Medical affairs are undergoing a transformative change where the traditional scientific support has given way to strategic partnership with key leaders, stakeholders, commercial and R&D. This change has now led medical affairs teams to responsibly generate differential medical value that empowers leaders to make measurable, scalable and clinically sustainable decisions.
Not to forget, the adoption of real-world data (RWD) and real-world evidence (RWE), medical analytics, digital health innovation, AI and the evolving healthcare delivery models are transforming how medical affairs teams operate and driving improved outcomes for patients.
Importance of investing in medical analytics
Over the years, medical affairs have undergone transformation over the last two eras. The first emphasised safe product usage by distributing data and holding scientific dialogues with key opinion leaders (KOLs). The second marked a shift when medical affairs started to actively participate in developing strategies, evidence plans and engage with a diverse set of stakeholders.
The third era demands that medical affairs focus on enhancing patient care and become a strategic partner and healthcare instigator. But why?
Enable data-driven medical strategy
Backed by RWD and advanced analytics, medical affairs teams can create a real world evidence strategy to identify unmet needs, enhance clinical decision-making and deliver better care.
Accelerate insights and decisions
Medical decision making relies on data insights from field notes, medical information call transcripts, literature reviews and advisory board summaries. Leaders can use AI to analyse unstructured data and uncover patterns to create easy-to-understand reports that help in scientific decision-making.
Expand stakeholder management
A valuable opportunity lies in nonpersonal, social and paid media engagement. Since medical affairs have already expanded their stakeholder base beyond traditional KOLs in the second era, the third era makes way for engaging with community physicians and digital opinion leaders. Organizations can work with analytics consulting firms to better understand the market needs and tailor their engagement plan to increase their impact.
Out of 100, only the top 10% organizations use medical analytics to its full extent. These companies focus on four key areas: insights, tactics, execution and impact. By connecting these areas to business objectives, it becomes easier to enhance decision-making, strategy and patient outcomes.
Insights
Traditionally, pharma organizations have invested millions in physician market research. But extracting useful insights from these statistics is both cumbersome and time-consuming. On the other hand, medical science liaisons (MSLs) interact with an average of 30 minutes per KOL, which helps generate a continuous stream of “free” market insights. Medical affairs teams should begin by identifying the patient journey and use RWD from diverse data sources, generative AI and natural language queries and expertise of healthcare professionals (HCPs) to uncover true unmet needs.
Tactics
Medical affairs can use both a prospective approach and a retrospective approach to make investments in evidence-based plans and evaluate the outcome. Here, there is a valuable need to identify gaps and assess the evidence plan’s effectiveness retrospectively. Teams can use AI and advanced analytics to study the complexity of scientific literature, clinical trial data and real-world evidence (RWE) to generate meaningful insights.
Execute
Organizations can begin by investing in best-performing MSLs and their capabilities using enhanced context, targeted planning and AI-guided prioritization. By identifying key capabilities of best-performing MSLs, building HCP 360° profiles, studying RWD insights, engagement histories, enabling digital augmentation and training MSLs in digital literacy (an emerging future skill), medical affairs can transform scientific engagement.
Impact
Lastly, with an advanced analytics strategy and AI, the medical affairs team can identify the impact across multiple horizons, including HCP knowledge and belief, HCP behaviour change, patient care and healthcare outcomes and the impact of investments across different initiatives.
