VOICES COLLECTIVE LAUNCHES TO SOLVE CRITICAL SHORTAGE OF PATIENT STORIES IN HEALTHCARE
NEW YORK, NY, September 24, 2024 – Voices Collective, a specialty healthcare agency, today unveiled its comprehensive solution to source patients, caregivers, and HCPs in healthcare.
Founded by industry veterans Cathy Fink and Curtis Hougland, the agency satisfies intensifying demand for authentic, diverse patient voices and storytelling, for use in omnichannel, brand, education, advocacy, media relations, and digital campaigns alike.
By deploying a human-in-the-loop AI platform tested at the front-lines of public health, Voices Collective identifies, credentials, recruits, and manages patients based on any criteria including condition, treatment, and demographic. With its Patient Finder technology, Voices Collective builds bespoke patient networks for brands in line with compliance and HIPAA guidelines.
“Patients increasingly rely on peers to inform their healthcare decisions,” said Founder Curtis Hougland. “In sourcing over 2,000 patient stories - and counting - we have refined the technology to solve the industry-wide problem of the lack of geographic, ethnic, age, gender, and treatment diversity in patient sourcing, as well as the increasing demand for quality and scale.”
“Our ability to identify and engage diverse, hard-to-find patients, particularly in the rare disease and clinical trial spaces, is huge”, said Founder and CEO Cathy Fink. “Far too many trials fail because of recruitment issues, and now, we can find the appropriate patients for most any use case, rapidly and in partnership with our clients’ compliance and regulatory teams.”
About the Founders
Cathy Fink is a healthcare industry leader, who founded Eden Communications, a patient and physician education agency that was sold to Omnicom. She also led the integrated global communications and corporate reputation portfolios for Johnson & Johnson and Boehringer Ingelheim on behalf of Porter Novelli/Omnicom Public Relations Group, and has built and led cross-functional marcomms teams for Fortune 500 clients and early-stage life science organizations alike.
Curtis Hougland founded one of the first new media practices and one of the first social media marketing agencies, Attention, where he created REG-SM, the first social media practice dedicated to healthcare. More recently, he founded People First to identify, recruit, and deploy patients to advocate for the most pressing public health issues facing the country such as COVID-19, flu, and MPox. People First’s People Finder powers Voices Collective.