IPG Health unifies 8 agency brands in one group

One year after corporate parent Interpublic combined FCB Health and McCann Health to birth IPG Health, the organization has unveiled a network that unites eight medical communications agencies under a single banner.

IPG Health Medical Communications will now officially house AREA 23 On Hudson, Caudex, CMC Affinity, CMC Connect, Complete HealthVizion, Complete Regulatory, ProHealth and Trio. None of the individual brands will be eliminated and Charlie Buckwell will serve as the network’s chief medical communications officer.

“There’s been a heightened interest in what we do and some of our clients are seeing medical communications as increasingly central on the healthcare communication spectrum,” Buckwell explained. “It’s the next evolution from the launch of IPG Health a year on, aligning all our medical communications expertise into one discipline.”

Buckwell said the reorg gives the new unit, and its IPG Health siblings, the ability to personalize expertise at scale, with each agency maintaining its individual offerings and collectively providing a broad spectrum of capabilities. By way of example, he pointed to the creation of personalized learning journeys for physicians.

Buckwell also noted the increasing importance of health literacy. “It’s becoming a bigger part of what we do in terms of patient summaries or supporting health literacy through data visualization — essentially turning complex information into meaningful information from different audience inputs,” he said.