MIAMI: Rbb Communications has formed a Healthcare Advisory Council with five seasoned pharma and health communications leaders.

Members of the Healthcare Advisory Council will work as consultants to rbb’s clients. Rbb is looking to bring senior talent to its team and clients with the health council, said rbb’s EVP of healthcare and global and emerging markets Srikant Ramaswami, who is overseeing the council.

Each member has extensive experience in healthcare, and most are working as consultants now. The health council also funnels clients both ways: the members work on rbb’s clients and can bring in their own clients to use rbb’s resources.

“We will create teams that are most effective to serving your business by putting together a combination of these folks,” Ramaswami said. “One of the things we have observed by having this more interesting structure is that people can scale up and scale down and put their hands up for projects they’re interested in and [clients] get an excellent team of seasoned people.”

The members are Donald Hannaford, managing principal at Deca Communications; Jeff Leebaw, a consultant and former VP of corporate communication at Johnson & Johnson; John Bloomfield, a consultant and former executive director of global communications at Merck; Marc Monseau, founder and president of Mint Collective; Robyn Reed Frenze, principal at Chameleon Communications and former Janssen Pharmaceuticals comms director; and Ramaswami, who previously worked at Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and Merck.

The model can be a huge benefit to smaller companies and startups that don’t have a big budget for PR, but still want access to experts in the field, Ramaswami explained.

“If you’re a client and you have an important product to market or important story to tell, wouldn’t you want to work with a number of very seasoned executives who are going to be charging you very reasonable rates compared to the very large agencies?” he said. “It enables us to have that flexibility in our teams. Where there are specific areas of expertise that require us to scale up or scale down, we will use the health advisory committee to do that.”

This article first appeared on PR Week.