What are the differences between ExtendMed and Within3?

Of course, there are feature and product differences between the companies, which we’ll get to in a moment. But at its core, ExtendMed was built exclusively for small to mid-size pharma, medical device, biotech and similar life science companies rather than the industry’s largest players.

This was accomplished with the unique knowledge and experience of healthcare education expert Amy Ravi, who’s spent over 20 years simplifying medical education and training solutions for medical communications agencies, medical associations and pharmaceutical companies.

If you’re a small to mid-size company, know that we understand firsthand just how challenging it is to leverage a small team with limited resources to engage with KOLs and thought leaders, convene advisory boards, build medical education programs, develop speaker bureaus and all the rest.

That’s why we’re able to provide a platform—and support it with expert guidance—that gives medical affairs and commercial teams, as well as the communication agencies they work with, the power to think globally and act locally, selecting the most relevant corporate assets and translating them to address local needs through an engagement platform that maximizes the frequency and value of your interactions at a third of the cost of traditional approaches.

While Within3 is focused on scaling its platform as a traditional Software as a Service (SaaS) product—where teams sign up to use the platform as built—our focus is on giving teams a more customizable, flexible platform wrapped in expert service as an extension of your team. We partner with our clients to help them set up and use our platform to the fullest.

The top four reasons companies choose ExtendMed over other platforms

1. We’re smaller, and focused on custom, personalized service rather than scaling a technology platform.

When you choose us, you get more than software. At ExtendMed, we assign senior-level healthcare technology experts to your account who work with you to customize and personalize our system to meet your specific needs, often resulting in faster reaction times. Moreover, we provide white glove service in interacting with your key stakeholders—whether we’re setting up a video shoot or balancing the insights we help collect during an engagement.

Each client is assigned their own dedicated program manager to provide development, implementation, training and follow-up support.

2. Our platform is focused on solutions for both synchronous and asynchronous engagements.

ExtendMed differentiates itself from Within3 and other platforms by focusing on both synchronous and asynchronous interactions and engagements, from curated, synchronous live or virtual meetings with interactive features to asynchronous surveys and discussion boards.

This combined approach to engagement offers some wholly new capabilities that teams find both convenient and extremely valuable. For example, ExtendMed offers survey tools that allow answers to be controlled and not viewable by other participants. This is perfect for teams who want to hear from each of their advisors and get their input on questions or topics that may be sensitive and not appropriate to make visible to others.

Our tools are also unique in that they enable teams to segment and quantify their market research in a way that is not so easy to do with live discussions alone. Teams can survey audiences with a more person-by-person focus, versus a discussion board, which gives everyone the opportunity to start to engage back and forth in new ways that may allow teams to collect insights in ways they simply couldn’t before.

Here are a few relevant capabilities that set us apart:

• Host synchronous live meetings to facilitate a real-time conversation and gather insights within the same software as your asynchronous engagements.
• Invite advisors to share answers to survey questions privately during a virtual meeting or conduct complete asynchronous surveys.
• Invite participants to engage with one another at their own convenience using our discussion board feature.
• Gather more of your insights into one platform to segment, quantify, and compare your market research.
• Follow up a virtual meeting with reviews and discussion, moderated by an expert who can elicit further feedback from advisors.

3. Our resource center allows participants to review resources at any time—inside or outside the context of a discussion, survey, or virtual meeting.

Our platform enables your team to communicate efficiently and consistently by providing experts with access to helpful resources such as articles, slide decks, or interactive visual aids on demand or during an interaction.

4. Our flexible approach to contracting enables teams to start with a low-commitment pilot project rather than committing long-term right away.

Our smaller size enables us to offer you much more flexibility when it comes to contracting. Within3 has done an impressive job serving the very top of the pharma market that is more comfortable and better resourced for immediate large-scale engagements.

Simply put, our tool is perfectly tuned for the mid-size market: those who may be more interested in starting with a six-month pilot rather than a longer-term commitment. Perhaps you’re working with a steering committee, which is only needed for a shorter period of time. Having that flexibility with us from a contracting perspective—as well as from a community-building perspective—is something our clients find particularly valuable. With us, you’ll get budget and project duration flexibility that’s hard to find elsewhere.

ExtendMed is the perfect complement for medical communications agencies—and companies working with them

We understand that gathering, combining, and reporting the data from virtual meetings, discussion boards, surveys, and more can be a challenge to coordinate and execute efficiently and effectively.

