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There is a point in every system where harm becomes normalized. Decisions grow distant. Patients turn into cases. And leaders convince themselves that empathy is optional. Matt Toresco spent nearly two decades inside that system, both as an operator and a casualty. What it taught him changed the trajectory of his life and the future of patient advocacy.
Today, Toresco is one of the most uncompromising voices in healthcare, a strategist who merges real-world pain with market intelligence to redefine how organizations listen, decide, and deliver. He leads Archo Advocacy, oversees ELAVAY: Patient Insights, and has become a sought-after speaker for companies and conferences eager to bridge the widening gap between patient experience and executive decisions.
Toresco calls his edge Advocacy Intelligence, a strategic category forged from lived experience and two decades of industry insight. It is direct, evidence-based, and uncomfortably honest for an industry that has long treated advocacy as an accessory. Advocacy Intelligence reframes it as a missing intelligence layer that influences everything from trial design and access pathways to adoption, trust, and real-world outcomes.
A Life Broken Open
Toresco’s story began on a lacrosse field at The Ohio State University in 2005. A catastrophic cervical spine injury went undiagnosed for four months, the first signal that the system didn’t see him. What followed was an 18-year descent through misdiagnoses, failed surgeries, neurological symptoms, opioid dependence, and more than $20–25 million in medical interventions that treated everything except the root cause.
But Toresco didn’t just survive the maze. He studied it. Behind the pain was a trained, intelligent mind, someone who had spent his career analyzing markets, signals, and systemic failures. He began mapping his own. What he saw was not personal misfortune. It was a blueprint of how millions fall through the cracks.
The Fusion That Changed Everything
In 2023, after six months of forced opioid detox and a 13-hour fusion surgery, Toresco woke up pain-free for the first time in almost two decades. Taller. Fused. Whole. It became his “re-birthday,” the moment he understood why he was still walking when so many variables said he shouldn’t be.
His spine wasn’t the only thing fused. His purpose locked into place. He realized that advocacy, as it exists today, is not broken, it is underleveraged.
The Birth of Advocacy Intelligence
Advocacy Intelligence blends five elements that organizations often silo or ignore:
• Stakeholder fluency
• Patient voice integration
• System funding truth
• Translation of advocacy to executive impact
• A measurable chain from patient input to organizational value
It is the missing mechanism that turns empathy into action and action into outcomes. And Toresco has turned it into a repeatable system for biopharma, health systems, and advocacy organizations desperate for clarity in a noisy healthcare landscape.
The Patient Edge: Turning Voice Into Value
While Advocacy Intelligence is the philosophy, The Patient Edge is the operating system. It forces one question:
Can you prove your patient-centricity, or are you just claiming it?
Toresco’s framework measures three things:
Inputs → Decisions → Value.
Capture the voice with discipline. Tie it to decisions. Document the value for patients, systems, and the business.
The result is a scorecard that executives understand, advocates trust, and patients can feel. Companies use it to prevent harm, refine trials, strengthen access, and rebuild credibility, one decision at a time.
Matt’s philosophy is direct:
If you claim to be patient-centric, prove it. Show your inputs. Show the decision you changed. Show the value created.
He teaches leaders to build systems that:
• Hear patients before harm occurs
• Engage advocates as partners, not tokens
• Build clarity instead of noise
• Read the real world, not the ideal world
• Treat patient experience data as strategic evidence
• Make decisions that patients can feel
Matt understands, at a cellular level, what happens when systems don’t listen. And he knows exactly how to fix the gap between intention and impact.
The Work: Building a Healthcare System Worth Trusting
Through Archo Advocacy, he guides pharma and biotech teams to operationalize Advocacy Intelligence and The Patient Edge into programs that survive internal politics and change decisions. Through ELAVAY, he publishes patient insights that cut through the noise and elevate what patients are really living.
Through his TEDx platform, he invites audiences to confront a simple idea: Patients don’t need perfection. They need partnership.
Through his speaking business, he builds an ecosystem where leaders stop chasing slogans and start measuring impact. His 80/20 keynote, built on the story that shaped him, turns lived experience into a universal framework with tailored applications for executives, advocacy teams, HEOR leaders, and frontline commercial teams.
The Moment Advocacy Becomes Strategy
What organizations discover when they work with Matt is that advocacy is not soft power; it is system power. It influences:
• Trial design
• Access pathways
• Policy visibility
• Market adoption
• Trust and erosion of trust
• Real-world evidence inputs
• Brand credibility
• Organizational reputation
His case work proves it. One pharmaceutical company reframed advocacy from “support” to “strategic lever” after Matt surfaced underreported impact data. That shift led to new funding, new alignment, and a new seat at the strategy table. Advocacy Intelligence is not a theory. It is traction.
A New Kind of Leader for a System Out of Time
Toresco isn’t asking healthcare to care more. He is asking it to measure what it claims to care about. He is shaping a world where:
• Advocacy is strategic, not symbolic
• Patient voice arrives before harm, not after headlines
• Data reflects human realities, not assumptions
• Stories earn the right to shape decisions
• Impact becomes visible, accountable, and repeatable
His work represents a shift the industry can’t avoid. Healthcare doesn’t need more slogans. It needs leaders with scars, data, and conviction, leaders who can speak the language of patients and speak patients to power. Toresco stands at that intersection, rebuilding trust one system at a time.
He is not just leading a movement.
He is building the blueprint for a healthcare system worthy of the people it claims to serve.
Visit Website : https://archo.io
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