Patient Perspective. Strategic Insight. Meaningful Impact.
Patient advocacy consulting that brings lived experience into the room—and makes it useful.
The best patient engagement doesn't happen when a patient is invited into a conversation after the important decisions have already been made.
It happens when the patient perspective is part of the conversation early, meaningfully, and with the potential to influence what happens next.
Margo Wickersham works with healthcare and life-sciences organizations, patient advocacy organizations, and other organizations committed to more patient-centered healthcare.
She brings together three perspectives that don't often exist in the same person:
The patient.
Firsthand experience navigating a rare and aggressive cancer, treatment decisions, the healthcare system, and life after treatment.
The advocate.
Years of work with patients, clinicians, researchers, advocacy organizations, and industry to bring patient perspectives into healthcare conversations and decision-making.
The business strategist.
More than two decades of experience in business, leadership, sales, marketing, communication, training, and organizational strategy.
The result is a patient perspective that goes beyond telling a story.
Margo helps organizations listen more effectively, challenge assumptions, identify blind spots, and turn patient insight into meaningful action.
How Margo Can Help
Patient Perspective & Engagement
Meaningful patient engagement starts with understanding what patients actually need—not simply checking a patient-involvement box.
Margo can provide patient perspective and strategic insight to help organizations better understand the patient experience and incorporate it into their work.
Potential engagements include:
Patient perspective in strategic discussions and decision-making
Patient engagement strategy and initiatives
Patient-centered research and development discussions
Patient journey and experience insights
Reviewing communications and materials through a patient lens
Identifying gaps between organizational assumptions and lived patient experience
Patient Advisory & Strategic Insight
Patients bring a kind of expertise that cannot be learned from a clinical trial, market report, or focus group alone.
Margo can participate in or help shape conversations designed to bring that expertise to the table.
Potential engagements include:
Patient advisory boards and advisory panels
Patient panels and stakeholder discussions
Patient perspective on therapy selection and treatment decisions
Moderation and facilitation of patient-centered conversations
Strategic input on patient advocacy initiatives
Collaboration with cross-functional healthcare and life-sciences teams
Margo's role is not simply to represent her own experience. She brings the ability to listen for the larger patient perspective, ask the questions others may not think to ask, and translate lived experience into actionable insight.
Patient-Centered Communication
The way an organization talks about patients matters.
So does the way it listens to them.
Margo can help organizations examine communications, messaging, presentations, educational materials, and other patient-facing or stakeholder-facing content through the perspective of someone who has actually been on the receiving end of healthcare.
She brings a combination of patient insight and professional communication experience to help make messages more human, relevant, understandable, and authentic.
Why Margo?
Margo isn't a traditional consultant who studied patient experience from the outside.
And she isn't simply a patient sharing her story.
She's both—and she understands the business side of the table, too.
Her career spans more than two decades of business leadership, sales, marketing, training, communication, and strategy. Her experience as a patient and advocate has added an entirely different perspective to that foundation.
That combination allows her to move comfortably between patients, healthcare professionals, researchers, advocates, industry leaders, and business teams.
She can tell you what it feels like to be the patient.
She can also help you think through what an organization can do with that insight.
Engagements Can Be Tailored
Not every organization needs the same kind of patient perspective.
Some engagements may be a focused consultation or expert discussion. Others may involve an advisory board, patient panel, strategic initiative, ongoing advisory relationship, or speaking or facilitation engagement.
Margo works with each organization to understand the question you're trying to answer, the perspective you're missing, and the kind of engagement that would be most useful.
There is no one-size-fits-all patient engagement model.
Have a Patient Perspective You Want at the Table?
Whether you're developing a patient engagement initiative, planning an advisory board, looking for an authentic patient perspective, or simply trying to think through a challenge from the patient's side of the table, let's talk.