Our platform solutions combine dedicated senior-level healthcare technology consulting with synchronous and asynchronous KOL engagement tools to help medical communication agencies and pharmaceutical companies facilitate communication, gather insights, and deliver outcomes faster, more efficiently, and cost-effectively.

For life science companies working with medical communications agencies

Your medical communications agency plays an essential role in understanding your market and crafting precise content and messaging. What’s often missing, however, is a technology partner whose expertise lies in sharing that message with your audiences and soliciting feedback and insights from them.

Often, this step consists of pieced-together tools and a less-than-ideal strategy. Meetings are hosted on one platform, surveys on another, and so on. Insights are siloed. Dots go unconnected. Without a dedicated set of tools for bringing your outstanding content to key audiences, it’s difficult to develop an overall communication strategy that achieves consistent, genuine awareness with providers, payors, patients, and others.

This is the critical gap ExtendMed fills. We complement the expertise and capabilities of your medical communications agency with a suite of engagement tools and the analysis capabilities that enable you to share your content, solicit feedback and insights from thought leaders, and distribute those learnings across the organization and outside of it. We bring unique expertise and efficiencies in producing content in different formats and facilitating the engagements you need—all at a fraction of the cost and complexity of traditional approaches.

For medical communications agencies themselves

Looking for a technology partner whose expertise complements your agency’s to provide a far better service to your clients? We routinely partner with agencies that are tired of managing franken-systems that frustrate clients and stakeholders alike.

Agencies typically partner with us when they’re ready to radically streamline all of these “curated” tools and technologies into one platform that provides their team, and their clients, with the convenience and rich insights they expect when it comes to stakeholder engagement, specifically.

Free your team to focus on crafting exceptional content and messaging while we provide the engagement tools that deliver desired outcomes faster and more reliably. We don’t replace what you do best, but rather, arm you with a mechanism for gathering, tracking, and distributing insights so you can spend more time and attention doing what you do best. Give your content the platform it deserves.

Educate

Leverage educational content across regions, professions, and specialties. Manage faculty, curricula, multimedia, content, and certification in one platform.

Track

Track how many participants have engaged in each of your activities in your portal through a simple reporting dashboard.

Testimonials

We've helped hundreds of organizations advance patient care with more efficient systems for engaging their experts and moving products forward.

“

ExtendMed gave me wonderful support in running this program, once again. It is so helpful to have a reliable technology partner for our virtual peer-to-peer programs (aka speaker programs with bureau). They reached out before the program to ask whether I had questions, during the program to make sure everything was running smoothly and after the program to make it easy for me to close out attendance and expenses, online."

Bridget Tygh
Territory Business Manager, Nabriva Therapeutics

“

In 25 years of working with vendors, ExtendMed stands at the top of the list. How so? They're strategic partners, arming my staff with vital statistics and sharing their experience and ideas for the future. They're nimble. We've had to change course in our work together. They've anticipated issues, recommended new directions, and implemented our decisions efficiently. They understand our business. ExtendMed provides us with instructional design and marketing support, and they communicate stepwise progress towards attaining our goals."

Jamie Arvizu
Vice President, Head of Medical Affairs, North America. Ultragenyx Pharmaceutical Inc.

Work with a partner that gets results.

Since 2000, we’ve been helping leaders in the pharmaceutical, biotech, and device industries—as well as medical communications agencies, research, and education organizations—deliver the efficiencies and capabilities they need to focus on the work that matters most. Are you next?

A biotech company specializing in fibrosis treatment needed to gather strategic insights from interdisciplinary experts to prioritize clinical studies, but faced budget constraints that made traditional platform commitments unfeasible.

ExtendMed delivered a hybrid virtual advisory board combining synchronous and asynchronous engagement, achieving high participation with experts contributing an average of 5 hours each. The engagement fostered stronger relationships with thought leaders across specialties while providing actionable recommendations that advanced their clinical development strategy. The company reported superior insights compared to in-person advisory boards at a fraction of the cost, with enhanced convenience through ExtendMed's Health Expert Connect™ platform.

A mid-size pharmaceutical company lacked marketing focus and wanted to use a group of KOLs to assess their marketing strategy.

Using ExtendMed to streamline market testing between external experts and the commercial team, the company began monthly outreach to build stronger specialist relationships, differentiated its position in a competitive market, and enabled clinical experts to provide feedback at their convenience—better noting the actions taken from their input.