Kristy Derkson, PresidentFor organizations working in healthcare, the challenge is no longer only about communicating accurate information. It is about making that information meaningful, accessible, and relevant to the lived experiences of people.
This is where GCI Canada leads: creating impact by fusing deep healthcare acumen with consumer brand instinct to transform complex science into messages that resonate, connect, and endure. Led by Kristy Derkson, President, the agency has built its approach around the belief that health is experienced through both scientific and cultural perspectives. The company’s “being-well to well-being” framework reflects this idea, connecting the realities of diagnosis, treatment, and healthcare decisions with the everyday choices people make around wellness, prevention, and healthier living.
“The communications industry must break down the silos between clinical health and consumer brand marketing. Empathy and cultural fluency are just as critical as clinical data in driving business outcomes,” says Derkson.
A New Perspective on Healthcare Communication
For GCI Canada, healthcare and consumer brand communications is inextricably linked. People do not separate their health and well-being from their daily lives; instead, health and wellness influences how they think about products, services, communities, and personal decisions. The agency believes communication strategies must reflect this reality by combining scientific credibility with cultural understanding.
The being-well side of the agency’s work focuses on complex healthcare challenges involving patients, providers, advocacy groups, pharmaceutical organizations, medical associations, and healthcare systems. These communications require accuracy, regulatory knowledge, and a deep understanding of patient needs. The well-being side addresses how individuals consider and engage with health and wellness through daily habits, products, and lifestyle choices.
By bringing these perspectives together, GCI Canada develops strategies that consider both evidence and emotion. The agency’s healthcare specialists and consumer communications experts work seamlessly together, allowing pharmaceutical and healthcare clients to benefit from cultural storytelling approaches while consumer brands benefit from the deep understanding of data, audience motivations and the evidence and rigour required earning consumer trust.
The agency’s integrated model is also reflected in how it approaches audience research and campaign development. Rather than relying only on demographic information, GCI Canada looks for the underlying human truths that influence decisions. Its proprietary Idea Architecture model guides teams in developing programs that are solid, beautiful, and useful, ensuring our insightsare reflective of the broader environment, and our campaigns and stories generate emotional engagement and reach audiences through the channels and formats most likely to create action.
This process allows the agency to address complex healthcare topics without reducing them to simple messages. For patients, caregivers, healthcare professionals, policymakers, and consumers, health decisions are shaped by personal circumstances, cultural backgrounds, and access to trusted information. GCI Canada recognizes that effective communication must acknowledge these factors while maintaining scientific integrity.
Building Trust Through Human-Centered Storytelling
Trust has become one of the defining challenges in healthcare communication. People now receive health information from many sources, including social platforms, online communities, healthcare professionals, and AI-generated results. In this environment, simply presenting facts is not always enough to create understanding, or to convey credibility.
The communications industry must break down the silos between clinical health and consumer brand marketing. Empathy and cultural fluency have become just as critical as clinical data in driving business outcomes.
GCI Canada believes credible communication requires both evidence and empathy. The agency works with patients, healthcare professionals, advocacy organizations, and community stakeholders to ensure messages are delivered through voices audiences recognize and trust.
“Facts alone don’t change minds, empathy does. When science feels cold or disconnected, misinformation easily fills the void,” explains Derkson.
The agency’s work in the ALS space demonstrates this philosophy. Rather than focusing only on clinical information, GCI Canada helped create a book featuring stories from patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals. The project captured personal experiences and created a resource that now exists within ALS clinics across Canada.
The campaign reflects the agency’s belief that healthcare communication becomes more impactful when people can see their own experiences represented. By understanding uncertainty, resilience, and emotional challenges faced by communities, organizations can create content that supports patients beyond awareness alone.
Creating Measurable Outcomes Beyond Impressions
GCI Canada measures success by looking beyond visibility. The agency focuses on how communications influence behaviour, support decision-making, improve understanding, or contribute to measurable organizational goals. This approach begins by defining the desired outcome before a campaign launches. The agency’s Elements of Impact framework looks at key performance indicators across audience journeys to track the full arc from awareness to action and align on the right metrics based on the objectives.
