Clinical immersion programs are fully customizable education and training courses developed in partnership with multidisciplinary teams at centers of excellence or community practices. These programs are consistently ranked as top educational training courses for life science companies.
But as COVID-19 continues to spread, in-person events may not be safe or sustainable. Companies still rely on continuing-education sessions to keep employees’ skills up to date, even during these uncertain times. Fortunately, digital solutions in clinical immersion programs can help bridge the gap.
Participants, who can be from within a pharmaceutical organization (sales, MSLs, or cross-functional) or practicing HCPs, are immersed in clinical education programs with varying levels of complexity, customized to attendee needs and delivered as live or virtual training events.
Virtual training platforms are a cost-effective alternative to in-person meetings. With virtual platforms, participants can join a session from any location. This capability helps keep your training schedule on track – considering upcoming product launches, new data from conferences, and the evolving competitive landscape within a disease area.
The Benefits of Clinical Immersion Programs
Pharmaceutical and medical device companies sometimes struggle to provide staff with on-the-ground training. While some employees may have a medical background, others might have limited experience in a clinical setting. These gaps in understanding may prevent your employees from completing essential job duties, as well as having the clinical context and knowledge necessary to have thorough conversations with physicians.
Clinical immersion programs provide your team hands-on learning with key experts and community physicians. Attendees learn how their product and competing agents are used in a clinical setting, and how their work improves the lives of patients.
The Best Immersion Programs
The best clinical immersion program includes a customized blend of didactic lectures, interactive patient case study workshops, competitive landscape simulations, faculty panel Q&As, and audience response question challenges. All activities are integrated, either in a live program or a virtual platform.
Designed by Experts
Clinical immersion programs must provide employees with cutting-edge information, which is why we develop these courses in conjunction with medical experts, regional clinicians, and multidisciplinary clinic staff in order to provide a well-rounded curriculum for the attendees.
Options for Customization
At Aptitude Health, we have partnered with several life science companies and academic centers to develop and execute these fully customizable training programs to meet attendee learning objectives. Components include faculty, location, scientific content, program format, and attendee type.
The faculty for a training course can be solely from academia or can contain a mix of national/regional experts with community-based physicians, advanced practice providers, and practice administrators.
Live meetings can be held over 1.5 days near a single academic institution, adjacent to existing internal gatherings (eg, plan of action meetings), or divided as multiple programs across field force regions. The virtual setting may allow more flexibility among internal teams, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Virtual clinical immersion programs can be held as 2-hour, 4-hour, or full-day courses, depending on the attendee group size and learning objectives.
The scientific content can be tailored to fit the audience’s level of understanding and diverse learning styles. Traditional static content can be dull and unengaging, such as recorded lectures and multiple-choice quizzes. An interactive platform, whether live or virtual, allows attendees to engage with the faculty, their peers, and the program content, keeping your team actively involved and excited about the discussion.
Program format is the most important part of any clinical immersion course. We want to ensure our life science partners meet and exceed their goals and expectations when training their field forces – which can range from 12 to 200+ attendees. Depending on the company’s strategic learning objectives and disease area, Aptitude Health can create a customized program featuring a mix of lectures, panels, case study workshops, competitive simulations, role-play exercises, and audience question gamification.
Lastly, our courses can be directed to a variety of audiences. Though we have primarily delivered these programs to internal pharma staff, such as sales teams or MSLs, Aptitude Health can tailor a course to focus on the community clinician setting, from a local area or even across several countries.
How We Can Help
Aptitude Health’s Hematology Oncology Learning Institute (HOLI) clinical immersion programs are a necessity to pharmaceutical and medical device companies in all areas of oncology, hematology, and supportive care. Whether training your sales team on a new disease area or competitor, preparing MSLs to discuss a pipeline product, or updating regional HCPs on treatment trends, we are here to be a valuable partner in your product development and in bettering patient care. Contact us to learn more.
