Dr. Frank Peacock and Dr. Damon R. Kuehl join BioTalk for a focused discussion on one of emergency medicine’s most persistent challenges: accurately diagnosing and predicting outcomes in mild traumatic brain injury. As Scientific Advisory Board members for BrainBox Solutions, Inc., they walk through what happens when a patient presents to the emergency department after a fall or sports injury and why current tools, including CT scans, often leave clinicians without clear answers. The conversation explores the gap between a “normal” scan and ongoing symptoms, and what missed or uncertain diagnoses can mean for patients weeks later.
Dr. Peacock outlines the HeadSMART II study and explains why combining blood biomarkers with neurocognitive testing provides a more complete assessment than biology alone. Dr. Kuehl discusses how multi-modal data, integrated through artificial intelligence, can generate an objective score to support real-time clinical decision-making and help identify patients at risk for persistent symptoms. The episode also highlights BrainBox’s leadership, including CEO Donna Edmonds, a member of the BioHealth Innovation Board of Directors, and the company’s role in advancing objective mTBI testing.
Listen now via your favorite podcast platform:
Apple: https://apple.co/4aiigz6
Spotify: https://bit.ly/4rZQWf7
iHeart: https://ihr.fm/3ZAGiPL
Amazon Podcasts: https://amzn.to/4bY0Fha
YouTube Music: https://bit.ly/4aF6SMB
TuneIn: https://bit.ly/4rXcx7V
Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com).
Dr. W. Frank Peacock IV is Professor of Emergency Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. Chief Medical Officer at AseptiScope, and the founder of both a contract research organization called Comprehensive Research Associates, LLC and a medical education company named Emergencies in Medicine, LLC. Dr. Peacock received his medical degree from Wayne State University Medical School and completed his Emergency Medicine training at William Beaumont Hospital. He has >900 peer reviewed publications and is also the co-editor of multiple medical textbooks on heart failure, acute coronary syndromes, and traumatic brain injury.
Dr. Damon R. Kuehl is the Vice Chair of Research and Academic Affairs and Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Virginia Tech, School of Medicine. He completed Medical School at University of Minnesota Medical School and his Emergency Medicine Residency at Stanford University. He has also completed residencies in Preventive Medicine and a Research Fellowship in the Center for Policy and Research in Emergency Medicine, at Oregon Health and Science University. Dr. Kuehl’s research primarily focuses on diagnostic and prognostic uncertainty in brain injury. He is a lead investigator for HeadSMART II and for HeadSMART Geriatrics, a NINDS funded 3 year study to develop a diagnostic tool for head trauma in older adults. He is the founder of the Carilion Brain Injury Center and also an investigator with the Virginia Tech Center for Biomechanics studying the boundary conditions associated with injuries in older adult falls.
BioTalk with Rich Bendis wants to hear from its audience about the voices that deserve the mic. A new guest submission form is now live at https://bit.ly/BioTalkGuest, making it easy for listeners, partners, and community members to recommend leaders shaping the future of biohealth.
BioTalk is a long-running podcast hosted by Rich Bendis that focuses on the real stories behind innovation in the life sciences. The show features open, unscripted conversations with founders, executives, scientists, investors, policymakers, and ecosystem builders who are moving ideas from lab to market. Topics range from company building and commercialization to policy, workforce, capital, and collaboration. The goal is clarity and perspective, grounded in experience.
With nearly 200 episodes, BioTalk has built a strong following across the industry. Many conversations highlight leaders and initiatives connected to the BioHealth Capital Region, while others bring in national and global voices whose work influences the region and the broader biohealth landscape. Episodes are designed to be accessible and relevant, offering insights that listeners can actually use.
Now, BioTalk is turning to its audience. Who should be featured next. Which voices are missing. Who is doing work that more people should hear about. If you know a founder, researcher, investor, policymaker, or industry leader with a compelling story or perspective, submit a recommendation at https://bit.ly/BioTalkGuest. The podcast wants to reflect what its listeners care about and continue spotlighting the people driving the biohealth industry forward.
by Jonathan Kay, MPP, Managing Partner, Health Market Experts & BioHealth Innovation, Inc. Entrepreneur-in-Residence
To recap, the first 5 posts of our series covered:
- Test, Don’t Guess: Adopt a data-driven mindset about messaging impact
- Know Your Stakeholders: Avoid a one-size-fits-all approach
- Listen First: What are your stakeholders saying and how?
