TJ WALKER - THE HABIT INFLUENCER - Personal Development | LIVE STREAM

Welcome to INSIDE communications. I'm your host, Mike Baco. Over the last three decades, we certainly know all about the lives that have been touched and ended by HIV and aids, but how much do we know about the people that are still living with the disease? Today on INSIDE Communications, we go inside the definitive study on this topic, the Atlas 2010 study. Today on Inside Communications, Lindsey DeFolt of Konen Wolf joins us. All that and more more coming up next. Lindsay, thanks for joining us today on INSIDE communications.

Thank you for having me.

So we all know about aids. It's been in the national spotlight for many decades now. But we think about it from a research standpoint. We think about it from the gains in terms of research, but not so much in terms of how people are actually living with AIDS globally around the world. That's where Conan Wolf and Merck came in. Tell us a little bit about the ATLAS study.

Sure. The ATLAS study, the AIDS Treatment for Life International Study, is the largest patient survey of its kind. Over 2,000 patients living with HIV were surveyed about treatment awareness across 12 countries. And we were able to, for the first time, identify some significant gaps in care and garner an understanding of what the patient goes through from a treatment perspective, but also from a personal perspective, living with the disease, figuring out, you know, what the issues are in terms of stigma and overall awareness and literacy. So it was a really good opportunity for us to uncover these, this information which we, you know, 30 years into the epidemic, we have come a long way, but there's still, it uncovered that there's still a long way to go in terms of, you know, helping patients be empowered to have more information and not feel so stigmatized by the disease.

We have come a long way and why now? Why 2010? And it was a big Apple Award winner for global communications. Congratulations on that. But why did Merck feel that now was the time to actually do this in depth of a study? And you mentioned 10, 20, 30 years into this epidemic.

Sure, there's been, there's a lot of patient research that exists to that point. Before we did this study, however, we didn't have a pure global snapshot of what patients, you know, across the world have been, have been dealing with. And it was, you know, we didn't want to just uncover, you know, the negatives, you know, that are associated with this disease. There's a whole lot of positives that we were able to learn about with these findings. So it actually gave a lot of hope for and it was something to celebrate in addition to, you know, figuring out where we need to improve. There's a lot of good that's also happening, which is fantastic considering we're 30 years in.

And some of the good that is coming out of this study is new international guidelines. Tell us a little bit about that.

Right. So part of the findings, there was a lot of information there, but adherence when it comes to HIV medication is absolutely critical. If patients are not compliant with their medication, there's a lot of complications that happen. Patients become resistant to different types of medication classes, and if you're resistant, then eventually you will run out of options. So it's very important that patients take their medications when they're supposed to take their medications. And some of the findings told us that there are some issues when it comes to compliance, whether it's taking a vacation from medication for a weekend, if there's a. There's something to do, or, you know, just not understanding what the implications, the negative implications of not adhering to your medications are. So the third party that we worked with, the International association of Physicians in AIDS Care, ipac, they took these findings and presented them to the National Institutes of Health and were able to garner funding to pull together a task force to develop the first ever treatment guidelines on HIV treatment adherence. So this is a really tremendous win in terms of taking some findings and taking it to the policy level and getting some regulation there and guidelines to improve care for patients.

And another tremendous win was going at it at a geographical level, finding out in different areas around the world what exactly people are doing when they're living with this disease. How did that inform the study in terms of knowing what someone, maybe in Africa is doing versus someone in Canada versus Italy, versus here in the U.S.

Well, I think one of the key learnings is that not one size fits all by a nation, by a region, you know, by continent. So it's very important that, you know, when regulators or pharma companies or industry in general come together and devise strategies to improve patient care, they need to consider these factors. You know, in developing world countries, what works there is not necessarily going to work, you know, here because we're so far advanced, and vice versa.

And how important is education in those countries, those underdeveloped countries, in terms of living with the disease, taking that medication, being introduced to all the ways that they could live with this disease?

It's absolutely critical. Stigma is something that affects a lot of people across the world, but it's even more important to tackle in developing world countries, such as India. While India was not part of the ATLAS study, we had a governing task force, and we had representation from Asia from a doctor, a key opinion leader, physician from India who, you know, made it very clear that stigma affects treatment compliance. There's, you know, a need to increase awareness in terms of prevention. There's just not a lot of awareness there. And HIV is rampant in India and it's, you know, coming up quickly behind Africa. So it's, you know, if we don't stop it and we don't take the right precautionary measures and we don't increase literacy, then it's just going to continue to. To be a problem.

