MVP created the ETHOS Engage Peer-to-Peer Collaboration and Deep Learning Tool in 2013 for ETHOS Health Communications. The company was looking to solve one of the trickiest problems in the pharmaceutical research and development industry: how can presenters successfully capture the attention of doctors and make their message heard above the noise constantly competing for their time? The answer was the Engage custom mobile application, which helps facilitate meetings with richly interactive multimedia content that engages audiences and thus helps to enhance retention of the information conveyed.
ETHOS's clients are numerous and with diverse needs. Furthermore, ETHOS wanted the flexibility to conduct Engage-facilitated meetings in a wide variety of ways so that they could gain a better understanding of the formats that worked best in communicating information about pharmaceuticals to clinical audiences. For this reason, administrators are given a wide range of controls so that each presentation can be tailored for each specific audience. The administrative area allows ETHOS the ability to load a variety of media to be presented during meetings and organize the order of their presentation.
Presenters at Engage-facilitated meetings choose when audience members see each section of meeting and can annotate on these materials in real time, and audience members will see these annotations mirrored on the materials presented through their iPad app. Meeting participants can also annotate on the meeting materials and record notes that are affiliated with the specific slide materials at which they took the notes. Depending on how administrators set up the meeting, participants may either be able to move freely through meeting materials or they may be locked in with the presenters' structuring of the meeting materials. Administrators can also determine whether or not participants for a given meeting will be able to save their annotations and notes for later download.
The Engage custom iPad application also has a wide range of features that facilitate interaction between presenters and participants. Participants can indicate that they have a question or comment through the app, which can be helpful especially in larger meetings. They are also able to submit questions and comments anonymously which can help encourage the expression of ideas that may be less popular. Presenters are able to send out multiple choice questions to meeting participants, and the platform captures and reports all data solicited thereby in real time. Presenters can choose to disclose overall results of said survey questions as a part of their presentation if they so choose, and all data on each meeting is saved for post-meeting analysis by ETHOS, thus helping them to improve the meetings they facilitate into the future.
Post-meeting surveys are also elicited to give ETHOS further insight into what does and doesn't work in the presentations that they facilitate. A specialized solution was developed by MVP that even allows use of the Engage platform and app where there is no or limited internet access. MVP also included help features to provide guidance to app users. Furthermore, MVP wrote users' guides so that everyone could get the most from the custom Engage platform and iPad application. A short video introduction was developed by MVP to give a sense of the purpose and capabilities of the new tool. MVP's work on the custom ETHOS Engage platform and mobile application was acknowledged with a win of a Tabby Award, the second in its history, for the Best Healthcare and Pharmaceutical App of 2014.
