NuEra Health Alliance
Streamlining Promotion Review

What’s the secret to NuEra’s success?” We asked Ginny Murnen, the Founder and President of NuEra Health Alliance, a sought-after consultancy firm with a unique focus on marketing promotion and operations for the pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical device industries. “It’s because we’ve done the work before. We speak the language. We understand the issues companies face when creating commercial promotional items and the challenges of the promotional review process,” Ginny proudly answered. “An efficient and compliant process depends on balancing the collective efforts of various review disciplines, marketing teams, ad agencies, and production vendors to create promotional materials that are competitive, creative and accurate. We can help them accomplish that in an efficient, cost-effective manner while ensuring compliance with the regulatory constraints put forward by OPDP.”
Promotional review has been historically challenging as it can be quite complex and often very time consuming. The process requires bringing together professionals from very different perspectives (marketing, legal, regulatory, medical) in an attempt to agree on what can be said or written about a product. PRC and other key stakeholders are already extremely knowledgeable and well-versed in FDA requirements; however, in many cases, the promotional review is only a portion of an individual’s already busy day job. Stakeholders are often burdened with limited staff, more recently so due to post-pandemic trends such as the great resignation, as well as high volumes of materials, lack of prioritization, and the need for quick turnaround based on a highly volatile and competitive marketing environment. To this end, NuEra’s expertise comes as a breath of fresh air for these organizations.

Besides process improvement work, NuEra offers staffing options, supplementing an organization’s current staff with experienced contractors at attractive pricing.

“NuEra has a network of specialized project managers with years of experience facilitating PRC review and managing large volumes of promotional pieces. We can place experienced pharma content copy editors and experienced reviewers to quickly and transparently fill in gaps,” states Karen Ruffner, NuEra’s VP of Operations. “This allows NuEra to be nimble and flexible in delivering solutions.”

The company begins engagement with clients via a proprietary Rapid Assessment where reviewers and stakeholders are interviewed to uncover relevant pain points that can bog down the marketing materials’ implementation process. Through the rapid assessment, the firm helps identify areas and processes that are bottlenecks and address them with quick wins (often within 90 days) and/or longer-term solutions. In addition to the rapid assessment process, NuEra has developed and offers additional tools for clients and often helps companies implement relevant software tools to more efficiently facilitate their processes.

Says Ginny, “NuEra has identified seven best practices gathered not only from our more recent client database but also from our real-world working experiences. We recommend that our clients implement these best practices whenever possible as we believe strongly and see real evidence that if you leverage these, you will experience real benefits. However, we also understand that not every company has the means to implement these practices immediately, and not one size fits all, so we work to ensure which practices are critical at the time. We help identify the specific actions to take to move to a ‘best fit of best practices.’”

As its name implies, “NuEra” initiated a new era in the promotion review space at its inception in 2009. The firm leverages lessons learned and best practices to help companies streamline their promotional efforts and expediously deliver high-quality, compliant and competitive commercial promotional materials