So let's go inside the campaign from a media perspective. Once the study is actually done, how do you go about getting pressed for this? Is it traditional press, scientific press, press that's interested in health issues? How did you go about that?

Sure. Well, it was a global program, so we were able to devise a global launch strategy. And the program itself was launched at the International AIDS Conference last summer in Vienna, which is the largest AIDS meeting of its kind. So there were a couple things that we did. We had submitted a Late Breaker abstract, which it was accepted out of 700.

Entries and they only accept 30 or so. Yeah.

So it was quite amazing. So it was presented. The findings were presented at this conference through a Late Breaker oral presentation. And then we also launched it publicly for media through Global Press Briefing, in which our task force of governing experts, you know, spoke about the data, different cuts of the data, and the most important findings and what this meant for patients and the call to action, what we need to do to improve. And, you know, that's how we were able to get it out. And it was also part of a turnkey global media strategy with Merck's affiliates around the world, so that we were able to push out the media or push out the news to media through the local affiliates, which was very successful. I mean, the survey itself, the findings were interesting on their own, obviously, with the late Breaker science, et cetera, but we were able to garner a significant amount of news coverage. Our targets predominantly, you know, were medical press, treatment press, getting to the HIV community, getting to the advocates, because obviously it's important to get to physicians, it's very important to get to patients, and we were very successful in that part.

Did you find that when the media picked up on the different aspects of the study, that there was a common thread that they all focused on, or was it kind of geographic, based on where someone was picking up the story, what sector they were in? Or did you find a Common thread, sure.

For the most part, I'd say that, you know, they picked up on the global press release what we had presented in the global press release, which was, you know, a good cross section of global findings, regional, but then also pulling out specific country findings. And the story there was essentially that patients, you know, are living with HIV and they're living well, and while they're having, you know, while they feel that their care is good, that's good news. They're engaging conversations with their physicians or their healthcare providers. However, the reality of the disease shifting, you know, they're not necessarily having conversations about things that they should be having conversations about, such as, you know, coexisting comorbidities, as we call it, such as, you know, other health factors that they're dealing with. And the reality now is that, you know, HIV being discovered 30 years, you know, before is that patients are, while they're living well, they're not necessarily dying from aids. It's other factors, such as cardiovascular disease, which is the number one killer globally. So it's an interesting story to tell in that, you know, patients are not necessarily being screened or having the discussions about these different comorbid conditions, diabetes, depression, heart, you know, various factors, you know, associated with heart disease. So that was an important story to tell.

Do you think the media is doing a good story of telling this story? You know, obviously, when the study comes out, they do a story on it. How about on an ongoing basis? Are they doing a good job of covering the story?

I think that the story with aging patients still needs to grow a little bit more, and I think as we learn a little bit more with research, clinical studies, we will be seeing a little bit more in that respect. And it's the reality of the HIV patients. So, you know, as the patient is aging, however, there are the newly diagnosed patients as well. I think in the media, we've seen a significant transition in, you know, the stories, and there's a lot of excitement with, you know, what's on the horizon in terms of new resources and tools for patients and things to empower patients to have more of an understanding of their disease and take that on as there's more information available with the Internet and everything like that.

And how do you use the Internet? Is that a viable resource for you, not only for this study, but just in your daily business in terms of reaching out, using social media and contacting different social media avenues like Twitter, Facebook, different things like that?

Sure. I think with the pharmaceutical industry, which are predominantly the clients that I have, are part of this. It's an evolving process, and digital media is something that we're getting into. And we've done a little bit, you know, with from a global perspective, I know from a US perspective, definitely is something that we've done a lot in that area. So it's an exciting area to pursue.

And finally wrapping up on a global scale. And you do global healthcare. What are the next trends, do you think that we see that people are going to be focusing on that research is going to be focusing in the future?

In hiv, I think it's, you know, really diving into the comorbid, you know, conditions, the actual patient, like, really looking at the patient and seeing what the patient is living with and the conditions there. One of the key findings that we was surprising, you know, when patients were being screened with their physician or having their appointments, the question of smoking history, you know, was very rare to come up. And that is a risk factor, a direct risk factor for heart disease. So I think it'll be interesting to see how other therapeutic areas come together and, you know, how all this starts to fit together, because I think, you know, as patients in general get older, not even HIV patients, you just need to be aware of what is, what's, you know, out there and what can happen. So it should be interesting to see how this all evolves.

Thank you for making us aware of this study and thanks for going inside communications with us.

Thank you for having me.