“We bring to bear the larger context of healthcare for our clients, aligned in our purpose and always keeping the patient at the center of our focus.” –Kelly Simpson-Angelini, Founder, CEO and CSO of Simpson Healthcare Executives

Over the past two decades, scientific, diagnostic, and therapeutic innovations have channeled healthcare teams achieve positive developments for their patients. Such rapid growth assures therapeutic advancements will continue to improve how diseases are managed in the future. Today, the promise of technology anticipates us to believe that that there will be better and earlier diagnosis of disease in many therapeutic areas.

In such an ever-evolving healthcare landscape, here comes Simpson Healthcare Executives. Founded in 1998 by Kelly Simpson-Angelini, Simpson Healthcare Executives is a diverse scientific agency currently celebrating its 20th year of business. Kelly believes it is essential to provide great branded and disease education to physicians to advance the story of science that clients need to tell. At Simpson Healthcare, they prioritize the overarching goal of healthcare: helping people live better. They do this by personalizing the brands of the future. “Our medical and strategy teams are catalysts of industry innovation as we bring to bear the larger context of healthcare for our clients, aligned in our purpose and always keeping the patient at the center of our focus,” says Kelly Simpson-Angelini as she leads her company as the CEO and CSO.

Kelly is an agency leader with a penchant to make the world a better place to live, catalyzing impactful triumphs on a day-to-day basis for patients who now have access to new and better treatment options. Simpson Healthcare is completely dedicated to disease education. Be it the brand experience or shaping the brand behavior, the company creates strong relationships between clients, physicians, and the patient communities. Over the years, her scientific agency has had the privilege of working on game-changing, billion-dollar therapeutic brands for the clients.

In a tete-a-tete with Kelly, let’s hear more about her story and her company:

Congratulations on 20 years of Simpson Healthcare! Tell us about your clients and the journey so far.

For the past 20 years, we have had the opportunity to work with heritage biopharmaceutical clients including Pfizer, Shire, AstraZeneca, Genzyme, Merck, to name a few, having focused our innovations on supporting them in the development of new therapies. The scientific expertise and disruptive thinking methods among members of our organization span across a broad array of many major disease categories, including respiratory, oncology, cardiovascular, immunology, rare diseases, gastrointestinal, adult vaccines, and severe asthma.

According to you, what is the role of a CEO in building Mission and Vision statements?

A few years ago, we revisited the mission and vision of Simpson Healthcare and transformed this into a purpose statement. This purpose is rooted in our internal core belief systems and is the reason why we do what we do here every day at our agency. Simpson Healthcare is guided by five core values that all team members believe in and live by in alignment with our purpose. We embrace the core values at Simpson Healthcare: we maintain Passion about making a difference by pushing the boundaries to create unique strategic value for our company, our clients, and our community; we Keep-it-Real by developing strong, authentic relationships internally and externally with our clients; we look to the Future by never losing sight of the larger context and bigger opportunity; we know we are Better Together and dedicated to collaborative teamwork to ensure the highest quality work product; and finally, we bring our Best Selves to work every day, which means we are committed to achieving personal balance and strength, both at work, and in our own lives.

How did you expand your offerings over the years?

To expand upon our commitment to the healthcare experience and scientific innovation for our clients, we have used our passion for healthcare and disruptive innovation to build and customize specialized service offerings that provide long-term value to their business and the healthcare field. Through the collaborations of the members of the team, our award-winning scientific agency has brought our “FUTURING” service offering many of our pharmaceutical clients for over the past half-decade. They have integrated FUTURING into their business strategy to create goals and drive decision-making, creating an impact for their business including in the development of new therapeutic brands, in providing a more personalized brand experience for patients, and in transforming patient health outcomes.

Can you elaborate more about FUTURING?

During FUTURING, we envision the potential best and worst futures without any reference to the present day. Once the FUTURES have been imagined, the drivers to reach those FUTURES are identified, which helps identify opportunities to shape a “DESIRABLE FUTURE” or avoid impact from an “UNDESIRABLE FUTURE.” The purpose of FUTURING is to look at global datasets, policies, and influential variables, and to disrupt key markets in healthcare with a longer 10–20-year vision for the future. These inventories are a starting point for change based on the identified opportunities from FUTURING. Our work here has been launched with many of our biopharmaceutical clients and we look forward as we continue to broaden the impact of their therapeutic brands.

Where do you visualize your company in a couple of years?

The core stories of disease, diagnosis, and new therapies will continue to be new and abundant. We see a huge opportunity to continue to build knowledge and skills in organizing and showcasing scientific content. We will have more brands to build, more ways to build and explain them. A personalized and individualized approach to disease education will be something to simplify and focus on in marketing material. We are proud to unite and support our clients, to shape the future of healthcare so that the best therapeutic treatments may be available to provide a brighter health outlook for those in need. We understand that there will be great opportunities in the near future to work on novel therapies, such as once-in-a-lifetime gene therapies that could improve the quality of life for patients in a significant way. We look forward into the future and aim to best support the brands of tomorrow and to prepare our clients to have the greatest and most positive impact for patients.

For a Cause

Kelly Simpson-Angelini currently serves as Chair of the Board of Directors at Can Do Multiple Sclerosis (MS), a non-profit organization that was founded by the Olympic skier, Jimmie Huega in 1984, with a purpose of helping people with multiple sclerosis live better. This role was expanded from her previous leadership role as a board member, for her passionate involvement in the organization. She is passionate about coaching executives at all levels to grow within their leadership roles and reach their full potential to activate their teams and most positively impact and empower patients with multiple sclerosis.

Legion of Honors

Kelly was honored by the Connecticut Technology Council as the ‘Women of Innovation Honoree’ for her outstanding entrepreneurial vision and leadership. She has since been honored in New York City by Medical Marketing and Media (MM&M) as a Healthcare Transformers- Top 10 Innovation Catalyst. Kelly was also awarded the Women in Business at the Stevie Awards. Here, she was awarded the Female Entrepreneur of the Year-Business Services, along with Company of the Year and the Most Innovative Company of the Year.

“The core stories of disease, diagnosis, and new therapies will continue to be new and abundant. We see huge opportunity to continue to build knowledge and skills in organizing and showcasing scientific content.”

“Our key strength is the ability to tell the right story, always keeping the patient and what they may be experiencing at the center.”

“We challenge key healthcare stakeholders to think disruptively about healthcare beyond next year and into the next decade as we work to develop and deliver the therapies of the future.”