Depending on the objective, success may involve encouraging patients to discuss treatment options with healthcare providers, supporting policy discussions, strengthening reputation, or increasing engagement with educational resources.
A notable example is the agency’s work for a client on breast cancer screening awareness. GCI Canada developed an emotionally-driven campaign built around the contrast between early detection and delayed action. Through digital promotion and targeted outreach, the campaign drove tangible behaviour change, directing more than 37,000 Canadian women to provincial breast screening websites, with 88 per cent of visitors within the target age demographic.
The agency also developed a digital ecosystem for an agriculture client, creating content designed to connect Canadians with farmers and provide information about food production practices. The initiative generated significant engagement, including increased website traffic and time spent reading content on the website.
“Ultimately, human value is changing a life or a mindset; business value is changing a market. The goal is always to connect what we did to what changed,” says Derkson.
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Facts alone don’t change minds, empathy does. When science feels cold or disconnected, misinformation easily fills the void.
“Ultimately, human value is changing a life or a mindset; business value is changing a market. The goal is always to connect what we did to what changed,” says Derkson.
GCI Canada’s experience across multiple industries also allows the company to identify connections between healthcare and broader societal conversations. Whether addressing disease awareness, public policy, consumer behaviour, or community engagement, the team looks for opportunities where communication can support both organizational goals and public understanding.
Combining Global Expertise with Canadian Insight
As part of GCI Health, a global health impact agency, GCI Canada benefits from international resources while maintaining a strong understanding of Canadian audiences. The agency recognizes that Canada’s healthcare environment has unique considerations, including regional differences, regulatory requirements, bilingual communication needs, and a publicly funded healthcare system.
The team acts as a cultural translator, adapting global tools and strategies to reflect and work within Canadian realities. Tools are used and campaigns are developed with attention to local perspectives, ensuring that messages resonate across different stakeholders, communities and regions.
This approach also extends to inclusivity. GCI Canada works alongside patient groups, community organizations, and cultural advisors to understand how health information is experienced by different audiences. The team’s work supporting the launch of the first autistic Barbie involved collaboration with the autistic community to ensure representation was respectful and meaningful. Another campaign focused on reaching patients with eczema reinforced the importance of ethnodermatology, an area of dermatology dedicated to the presentation, diagnosis and management of skin disorders in patients who have pigmented skin, by raising the voices and experiences of patients with skin of colour. The agency spends considerable time incorporating patient voices into campaigns, recognizing that lived experience can shape communication in ways data alone cannot. When working with patients across a wide range of therapeutic areas , GCI Canada seeks to understand real experiences and translate them into useful resources.
Using Technology While Keeping Human Intelligence at the Centre
AI is reshaping how organizations research, develop, and distribute information. GCI Canada sees AI as a significant advancement, but one that requires human judgment and expertise.
The agency leverages its data intelligence suite and creative and content studio, deploying AI-driven forecasting to reach strategic solutions for their clients at speed. They use tools such as Decipher Health, a cognitive AI predictive solution developed and owned by GCI’s parent agency, Burson, to analyze how audiences may respond to messages based on potential believability and resonance. The team leverages custom AI personas built to model real-world behaviors — critical for engaging hard-to-reach audiences across rare diseases and niche medical specialties. Offensively, they have developed capabilities around generative engine optimization - using solutions like GEOrge, to empower clients to shape how and where they are showing up in generative AI search. Defensively, they utilize their Misinformation Mitigation Intelligence Solution (MMIS) to detect and neutralize false health narratives.
However, GCI Canada believes technology must support, rather than replace, human insight. Healthcare communication requires context, empathy, and careful interpretation, particularly when messages influence patient decisions and public understanding. Derkson emphasizes that AI tools remain most effective when guided by human expertise and evaluation.
Strategic Partner for Evolving Healthcare Needs
GCI Canada positions its teams as strategic advisors rather than transactional service providers. The agency collaborates closely with clients, challenging assumptions when necessary and developing approaches that align communications with broader business and healthcare objectives.
. As they look to the future, GCI Canada plans to continue building on the agency’s strong foundation, adapting capabilities as healthcare priorities shift and communication channels expand.
Its long-term partnerships demonstrate this commitment. GCI Canada boasts an industry-leading 93 per cent employee retention rate, providing clients with unparalleled stability. This continuity is a key reason why 75 per cent of its client relationships extend beyond three years, reflecting its focus on becoming an embedded strategic partner rather than a short-term service provider.
For the company’s work in healthcare strategic communications and public relations, GCI Canada has been named Top Healthcare Strategic Communications & PR Agency in Canada for 2026. This recognition reflects the agency’s continued focus on integrating science, culture, empathy, and measurable impact in healthcare communications.
As healthcare conversations continue to evolve, GCI Canada believes the organizations that succeed will be those capable of combining credibility with connection. By understanding both the science behind health challenges and the human stories surrounding them, the agency continues to help clients create communications and engagements that contribute to meaningful business and human impact.
What Healthcare PR Must Get Right in Canada
A healthcare campaign can be scientifically correct and still misfire in Canada when a global message is carried over without enough adaptation. Regulatory limits, bilingual execution, regional expectations and cultural context can all change how a message is received. For executives comparing healthcare communications and PR agencies, the practical difficulty is finding a partner that can protect accuracy while reshaping the work for the people who will actually see it.
Scientific translation deserves close attention. Healthcare communications often sit between medical evidence and public understanding, and weak execution can create either excessive technicality or oversimplification. Buyers should examine how an agency reviews claims, works within regulatory boundaries, tests comprehension and adapts language for different audiences. Canadian work adds another layer because English and French cannot be treated as interchangeable versions of the same campaign. Regional media habits, community sensitivities, provincial differences and local spokespeople may all require changes in strategy rather than simple translation.
Representation deserves the same scrutiny as language. Campaigns aimed at patients can lose credibility when audience research is treated as demographic segmentation instead of direct input from the communities involved. A capable agency should have a method for incorporating lived experience into message development and checking whether imagery, spokespeople, channel choices and framing make sense for the intended population. The risk is sharper when disease experience or treatment perceptions vary across communities.
Trust is equally dependent on who carries the message and where it appears. Health information now competes with influencer commentary, social feeds, generative search results and traditional news. Reach alone says little about whether an audience considers the information credible. Agencies should therefore be assessed on how they combine evidence with credible voices, especially patients and healthcare professionals, while choosing channels that fit the audience. The same discipline applies to emerging search behavior. Content increasingly needs to be structured so accurate information can surface not only in conventional search but also in AI-generated responses.
“GCI Canada also uses Decipher to test message believability and likely resonance, alongside tools that examine how content appears in generative search.”
Measurement should also be established before campaign activity begins. Impressions remain useful, but they do not show whether people understood a message, remembered it, acted on it or changed behavior. Stronger programs define desired outcomes early, then connect content and channel decisions to those outcomes. Useful evidence may include message testing, click-through behavior, content completion or other signals that show whether communication is moving people toward the intended action. Executive buyers should also look for an agency willing to challenge a proposed tactic when the tactic does not support the stated objective. Strategic counsel has more value when it shapes the program before execution rather than simply delivering a requested media plan.
GCI Canada combines healthcare communications with consumer brand thinking and applies that approach within Canadian regulatory and cultural conditions. Its work includes adapting global programs for Canada, including English and French requirements, while accounting for regional differences rather than relying on direct translation. GCI Canada also uses Decipher to test message believability and likely resonance, alongside tools that examine how content appears in generative search. Its teams bring patient and healthcare professional voices into campaign development and define objectives and key performance indicators before launch. For buyers that need healthcare expertise without losing cultural relevance, GCI Canada merits careful consideration.
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