The hard part of healthcare communication is rarely finding something to say. It is deciding which truth belongs in which room. A molecular biologist, a patient advocate, a federal official and an investor may all be discussing the same treatment, but they are not having the same conversation. The usual agency solution is a relay race: strategy hands to creative, creative hands to medical, medical hands to media. Every handoff is tidy. Every handoff risks dropping the baton.
JPA Health has built its business around making the relay less necessary. The Washington company assembles what it calls “synced-up specialists” - practitioners in public relations, medical communications, marketing, advocacy, policy, analytics and, since 2025, investor relations. The phrase is agency language. The operating idea beneath it is more interesting: keep the expertise separate enough to remain expert, but close enough that the work does not arrive in pieces.
A public-affairs firm learns to connect the rooms
Carrie Jones founded Jones Public Affairs in 2007. Its home turf was policy, advocacy and health - work where a neat press release can be less valuable than knowing who trusts whom. The firm broadened and, in 2013, adopted the JPA Health Communications name. By 2022, when healthcare-focused investor Great Point Partners completed an undisclosed growth recapitalization, JPA had more than 90 employees and offices in Washington, Boston, New York and London.
Private equity can turn a company story into a fog of euphemisms. Here the visible consequence was unusually literal. JPA began shopping for missing capabilities. True North Solutions arrived in October 2023 with predictive analytics, visualization, natural-language processing and custom AI. BioCentric followed in May 2024 with medical communications, scientific learning and serious games. Two months later, London agency akt health added deeper UK and European experience. In less than a year, three transactions turned a communications firm into a more complete health-services network.
Data science, predictive analytics and AI for commercial, clinical and medical-affairs questions.
Medical communications, learning design, scientific platforms and game mechanics.
UK and EU healthcare communications, medical education and patient engagement.
“Investor Relations was a missing piece of the puzzle.”Carrie Jones, on the practice JPA launched in 2025
That quote is the most candid description of the strategy. JPA did not claim it had always been complete. It noticed a gap and filled it. Investor relations extended the same scientific story toward capital markets; the earlier acquisitions extended it toward data, medical education and Europe. By April 2025, the agency said it employed more than 150 specialists across six offices.
What did the expansion cost?
The investment and acquisition prices were not disclosed. The public number is on the customer side: a 2023 SAMHSA assignment was described as a multi-year, multi-million-dollar contract.
The first thing to fail is usually the obvious answer
JPA's better case studies begin when the conventional channel fails. People with an ultra-rare cancer could find information online, but it was scattered. Women in low-income markets needed practical contraception information, but generic product pages were not built around their questions. Lung-cancer patients could hear about biomarker testing, but awareness did not reliably become a conversation with an oncologist. More information was not the fix. Better arrangement was.
For Medicines360, JPA researched women in target markets and built AVIBELA's global product hub in under six weeks. The site explained IUDs, showed where to obtain the low-cost product and included training resources for healthcare professionals. In its first month it recorded 1,623 users and more than 2,300 page views; 45 percent of users came from key markets including Kenya, Panama, Nigeria and China. The clever part was not speed alone. The team changed the brief from “make a website” to “close a practical information gap.”
For a biopharmaceutical client, the agency made a six-part lung-cancer biomarker miniseries led by professional golfer Jason Day, with Julie Bowen and Bellamy Young among the guests. Celebrity was the hook, not the product. The campaign sent viewers toward a conversation about comprehensive testing and reported the results above. Another biomarker initiative, No One Missed, aligned more than 30 pharmaceutical, advocacy and professional organizations, later expanding its attention to underserved groups. It reported 50 million impressions - twice its launch goal - and more than 1,000 media placements.
The useful distinction is between audience and action. Impressions tell you a message passed by. A prescriber, a downloaded guide or a patient question tells you it stopped. JPA still reports large reach numbers, as agencies do, but its strongest work includes a next step: ask about a test, locate a contraceptive, join a coalition, attend a clinical-data briefing.
A specialist shop wearing a full-service coat
JPA sits between two familiar competitors. On one side are large global networks with every discipline and country available somewhere in the org chart. On the other are boutiques with deep authority in one corner of health. JPA's answer is a healthcare-only agency with enough breadth to handle a product from clinical development through launch, advocacy, public debate and investor expectations. Its customers include biopharma and medtech companies, federal agencies, nonprofits and public-health organizations. Public work names CDC, SAMHSA, Medicines360, LUNGevity Foundation, Nobelpharma, Milestone Therapeutics, Kroger Health and Autistica.
The company's proprietary research engine, GRETEL, is meant to supply connective tissue. It maps stakeholders and conversations, and uses a “Connectability Score” to estimate how readily a message may travel through a network. The language sounds a little like a railway timetable for ideas. Its value depends on what follows: a better choice of messenger, channel or audience. A map that does not change a decision is wall art.
Define the behavior before choosing the channel. “Ask about biomarker testing” is a brief. “Raise awareness” is weather.
Bring the affected audience into research early. Patient interviews changed JPA's rare-cancer work from more content to one navigable starting point.
Use specialists in parallel. Medical, policy and creative review at the end is quality control; participation at the beginning is strategy.
The model needs complex stakes, multiple audiences and enough budget to support genuine expertise. A simple local promotion would drown in the machinery.
There are conditions attached. Celebrity attention is not portable to every diagnosis. Coalition campaigns slow down when partners cannot agree on one action. AI-generated insight needs experienced medical and regulatory judgment. And integration is only useful if one accountable team actually makes decisions; otherwise “full service” becomes a more expensive relay race.
JPA's mission is to help people live healthier lives. That claim is too broad to distinguish an agency by itself. The more persuasive evidence is narrower: a six-week information hub, a testing conversation, a room of 30 partners, an admission that investor relations was missing. Companies become interesting when their slogans acquire mechanics. JPA's mechanism is the connection - between disciplines, between stakeholders and, when necessary, between the business it was and the capability it had to buy.