World Medical Leaders Work Values

Daily Duties at World Medical Leaders:

As an initial executive team member, I helped shape the company from the beginning on how to create a product and best approach major customers/customer groups to utilize the services of the company. I interviewed, hired and trained the initial sales reps, I visited high profile physician client such as Medical Societies and prestigious Medical Centers such as The Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins and large pharmaceutical companies that wanted value-added programs to offer physicians. My first task was to create the Business Development Plan which included Strategic Planning, Marketing, Sales, Sales Administration and Training. I first needed to understand the world of accredited continuing medical education (ACME) and then apply it to an on-line venue. I met with several highly acclaimed national accrediting agencies to gain a thorough understanding of the requirements. The key element was to provide pure academic material, nothing promotional or endorsing about a product or company. Once that was accomplished, I needed to create a list of the top 100 lectures of value to all physicians and focused specialties. In conjunction with the CME company and our Physician COO, I created a list of 12 proposed lectures of a general nature that could be viewed by any physician, regardless of specialty. Then I created a list of 20 lectures for the six largest subsegments of the physician community, ranked by top numbers of physicians. Those subsegments were Internal Medicine, Family Medicine/General Practice, Pediatrics, Obstetrics and Gynocology, Psychiatry/Pain Management, and the Emergency Medicine. The number of continuing education hours required annually by a physician ranges from 20-50 depending on the state. We were going to create lecture series that would provide 3 credit hours per series, so to satisfy every state's requirements, we would create 12 lecture series to begin with. My proposal of 12 of the 40 for all physicians was accepted to create a "core"for all physicians. I then developed 5 lecture series for Internal Medicine.Family Practice/General Practice; 5 for Peds; 5 for Ob/Gyn; 5 for Psychiatry/Pain Management and 5 for Emergency Medicine. In that way with 37 lecture series we could provide a year's worth of continuing medical education credits for all of the six top subspecialties, which represented 51% of the entire 723,000 physician population in the entire United States. At a proposed $500 subscription per year, that represented an initial market cap of $186 million. Next was to validate the list of lectures with the Physician community. This involved visiting medical thought leaders around the country to gain their input and change specific content based on their feedback. That took about 30 days to accomplish and there were only three lecture changes among the 37. After thought leaders were identified as presenters for individual and panel lecture series, production began for the first 37 lecture series. The next task was to figure out membership and the financial model of who would pay for the annual subscriptions. It was thought initially that the physicians would pay out of pocket in order to curtail their annual trade show visits to gain access to the top physicians in the world in their specialty. That was not the case. I determined early on that physicians would not curtail their annual or semi-annual trips to their specialty trade shows and lectures. In most cases budgets were either allocated to physicians through the hospital or their practices for such trade shows. Secondly, physicians were very anxious both to go to the live lectures and visit the trade show floor to see what new products and services were available for their practices. Thirdly, there was a collegial purpose to their live attendance at these meetings. Annually they could reconnect with their former classmates, or other academic/practice collragues among their specialty group for social, business and academic renewal. They saw World Medical Leaders certainly as an adjunct to their annual meetings but not as a primary replacement. As a result of potential redundancy the physicians would not be paying for a World Medical Leaders annual subscription from their own products. I determined that there were two sources of revenue for World Medical Leaders outside of physicians paying for their own subscriptions: Pharmaceutical companies and Hospitals. If we were to gain financial support for paid physician subscriptions from Pharmaceutical companies, we needed to expand the site to mirror a national medical society meeting. To do that I held meetings with our business development team (ACME companies, Physician COO, Advisory Board, and web designers) to create a virtual exhibit hall that showcased products and services from participating, sponsored companies. The site would have to mirror a national medical society meeting, that is, the lecture series and trade show displays could not exist in the same venue. Just like a trade show, the physician would have to view the lecture, take his/her on-line quiz that produced a validation document, completely exit the lecture hall part of the site, and then re-enter the exhibit hall portion. In that regard the ACME was not commercially tainted in any way, and the pharmaceutical companies saw that as a pathway for active marketing of their product lines. My goal was to visit the top 200 pharmaceutical companies, starting with the largest of Johnson and Johnson and BristolMyers Squibb. In tandem I visited a number of top tier Health Systems -- Yale-New Haven Healthcare, Mayo Clinic, Saint Barnabas Healthcare, and others to develop a loyalty program for their hospitalists as well as their referring physicians. Lastly, there were roughly 450 different Medical Societies throughout the US, to which physicians belonged. They were organized by municipality, county, state and as national organizations, as well as by specialty. To create a value proposition to the sponsoring pharmaceutical companies and Hospital Groups I needed to create a flurry of activity into both the lecture hall as well as the exhibit halls. I needed a Sales force to get the users into the site. I hired 3 region managers and 12 sales reps to quickly develop relationships with the medical societies. I started relationships with 3 state medical societies, which quickly turned into 48, and 200 county medical societies. The Directors of each of these medical societies quickly saw the value-added benefits of providing on-line courses to their physicians. Each director heavily promoted the site to the physicians, and through the sales organizations and the Medical Society Directors we started getting hits to the site in the millions. As the number of hits increased more pharmaceutical companies were interested.

What they like about World Medical Leaders:

Working for a company with an emphasis on social values and helping society is a clear and important priority for you - a critical factor in who you choose to work for. In contrast to other factors, you place an organization's reputation for fairness and concern for the community above most other aspects of the company. As you search for a new job opportunity, it is usually possible to find out if the company is involved in the community and/or if it is addressing problems and issues in society. Pay special attention to non-profit organizations and those specifically involved in social action. Moreover, speaking with current and former employees should enlighten you to perceptions of the fairness of the company's leaders and the treatment of employees.

Tags

Vice President, Director, Marketing guru, Sales afficianado, Writing Business plans, Business Development expert, Training, Real Estate, Sales, Business Development

Skills

P&L responsibilities, Presentation, Ecommerce Strategy and digital marketing channels optimization - SEO, SEM, email, affiliates - for high-profile accounts., Technology Solutions, Sales Support, Software Implementation, Requirements Analysis & Specification, Leadership , Real Estate, Sales, Business Development

These are some of the questions we asked our climbers about their experiences with World Medical Leaders: