Perspectives on the forces shaping health
Reservoir Health experts share analysis and ideas on the dynamics shaping health care decisions.
Reservoir Health experts share analysis and ideas on the dynamics shaping health care decisions.
Health care decisions are shaped by policy, evidence, trust, market dynamics, public debate, and individual experiences of patients and stakeholders. We share our perspectives to help leaders make sense of those forces and identify what to do next.
Reservoir Communications Group Rebrands as Reservoir Health, Reflecting Breadth of Health Care Expertise & Capabilities
New identity reflects firm’s integrated capabilities across policy, market enablement, and communications with a dedicated focus on helping health innovation reach patients
WASHINGTON, D.C., September 2, 2026 — Reservoir Communications Group today announced that it is now Reservoir Health, a new brand that reflects the firm’s longstanding focus on health care and expanded capabilities to help innovators shape policy, communications and market environments in support of patient access.
“Health care has always been our North Star, and our new brand reinforces our deep subject matter expertise and experience working across the health system and the innovation lifecycle to deliver creative, data-driven solutions that support patients,” said Robert Schooling, Reservoir Health Founder and President. “Our growth and expansion in policy, market enablement, and communications over the last decade has allowed us to serve as our clients’ ‘go-to’ for their most complex challenges and issues.”
Since its founding in 2014, Reservoir Health has grown from a public affairs and communications firm into an integrated strategic advisory firm for health care innovators. Its team brings experience from across the health system—including government, politics, media, patient advocacy and care delivery—and serves innovative life sciences and health care companies, trade associations and nonprofit organizations.
In November 2024, Reservoir Health announced an investment partnership with Periscope Equity, a Chicago-based private equity firm that partners with founder-owned, technology-enabled business services companies. The partnership between Reservoir Health and Periscope has focused on accelerating the firm’s growth and scale while broadening the firm’s capabilities in support of existing and new clients.
Reservoir Health’s expanded model is further strengthened by its recently announced acquisition of Applied Patient Experience, LLC (AppliedPX), a leading patient engagement and patient-centered research consultancy. The combination introduces a fully integrated patient evidence capability to Reservoir’s existing work across policy, communications and market readiness and positions the firm to help clients translate patients’ lived experience into decision-grade evidence that informs clinical development, regulatory strategy, market access, and patient and provider adoption.
Reservoir Health’s work is underpinned by its research team which delivers strategic insights and a clear roadmap for engagement through advanced qualitative and quantitative platforms, including our proprietary PRISM model.
To learn more about the Reservoir Health team, click here. For Reservoir Health Insights, click here.
Reservoir Health is a leading health care consultancy that helps innovators anticipate and shape the environments—policy, communications, and market—that determine which innovations reach patients. Based in Washington, D.C., the firm brings decades of experience across the health system, government, media, and patient advocacy to deliver integrated, data-driven solutions to health care’s most complex challenges.
Immunology is shaping one of the most dynamic areas of modern medicine. From autoimmune and inflammatory diseases – like atopic dermatitis, ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease – to oncology and rare conditions, the field is seeing sustained innovation as effective therapies enter the market and intensify competition.
That’s because scientific breakthroughs are accelerating, pipelines are expanding and many emerging therapies are now designed to target inflammatory pathways across multiple indications. But as these innovations advance, the path to market has become more complex, and success relies on far more than clinical efficacy alone.
Despite efficacy and safety advancements, significant unmet needs remain. Many immunologic conditions are chronic, invisible or misunderstood. Patients may face years of misdiagnosis, social stigma or dismissal of symptoms before receiving appropriate care. Even after diagnosis, patients encounter barriers to accessing and affording treatments. At the same time, payers and policymakers are scrutinizing cost, value and long-term outcomes, raising the bar for how innovation must be positioned, communicated and understood.
For companies bringing immunology products to market, understanding the broader ecosystem is critical. Beyond the science, there are several key factors that can ultimately shape access, adoption and impact:
Immunology may be driven by science, but immunological treatments only help patients if biopharmaceutical companies understand the full launch context to support access. This means going beyond biology to understand the barriers, the stigma and patient needs, and working with the communities striving every day to improve outcomes.
Advancing health policies that improve outcomes and meet the moment requires careful leadership and collaboration. The journey from identifying an issue that needs to be addressed, to engaging with policy makers, to passing legislation takes significant time, energy and investment. Rarely can this work be carried forward by a single organization alone. Collaboration is essential.
Coalitions bring together stakeholders from across the health care ecosystem to align around common goals and speak with a collective voice, helping to build credibility with decision-makers, foster durable consensus and sustain momentum over time. By turning shared priorities into actionable policies that expand access, coalitions can improve outcomes and make health care more accessible for countless patients and communities nationwide.
Advancing Meaningful Policies
Coalitions can be impactful in advancing meaningful health policies for several reasons:
Driving a Successful Coalition
When building, launching and managing a coalition, strategic, intentional best practices can make an impact:
In an environment where it can be difficult to break through the noise, coalitions are a powerful—and proven—approach to achieve goals using a strategic, collaborative and values-driven approach.
Ultimately, coalitions remind us of what the health care community already knows to be true: to change policy for the better, we must work closely together.
For more than two decades, the dominant paradigm for explaining pharmaceutical pricing has been value. That value was defined by clinical benefit, improved patient outcomes or experience, and the longer-term societal return of reducing disease burden. While value itself has not had a singular definition, it did provide a framework that shaped how therapies were launched, reimbursed, and defended — particularly for specialty and biologic medicines — and it gave companies a consistent story to tell regulators, payers, prescribers, and patients.
Today, that clarity is gone with more recent policy and market shifts. It’s not just that pricing strategies are changing. Explaining price and linking it back to a unified understanding of value has become more complicated than ever.
With the rise of direct-to-patient (DTP) and direct-to-employer (DTE) models, government-set prices under the Inflation Reduction Act, and initiatives like TrumpRx and Most Favored Nations (MFN), the market now contains more visible price points than at any time in modern pharma history. These prices are often dramatically different from one another — and increasingly disconnected from traditional, U.S.-centric definitions of value. As a result, companies face a growing communications and business challenge: how to justify multiple prices, to different audiences, in a politicized environment where value is no longer the sole anchor.
From Value to Visibility, and Contradictions
Programs like TrumpRx — an evolution of the administration’s MFN drug pricing approach — exemplify this shift. Rather than tying price to clinical or societal value, TrumpRx benchmarks certain drug prices to what other developed countries pay, informed by health technology assessment approaches with different priorities and conceptions of value. At the same time, Medicare price setting under the Inflation Reduction Act, alongside expanding DTP and DTE offerings, is introducing highly visible, often substantially lower prices into the market.
The result is not a single new pricing paradigm, but a fragmented landscape of co-existing prices:
These prices may be rational within their individual policy or channel mechanics — but to patients and other stakeholders, they can appear arbitrary, contradictory, or even unfair.
The New Risk: Confusion, Erosion of Trust, and Narrative Breakdown
As pricing becomes more transparent, the challenge is no longer simply defending a price — it is defending the existence of different prices at all.
Patients may struggle to understand why they are quoted one price while seeing another advertised publicly. Employers and policymakers may question why lower prices are available in some channels or for some products, but not others. Even when alternative prices apply to limited populations or are constrained by policy design, their visibility can undermine credibility and fuel skepticism.
In this environment, the traditional value-based narrative — while still essential — is no longer sufficient on its own. Value may explain why a medicine matters, but it no longer fully explains pricing across every channel.
What Comes Next: Reframing How Price Is Explained
For life sciences companies, payers, and healthcare stakeholders, the implications are clear. Success in this next era will depend not only on pricing strategy, but on how pricing is explained, contextualized, and communicated. That means:
In a multi-price world, silence or reliance on legacy value arguments risks confusion — or worse, loss of trust. Organizations that plan now — and proactively define how they will talk about price, value, and access in a fragmented market — will be far better positioned to navigate what comes next.
November 2025 may ultimately be remembered as a pivotal moment in how the United States understands and treats obesity. Last month, federal regulators announced an effort to significantly expand coverage for obesity-management medications under Medicare – alongside a new pricing framework designed to lower costs for people paying out of pocket and potentially encouraging more inclusive coverage across the broader insurance market.
For years, the medical community has recognized obesity as a chronic disease. In 2013, the American Medical Association formally adopted a resolution classifying obesity as a “disease state” that requires a spectrum of medical interventions – from behavioral therapy, to surgery, to medications. This designation reflects an extensive evidence base linking obesity to more than 200 other chronic conditions, including heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and several forms of cancer.
Yet despite this medical consensus, coverage for care has not always kept pace. For many years, obesity was treated differently from other chronic conditions, creating barriers for people seeking treatment.
A Significant Shift in Federal Policy
Last month’s announcement marks a major shift in that landscape with Medicare now beginning to offer coverage for obesity-management medications for people with obesity – not only for those with related conditions. Medicaid programs in many states may follow suit. The framework also introduces reduced pricing for individuals paying out of pocket, which could expand access even further. Details are outlined in a recent release from the White House.
If implemented as proposed, these steps could meaningfully broaden access to obesity-management medications, particularly for older adults and lower-income individuals who have historically faced cost barriers to treatment. In the long term, wider access may help reduce complications associated with obesity-related diseases and lower overall health-care costs. This outlook is consistent with a recent Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) assessment, which found that newer obesity medications are cost effective.
What to Watch
As details emerge, several factors will determine how transformative this moment becomes:
An Important Moment with Long-Term Implications
Investing in prevention and treatment of obesity can improve health outcomes and lessen burdens on the broader healthcare system. By improving access and lowering financial barriers, last month’s actions signal a meaningful shift in how the country approaches a complex and costly chronic disease.
Whether November 2025 proves to become a true turning point will depend on implementation, follow-through, and coordinated action across federal and state programs, insurers, employers, providers, and communities. But the significance of this moment is clear: it could reshape obesity care in the United States for years to come.
A new election cycle is upon us, which means America is once again scrolling its way through headlines, policy debates, and an endless stream of TikToks featuring people explaining complex health care issues from the front seat of their car.
If you’re an organization in or around health care, you know what’s coming: a giant, chaotic, high-velocity conversation where everyone has something to say, and very few people have the patience to read anything longer than a tweet.
So how do you show up in this moment without getting lost, ignored, or mistaken for a PDF from 2009?
Three key rules: Know your audience. Lead with affordability. Embrace digital-first.
Just look at the latest stats from Pew:
That means truly embracing storytelling and video content as the ways to reach key audiences. Short explainer videos, swipe-through story formats, mobile-friendly visuals, and human-centered storytelling break through, where issue briefs and reports simply don’t. Short, sweet and scrollable wins every time.
Health care communication during an election cycle isn’t for the faint of heart. But starting early and refining relentlessly means that your message can survive and thrive the election-year noise.
Access to quality health care is something we all want. We all benefit from medical progress, innovative care and new technologies that help people live healthier lives. When people are healthy, families, communities and societies thrive. And while we know our health care system has real strengths, we also know it can be stronger — because right now, not everyone is getting the care they need.
We believe progress comes from working together. Bringing partners together helps build coalitions that identify barriers, foster alignment and co-create sustainable solutions that improve access and advance health for all.
Here’s how we recommend approaching partnerships:
But that grit alone isn’t enough. Many health leaders are navigating limited bandwidth, stretched resources and growing expectations. A great partner recognizes this and can help strength capacity to sustain momentum, refine and enhance strategies, and provide support and connection to a broader community.
Long-term progress depends on shared investment and lasting infrastructure. It is best to align strategy across teams and bridge cycles of funding so that on-the-ground daily action can continue. When partners know they can count on one another, they can do more for the communities they serve.
Every partner brings insight, expertise and commitment. An agency partner, in particular, can build trust, support and collaboration and make sure the work reflects the values of everyone at the table.
Together Makes Progress Possible
We all want a health care system that helps people live healthier, fuller lives. Building that system requires deep collaboration, sustained commitment and respect for the people doing the work every day. When we align shared goals and act with purpose, we can create a system where more people get the chance to thrive.
America’s medicine cabinet hasn’t kept pace with its health care needs. While digital tools and consumer empowerment have transformed nearly every facet of modern health care, prescription-to-over-the-counter (Rx-to-OTC) product switches have slowed to a crawl. The FDA wants to change that.
Flipping the Switch — Again
The FDA is pushing to expand consumer access to medicines by encouraging more Rx medicines to move OTC. FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and Center for Drug Evaluation and Research Director George Tidmarsh have both expressed strong support for the Rx-to-OTC switch pathway, with Tidmarsh recently urging manufacturers to think beyond regulatory mechanics and focus on the broader public health benefits these transitions can bring.
