What's a more interactive presentation solution than a slide deck?

Slide decks or slide sets are preferred by pharma, clinical and biotech companies as an excellent tool, mainly for:

• Investor outreach (investor pitch deck)
• Product marketing presentations
• Product training (internal staff and external audience (HCP’s etc.))

Apart from healthcare companies, many patient advocacy & research foundations use slide decks to attract funding and also to highlight research findings in the  therapeutic area/s they champion.

Traditionally, slide decks are developed using PowerPoint then are converted into a pdf document if being sent outside the organisation. The healthcare company would either use an in-house team or engage a medical communications agency to create content, perform literature research (where required) and to format the final document. One of the downsides of using PowerPoint to develop slide decks is that its linear, static and text-heavy nature can make the final product quite simply – boring.

The latest alternative to ppt slide decks are web-based presentations. In this ‘touch, swipe, pinch and zoom’ era, a highly interactive user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) information delivery platform has the potential to keep the audience engaged, resulting in:

• Better learning outcomes (with intuitive training decks)
• Improved product promotion coverage (with high impact marketing decks) and/or
• Increased funding opportunities (with dynamic investor pitch decks).

Besides offering greater interactivity, web-based presentations come with the flexibility of embedding a range of intuitive plug-ins and features, such as:

• Password protected individual user login
• QR code access
• Payer/cost calculators
• Time stamped videos
• Case studies and research papers categorised by disease/therapeutic area, author and topic
• Real time assessment and feedback to monitor audience engagement and progress
• Module completion reward system
• Integration with social media or the company’s internal community discussion platform
• ‘Off-line’ mode functionality
• Audience engagement metrics.

One of the most exciting and emerging applications to replace Powerpoint-based training slide sets is known as the Learning Management System or LMS. LMS has the ability to encompass a company’s training requirement of its total product portfolio and can be customised with built-in segments specific to the type and tier of audiences i.e.:

• Internal – sales & marketing teams, other key departments, stakeholders and
• External – Health Care Professionals (HCP), Key Opinion Leaders (KOL), investors etc.

The Learning Management

System has the advantage of being future-proof as it can be updated and customised based on the evolving requirements of the organisation. In contrast, slide sets sent out as .pdf files will need to be updated and re-sent; with the appropriate version control needed for multiple digital versions.

Coming up on HOC –  a detailed article dedicated to LMS.

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