- Message Anatomy: Ensure messages get the job done
- Measuring Success: Define metrics of success upfront
Insight 6: Just Start
It’s true we want to pursue all 5 tactics above. But that doesn’t mean we always can. Sometimes clients or would-be clients insist:
- Time is too limited, so they can’t test
- The target audience is rare or ultra rare, so they can’t test
🛑 Hold on! Don’t skip testing even in these situations. As the saying goes, Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.(That’s typically attributed to surgeons!🥼)
Real-world problems require real-world problem-solving. To know in advance how well your messages will perform, ask real-world stakeholders. Even if time is extremely limited. Even if audiences seem too hard-to-reach. (We can help you in both cases. While we encourage clients to have a launch runway and notify us in advance, typically we can line up test audiences in a day or two, or faster!)
Testing messages BEFORE launch can improve early uptake 📈, increase commercial success, and save time and budget later. It can help you avoid unnecessary stress.
✅ Rather than skip testing, “just start” testing by modifying the ideal and going with what is realistic. Here are a few ideas:
- Fewer interviews
- Shorter survey
- Leverage Gen AI (more to come in Tactic #7)
- Plan ahead: put message testing in your launch plan
When a client was preparing to launch a genetic marker for a rare disease, they approached us to test physician ad concepts and messages. They faced two familiar constraints in biotech launches:
- Limited time
- A small, hard-to-reach physician population
One more traditional approach might have been to test messages → share feedback with client and creative agency → agency modifies concepts → ideally we test again to optimize. Instead, we compressed the process and reduced the timeline by days, possibly a week. (How great would it be to save a week when getting ready for launch?)
How did we do that?
- We reduced the number of stakeholder interviews.
- We prioritized metrics like stopping power, visceral response, clinical credibility
- Importantly, we invited the agency into the testing process.
Bringing the agency in allowed for agile development. As the interviews progressed, the concepts evolved, and we moved closer and closer to optimal with each next test.
The results were telling, actionable, and valuable even with a small sample. We confirmed a key hypothesis, which added confidence to the commercial strategy. We also revealed confusing language about the biomarker that we easily fixed to avoid encountering post-launch confusion, questions, and delayed product adoption.
The key takeaway: When launching a business or a brand or a campaign, perfect conditions are rare. But even limited testing can uncover powerful insights, reduce risk, and strengthen confidence before your message reaches the market.
If your organization is preparing to launch a new business or brand, connect with us (message me on LinkedIn) or visit https://www.healthmarketexperts.com/ to learn more about how we can help you with messaging and commercial strategy to set your business and brand on a path of success.
Written by a human. This post expands on content I previously wrote as a blog at Catalant and delivered in guest lectures at Rutgers Business School.
Visit https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-kay-healthcare/ to connect with Jon on LinkedIn.
BioHealth Innovation extends its sincere thanks to Jarrod Borkat, Chief Commercial and Strategy Officer at On Demand Pharmaceuticals, and Rachel Rath, Head of JLABS @ Washington DC, for their dedicated service on the Board of Directors.
Throughout their tenure, both leaders brought a steady, thoughtful presence to the board and helped strengthen the organization’s role within the BioHealth Capital Region. Their perspectives, grounded in deep industry experience and regional engagement, supported informed decision-making and reinforced a shared commitment to advancing innovation across the ecosystem.
Jarrod Borkat’s career spans senior commercial, strategy, and partnership roles across the biopharmaceutical sector. His experience building large-scale collaborations among industry, academia, and government brought practical insight to board discussions, particularly around commercialization pathways and cross-sector engagement. His long-standing involvement in the region reflects a consistent belief in collaboration as a foundation for sustainable growth.