After a wave of switches in the early 2000s that transformed pharmacy shelves, progress has largely stalled. In recent years, only a small number of prescription drugs have successfully transitioned to OTC status — not for lack of opportunity, but because regulatory uncertainty continues to stand in the way. Meanwhile, Americans’ appetite for convenience, privacy, and self-care has only grown. The FDA’s latest signals suggest a renewed effort to break through that inertia and reignite the switch movement.
Why Switch Matters
Switching a drug to OTC status isn’t simple. Manufacturers must prove not only that a medicine is safe and effective, but also that consumers can confidently and correctly use it without a doctor’s supervision. This typically requires numerous real-world behavior studies showing that people can self-select and use the product appropriately.
For many Americans, that independence matters. Millions face barriers to accessing health care — and, by extension, the Rx medications they need — from cost and coverage gaps to provider shortages and pharmacy deserts. These barriers are especially steep for low-income populations and older adults, who already rely heavily on OTC products. In many cases, safe self-care can achieve similar health outcomes to physician-directed care — at a lower cost and more conveniently — helping more people manage their health on their own terms.
What’s more, for every dollar spent on OTC medicines, the U.S. health care system saves $7.33, accumulating to $167 billion in savings each year — making this a broader public health issue.
Switching Up the Rules
The regulatory environment is evolving alongside the growing push for Rx-to-OTC switch. Less than a year ago, the FDA finalized a rule allowing nonprescription products to be marketed with “additional conditions for nonprescription use.” This pathway gives manufacturers flexibility to leverage digital tools, smarter labeling, or in-store prompts to help consumers use switched medicines safely and effectively.
If the industry responds to the FDA’s call, a new wave of switches could emerge in treatments for allergy, migraine, sexual health, and cardiovascular disease prevention — areas where safe self-management can relieve strains across the health care system and empower patients to act early. Improved access isn’t just about convenience; it’s about delivering meaningful improvements in both personal and public health for all Americans.
Fueling the Next Switch
The FDA has made its priorities clear; now it’s up to patients, drug manufacturers, providers, and policymakers to coalesce to modernize access and make self-care a cornerstone of public health. The agency has opened the door to a new era of consumer health — how far it swings will depend on those who seize the opportunity.
Policy has always influenced how the biopharmaceutical industry communicates the value of its medicines. However, today’s value communicators must be more agile than ever. In the past two weeks alone, the White House has made announcements on TrumpRX, pricing deals with Pfizer and AstraZeneca, and delayed pharmaceutical tariffs—and this doesn’t account for ongoing policy around the Medicare drug price negotiation program, much less how the government shutdown is affecting the FDA, CMS, etc. The policy ground is shifting quickly under our feet and forcing industry to respond in real-time.
For years, value communicators have helped companies shape the value conversation at the product, portfolio, corporate, and societal levels. Successful value communications efforts tell a compelling story about the benefit of innovation to patients, foster alignment among stakeholders, and show how companies are working to bring potentially life-changing medicines to those who need them most. Given the new administration’s focus on an “America First” economy, combined with an uncertain policy landscape, communicators now face an additional task—demonstrating how they are part of the solution when it comes to not just pricing and access, but also to how they are delivering economic value for the country.
As value communicators navigate this shifting environment and continue to reinforce their messages with policymakers and consumers, they should ask themselves the following questions:
1. Is my messaging focused on access? Ultimately, conversations around price are about patient access, and companies need to reinforce how they are proactively expanding access. Communicators should capture the breadth of access levers their companies are pursuing, including direct-to-consumer initiatives, patient access programs that help defray out-of-pocket costs, navigation services that help patients move through a complex system to obtain the treatments they need, and innovative payer contracts that drive outcomes or value for patients and the health system at large. Our health care access system is complicated; telling the story of what it actually takes to get medicine to the patient who needs it can help humanize the industry.
2. Am I losing the conversation to list price when there is a net price story to tell? Most stakeholders (policymakers and reporters included) report on list price because it’s easy to find and easy to cite. But that only tells part of the story when it comes to the economics of prescription drugs. Some companies have opted to announce net prices, launch products with a direct-to-consumer price, be transparent about average rebates, or respond to government-set price announcements. When possible, and for the purposes of policymaker or consumer communications, companies should make these net (or government-set) prices the focal point of their messaging. This approach can help further conversations and awareness around payer negotiation dynamics, the role of other supply chain entities, whether and how rebated amounts are returned to patients, direct-to-consumer offerings, and what real-world costs for patients actually look like.
