Ashfield unveils three new business units, revamped healthcare offering, and new head of healthcare

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Ashfield unveils three new business units, revamped healthcare offering, and new head of healthcare

2021 got off to a busy start for Ashfield. In January, the company, which is part of UDG Healthcare, revealed a reorganization that has resulted in three new business units: Ashfield Advisory, Ashfield Engage, and Ashfield Health. The latter is being led by a familiar face, Amar Urhekar, formerly of McCann Health.

Management says the creation of the three business unit follows Ashfield’s strategic acquisition of 22 businesses over the last 10 years aimed at strengthening the company’s integrated service portfolio to support clients, healthcare professionals, and their patients.

“The move is also in direct response to continued demand from clients for deeper partnerships and will enable greater collaboration between Ashfield’s experts to solve multi-faceted and complex challenges,” company executives say. “The three business units clearly articulate the capabilities within each business unit and how each can support Ashfield’s diverse range of healthcare and life science companies.”

Ashfield Advisory is “a carefully curated ecosystem of healthcare advisory and consulting businesses with a targeted focus on accelerating business performance.” The unit consists of Vynamic, Putnam Associates, SmartAnalyst, and STEM Healthcare.

Ashfield Engage is “a single strategic engagement partner” across five specialist areas: Commercial, Patient Solutions, Medical Affairs, Market Access, and Event Experiences. “The team creates personalized, impactful experiences for healthcare audiences including HCPs, patients, and payers,” management says. 

Ashfield Health, formerly Ashfield Healthcare Communications, “uses its collective, dynamic health marketing and communications teams to ultimately strive for better health,” company executives say. Acquisitions over the years have included Canale Communications, Create NYC, Galliard, Incisive Health, and MicroMass. As art of the revamp, two new global healthcare agencies were unveiled.

“Ashfield has always been driven by a desire to redefine and develop richer client partnerships, improving customer experience and outcomes,” says Ryan Quigley, chief operating officer of Ashfield and UDG Healthcare. “Our business has evolved in recent years due to a number of strategic and complementary acquisitions, and our new structure tells a simpler, stronger story. Most importantly, it enables our clients to access a breadth of industry-leading solutions and experience our collective expertise, combined with outstanding execution.”

Quigley adds, “Throughout Ashfield, we are connected by imagination, strategy and action, in everything we do. Our capabilities in data and digital engagement are a good example of this and through innovative approaches we are enabling our clients to adapt to the present pandemic as well as helping them to prepare for the future. Our integrated offering will allow us to better meet clients’ needs, tackle their challenges with ingenuity, and create tangible solutions.”

The creation of Ashfield Health, according to executives, “are part of a journey started by our new Global President Amar Urhekar, to be the best partner we can for our wide range of clients across the world and deliver work that truly has a life changing impact.”

“We have built a network for today – agile, data and technology driven, creative, and diverse – which can respond better and quicker to the new challenges our clients face,” Urhekar says. “We are different to old networks as we encourage independence and entrepreneurialism in our specialist agency teams but have created a unique ability and drive to work as one team when needed.”

Part of the reorganization was mingling some of the network’s acquisitions to form two new healthcare agencies, Mind+Matter and Ashfield MedComms. 

Mind+Matter was created by merging Cambridge BioMarketing with Ashfield Digital and Creative (ADC) and Pegasus. According to management, the new 250-person global agency will span the breadth of health from consumer wellness through to established pharma and rare and novel therapies.

According to Global President Ben Beckley, Mind+Matter will be the first global agency to create meaningful experiences by bringing data and emotion together to drive behavior change.

“Health is the most vital, exhilarating frontier in communications, and we had to bring this global team of world-class experts together – even if we’re apart,” Beckley says. “COVID has shown in an instant how our individual health is also a truly global issue, and we need to offer clients a deeply interconnected, cross-sector response to their challenges – big thinking that’s unafraid to confront the toughest problems out there.”

Ashfield MedComms brings together more than 700 creatives, scientists, strategists, and client partners to form one of the largest scientific and medical communications agencies in the world. The agency is headed up by President Richard Lawrence (UK and Europe), and President Matt Jacobson (North America), reporting to Urhekar.

“We have long heritage of being creators, leaders and pioneers,” Lawrence says. “The formation of Ashfield MedComms accelerates this and better enables us to achieve our mission of bringing clarity to the complex science to shape and inform decisions. Operating under one, global brand and connecting the capabilities of Ashfield Health, our clients will have access to an unrivaled strategic, creative and scientific team.”

“Together, our work will span new medicines for diseases where no treatment existed, to paradigm-shifting advances, to precision medicines, real-world evidence and patient-relevant outcomes, to technologies and diagnostics that will fundamentally reshape healthcare,” Jacobson says.

According to Urhekar, all Ashfield Health agencies are now united by a new brand identity and shared purpose to “make it matter.”

“‘Make it matter’ is our promise to clients and a reminder to ourselves that everything we do is a matter of life,” Urhekar says. “Our drive to ‘make it matter’ inspires us to grow, adapt, be more creative and work smarter than anyone else to deliver work that is truly life changing. From making discoveries to making a difference, we will take every opportunity to challenge convention and spark change for better health – this is something that you will see in every Ashfield Health agency.”

Besides Mind+Matter and Ashfield MedComms, Ashfield Health consists of CanaleComm, a U.S.-based communication partner that management says springs strategy into action for emerging companies; Create NYC, a U.S.-based agency that helps clients deliver creative tactics more effectively and efficiently; Galliard, a UK-based PR and communications agency that delivers scientific storytelling with passion and creativity; Incisive Health, a UK and Brussels-based agency which looks to change government policy and transform lives; and MicroMass, a U.S.-based full-service marketing agency with expertise in changing health behavior.