the “human touch.”
Kristin Cahill closed the session by recalling the meticulous care that goes into GCI Health’s patient-facing events: “It comes down to the details of the experience we create. When we host patient events, we are asking: Are the chairs comfortable for someone living with pain? Will they get cold? Do they need a blanket? What food is appropriate? Putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes and caring for them as human beings is what ultimately differentiates our approach.”