3. How can I underscore the value of a medicine or portfolio to the economy? Medicines provide value by delivering better clinical outcomes and by building an economic footprint. And the pharmaceutical industry has always heavily invested in the U.S. Individual companies should amplify their own contributions by highlighting: the federal, state, and local impact of their products’ manufacturing supply chain; the number of jobs supported at plants, clinical trial sites, and partner facilities; whether active pharmaceutical ingredients were sourced domestically; and if any manufacturing was onshored, etc. By sharing this information, policymakers may see the economic engines that support the production of our medicines, making the value story more tangible.
4. Is it possible to take this value story local? While the White House will be focused on the big picture, most politicians are thinking about policy at the state or local level. Communicators need to translate the national policy debate into the value they are providing at a district or state level. That means having tailored messaging that underscores clinical trial programs at medical centers or local clinics, patient testimonials from people in the community who have benefited from access or navigation programs, jobs created across the supply chain, etc. Being able to show connection to constituents can make national issues personally salient, and influence is dynamic, meaning local engagement can bubble up to shift a national policy conversation.
To connect with policymakers and consumers, value communications need to move beyond addressing the ongoing issues of access and price. For decades, the U.S. pharmaceutical industry has been a driving force of innovation, but as it has become a political bargaining chip on both sides of the aisle, its role as a driver of the U.S. economy has been overlooked. The companies that succeed in reinforcing this perspective will be able to tell a comprehensive value story for their products—one that shows benefit to patients, health care systems, communities, and the U.S. economy. The time to tell that story is now.
In today’s scroll-and-swipe culture, every personal device has effectively become an advertising platform. With audiences constantly exposed to an endless stream of messages and imagery, every campaign faces the same challenge: cutting through the clutter to drive recall, awareness, and action.
Measuring What Truly Matters
We all want our campaigns to make an impact — but it’s impossible to know what’s working if we don’t measure it. Campaign evaluation isn’t just a box to check; it’s how we ensure accountability, uncover what resonates, and distinguish genuine impact from background noise.
That’s why success must be defined before launch with clarity needed on two fronts: what we aim to achieve and who we’re trying to reach. Are we raising awareness? Changing minds? Inspiring action? And are our audiences the undecided, the already engaged, or the unaware?
When we define success and audience segments clearly, measurement becomes purposeful. We can then assess outcomes precisely — and use those insights to shape campaigns that don’t just reach people but move them.
Knowing What Resonates
To break through the competing noise, message and ad testing are vital steps in creative development — an early opportunity to understand how the audience thinks and feels. It replaces guesswork with data on what truly resonates and sticks.
Rather than relying on assumptions, message and ad testing reveal which creative elements spark curiosity, foster emotional connection, and inspire action. This iterative approach helps optimize performance while uncovering valuable learnings about audience preferences — insights that can inform not only the campaign at hand but broader strategy decisions.
Understanding Your Audience
Just as message and ad testing help remove the guess work from creative development, leveraging the right audience segmentation data when launching a campaign helps maximize ad dollars. Precision in targeting key audiences is a powerful foundation for any successful advertising campaign because it creates efficiency with an ad spend by ensuring that the right message reaches the right people at the right time on the right platform, instead of just casting a wide net.
Building Real Intelligence
With campaign evaluation data in hand, it’s easy to mistake “signals” intelligence for real intelligence. Metrics such as clicks, likes, and shares may look like proof that a campaign is working — but these are signals, not outcomes. They tell us that something happened, not whether it mattered.
Real measurement digs deeper. It cuts through the noise to uncover what truly drives awareness, engagement, and behavior change. At its core, real intelligence means taking signal data and putting it in context — triangulating what the numbers say with what people actually think, feel, and do. That’s where rigorous evaluation methods come in: pre/post testing, message testing, audience segmentation, and triangulating signal data with attitudinal and behavioral measures.
Tailoring for Impact
Our campaign assessment framework brings order to this complexity. It starts with the broadest question — Did people see the campaign? — and moves toward deeper outcomes — Did it change what they believe or do?
Not every campaign needs to travel this full distance. But understanding where you are in the journey helps choose the right tools, ask the right questions, and interpret data with confidence.
In a world where attention is fleeting, the right measurement framework gives campaigns lasting impact. Let us help turn impressions into intelligence — and data points into progress.