During his time with MedImmune and AstraZeneca, Jarrod played a key role in advancing the BioHealth Capital Region (BHCR) brand and strengthening its national profile. He was also a strong advocate for BioHealth Innovation expanding its footprint into Washington, DC, and Virginia, helping foster a more integrated regional ecosystem. In addition, he served on the Board’s Executive Committee, where his strategic perspective supported organizational growth and transition.
Rachel Rath provided a complementary lens shaped by her leadership at one of the region’s most active innovation platforms. Her work evaluating and accelerating early-stage companies, along with prior experience supporting national health security and clinical research initiatives, informed the board’s understanding of emerging technologies and the needs of founders navigating complex development environments.
“Jarrod and Rachel have been exceptional board members and trusted partners,” said Rich Bendis, Founder, President, and CEO of BioHealth Innovation. “Their leadership, insight, and commitment to the BioHealth Capital Region have made a lasting impact. We are grateful for their service and for the time and expertise they so generously shared.”
BioHealth Innovation wishes both leaders continued success and looks forward to their ongoing contributions to the region’s innovation community.
by Jonathan Kay, MPP, Managing Partner, Health Market Experts & BioHealth Innovation, Inc. Entrepreneur-in-Residence
Welcome to Tactic 5 in our series of 7 Tactics to Optimize Launch Messaging 🚀 in health and life sciences 🧬. So far in our Optimizing Launch Messaging series, we’ve discussed topics such as the importance of data, the value of tailoring communications to your audience, and the benefit of making communication precise and purposeful. When messaging about a product launch, that included a reminder to focus on benefits and not only on features and functionality. But even the strongest message has limited potential if you can’t quantify its impact. That brings us to Tactic 5, Measuring Success.
Tactic 5: Measure Success
Feedback can be helpful in a variety of contexts. We look for feedback in the market, in a variety of forms of ROI.
In messaging, we look for message recall, impact, attribution.
We also want to know which parts of a message worked best, through which channels and messengers.
When designing your messages, you can find out a lot of that in advance. Think what you could do if you knew in advance of launching a business, a brand, or a campaign:
- Will the message work well?
- With which market segment or target audience?
- Will the message raise awareness?
- Change opinions?
- Motivate behavior?
- Why? How?
To ensure your messaging is targeting the right audience andmaking an impact, you need to measure its effectiveness.
In healthcare, that may mean testing with multiple stakeholders: physicians, payers, patients, among others.
🔑The key is to define success before you start testing.
At Health Market Experts, we recommend working back from your business need and desired outcome to determine which metrics will be most meaningful and practical.
For example,
- If the science behind a cellular treatment, like CAR-T, is critical to convey, but complex, then a good metric is clarity.
- If a gene therapy offers a functional cure, but may be perceived as “too good to be true,” then credibilitywould be a useful metric.
- When launching a novel advanced therapy, interim indicators of success may be useful, such as “likelihood to seek more information.”
Those metrics show different ways to assess attitudes and behavior.
Combining quantitative and qualitative feedback helps identify the messages that outperform for each audience, why and how those messages work.
Artificial intelligence can further enhance this process by rapidly synthesizing quantitative and qualitative feedback across stakeholders, uncovering patterns in message performance, and enabling faster, more precise iteration of launch communications. We talk more about AI for messaging in Tactic 7 down the road. But you still need to test with real stakeholders who will make the actual decisions that determine the success of your business or brand down the line.
In summary, metrics provide a feedback loop and let you design a roadmap for continuous improvement, ensuring your communications evolve as stakeholder needs and market dynamics change.
That’s why the strongest message has limited potential if you can’t quantify its impact. If you don’t know why it works, you can’t keep the best parts and improve the rest, even as the market changes and grows with you and your product.
If your organization is preparing to launch a new business or brand, connect with us (message me on LinkedIn) or visit https://www.healthmarketexperts.com/ to learn more about how we can help you with messaging and commercial strategy to set your business and brand on a path of success.
Written by a human. This post expands on content I previously wrote as a blog at Catalant and delivered in guest lectures at Rutgers Business School.
Visit https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-kay-healthcare/ to connect with Jon on LinkedIn.