May, 2026.- You can have the most rigorous science and the most daring creative strategy in the world. But if the work does not connect with how a real person actually feels about their health, their body, their fears—it moves no one.
Nivey Nocher, Executive Vice President Health at PHA Group, has spent her career across pharma, biotech, non-profits, and academia. And she has identified the single biggest failure in health communications: not a lack of scientific rigor, not a lack of boldness, but a failure of empathy. The gap, she explains, is not between science and storytelling. It is between the clinical framing that organizations are comfortable with and the cultural moment that people are actually living in.
We are all drowning in information. What we need is clarity, confidence, and connection.
Nocher leads a health practice that spans consumer wellness, medical communications, and medical education—disciplines that most agencies keep separate. At PHA, she does the opposite. She believes these are not verticals but fragments of each other, all telling parts of the same health story. Medical education should inform how we talk to consumers. Cultural insights from consumer campaigns should feed back into how we educate HCPs about what their patients are actually thinking and experiencing. When those loops close, the work gets sharper.
In this interview, Nocher discusses what has changed in therapeutic launches over the past decade—the shift from starting at approval to starting years earlier in patient communities and advocacy conversations. She contrasts rare disease communications (deeply knowledgeable, often desperate populations) with NCDs (vast, distracted audiences who may not feel the urgency). And she explains why having genuine scientific credentials—PhDs on the team—changes the conversation with pharmaceutical clients: because a client who spent years developing a molecule does not want to spend half the briefing explaining the science. They want a partner who can engage at that level from the start and then do something remarkable with it.
This is a conversation about trust, credibility, and the art of translating clinical precision into human connection.
1. The Health Communications Gap: You’ve worked across pharma, biotech, non-profits, and academia. Where do most health communications strategies fail—lack of scientific rigor, lack of human empathy, or lack of boldness?
Probably all three but if I had to name the one that holds everything else back, it’s the failure of empathy. You can have the most rigorous science and the most daring creative strategy in the world, but if the work doesn’t connect with how a real person actually feels about their health, their body, their fears, it doesn’t move anyone.
What I’ve seen consistently across my career, whether it’s in global pharma, in biotech, in non-profits working at the grassroots, is that the biggest gap isn’t between science and storytelling. It’s between the clinical framing organisations are comfortable with and the cultural moment people are actually living in. If we only focus on health as a clinical category and not the cultural force it actually is – we lose our ability to fully realise the potential of every opportunity. We don’t need more information, we’re all drowning in it. We need clarity, confidence, and connection. That’s where great health communications begins.
2. Consumer vs. HCP vs. Medical Ed: PHA’s health offer spans consumer wellness, medical communications, and medical education. Which of these three is hardest to integrate, and why do agencies typically keep them separate?
Medical education is the hardest to integrate, and I think agencies keep these disciplines separate for the same reason they keep anything separate – it’s easier to specialise than to translate. Medical education lives in a world of publications, congress strategy, and KOL engagement. Consumer wellness lives in culture, in social feeds, in kitchens and gyms and conversations people have with friends. The assumption is that these two audiences don’t speak the same language but that’s exactly the opportunity. At PHA, we think of our services not as separate verticals but as fragments of each other – they’re all telling parts of the same health story. A piece of precise medical affairs work should inform how we talk to consumers. A cultural insight from a consumer wellness campaign should feed back into how we educate HCPs about what their patients are actually thinking and experiencing. When those loops are closed, the work gets significantly sharper. Health doesn’t sit in silos. Why would our communications?
3. Taking a Values-Driven Position: You encourage organizations to take “bold, values-driven positions” on global health issues. In a highly regulated category, where is the line between values-driven and overly bold?
The line is purpose. Reckless is when you take a position only because it’s trending. Values-driven is when you take a position because it’s true to who you are, backed by evidence, and in genuine service of the communities you’re trying to reach. Those things are very different, even when they look similar from the outside.
I would also push back gently on the idea that regulation has to be the enemy of boldness. In my experience, it’s often the opposite. Regulation forces you to be a more creative and innovative communicator. When you can’t just say whatever you want, you have to find a better way to say something true and that constraint, handled well, produces more original thinking.
What I encourage organisations to do is stop watching from the sidelines on issues that matter to the communities they serve. Misinformation spreads fast and public trust is fragile. If you have the science, the relationships, and the platform, you have a responsibility to use them and that’s not reckless, that’s a genuine opportunity for leadership.
4. The Therapeutic Launch Playbook: You’ve led multiple therapeutic launches. What’s the single biggest change in how you launch a drug today compared to ten years ago, and what hasn’t changed at all?
The biggest change is where the launch begins. Ten years ago, you could launch a therapy with a strong data package, a compelling congress presence, and a well-run media campaign, and that would carry significant weight. Today, the launch begins long before approval. It begins in patient communities, in advocacy conversations, in the cultural narrative being built around a disease area. By the time a drug reaches the market, patients and caregivers have often already formed their views. If you haven’t been part of shaping that conversation, you’re at risk of playing catch-up.
The earned-first approach matters enormously here. Sequenced campaigns where you build influencer and media credibility before scaling into social and digital drives higher engagement than broadcast-style messaging. That’s a significant shift in how we think about the overrall launch architecture.
What hasn’t changed? Trust. It was the currency that mattered ten years ago, and it matters more than ever now because there’s so much more noise, so much more misinformation, and so many more competing voices. You can buy reach. You cannot buy credibility. That has to be earned, every time.
5. Rare Diseases vs. NCDs: Your experience spans rare diseases and non-communicable diseases. How does the communications strategy differ when you’re speaking to a small, desperate patient population versus a broad, distracted consumer audience?
The strategies look very different on the surface, but they share the same foundation, which is you have to meet people where they actually are, not where you’d like them to be.
With rare diseases, you’re working in a world where every affected family is often years into a diagnostic journey. They are extraordinarily knowledgeable about their condition often more so than general practitioners. You cannot afford to be vague, generic, or performative. The communication has to be accurate, deeply empathetic, and genuinely in service of people who have often been failed by the system.
With NCDs the challenge is almost the inverse. You’re trying to reach a vast, distracted audience who may not yet feel the urgency that the data suggests they should. Here, cultural intelligence becomes critical. Health decisions are made at home, online, at work, in communities not just in clinical settings. To shift behaviour at population scale, you need communications that connect health to people’s real lives, motivations, and moments. It has to feel personal, not preachy.
What’s consistent across both is you have to understand people, their fears, their behaviours, their barriers and their motivations. It’s what makes the difference between communications that informs and communications that actually changes things.
6. The Health Team’s Unique Asset: PHA’s health team includes specialists with medical PhDs. How does having genuine scientific credentials on the team change the conversation with pharmaceutical clients compared to a pure PR agency
It changes the level of the conversation. Pharmaceutical clients particularly in medical affairs and clinical functions are often communicating across silos internally. Their medical teams speak one language, their commercial teams another, their communications function a third. When you walk into the room with scientific depth and communications credibility, you can become a bridge.
A client who has spent years developing a molecule doesn’t want to spend half their briefing session explaining the science. They want a partner who can engage at that level from the start and then take that science and do something remarkable with it. That’s the combination we’re building at PHA – scientific and healthcare depth coupled with cultural intelligence, working together. And it matters for the work itself. When you genuinely understand trial design, publication strategy, regulatory constraints, and disease biology, you can translate that into stories that people actually connect with, without distorting, oversimplifying, or losing the nuance that makes it meaningful.
