Exploring Next Year’s Medical Affairs Outlook
LifeSciencesIntelligence explores trends in medical affairs in 2023 and upcoming 2024 predictions with Deepak Patil.
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- Medical affairs teams are critical in scientific communication between life sciences companies, pharmaceutical companies, or industry leaders and medical professionals or patients. The Accreditation Council for Medical Affairs notes that these departments can support regulatory affairs, sales, and marketing. However, these teams must adapt as the industry evolves to accommodate new trends and advancements.
As the year comes to a close, LifeSciencesIntelligence interviewed Deepak Patil, senior director of medical strategy at Aktana, to discuss 2023 medical affairs and 2024 predictions.
Current Medical Affairs Trends
Patil told LifeSciencesIntelligence that the following factors were the most important medical affairs priorities in 2023:
- KOL network development
- Efficient medical insight collection
- Effective content creation and dissemination
KOL Network Development
“KOL network development continued to be a top priority for medical affairs (MA) teams in 2023,” explained Patil.
He cited a 2023 survey published by Veeva Pulse that revealed the majority of KOLs, 70%, only engage with one biopharma company. Companies looking to garner support or insight from these individuals must prioritize networking and securing that connection before KOLs begin engaging with other life sciences companies.
Throughout the past several years, more biopharmaceutical companies have invested in specialty drugs, noting the corresponding commercial revenue contribution has surpassed traditional pharmaceutical products. However, these companies have focused on medical affairs activities to improve market preparation during the launch to promote commercial success.
“With several New Molecular Entities (NMEs) launched in 2023 in the highly competitive immunology and oncology markets, it is critical for pharma companies to drive meaningful differentiation through MA-driven activities. Developing the KOL network to ensure market preparedness continues to be the top MA priority in 2023,” explained Patil.
Additionally, technological advancements, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), have played a critical role in how medical affairs teams interact with KOL and relationship management strategies.
“We have seen a significant increase in medical affairs teams deploying AI/ML technologies on CRM to improve physician relationship management.”
Medical Insight Collection
Beyond market challenges, Patil notes, “Sub-optimal CRM adoption by field medical teams and under-utilization of interaction logging tools continue to be a challenge across the industry. Valuable medical insights tend to get lost in the process.”
In addition to building a network of KOLs to engage with biopharma companies and provide market input, he explained that many life sciences companies focused on gathering efficient medical insights in 2023.
Companies have continued to prioritize the efficient collection of medical insights by fine-tuning their processes and technologies, consequently improving the quality and quantity of medical insights.
“This includes intelligent engagement models that prompt specific insight collection in the pre-call planning phase, voice-to-text capabilities, and streamlined surveys for insight logging and using NLP and AI to derive insights from plain text notes logged by MSLs,” Patil revealed. “Additionally, MA teams have been building models to harness patient, physician, and practice-centric insights from real-world data.”
Content Creation and Dissemination
Another priority Patil highlighted was creating compelling content and disseminating it to the right people through the appropriate avenues. Medical affairs content is extensive, lending itself to dense materials delivered via hundreds of presentation slides or pages in a PDF document.
While the content is important and delivers critical information to the audience, he noted that its dense nature has “limited MA teams to use traditional channels, [including] emails, in-person or remote/Zoom presentations, and recorded presentations.”
However, throughout the past year, medical affairs in the life sciences industry have expanded their content capabilities, improving storage, modularization, and tagging technologies.
“While medical communications teams continue to develop bite-size content that can be shared over non-traditional MA channels, better content storage, modularization, and tagging allow automation and omnichannel evidence dissemination.”
Medical Affairs Predictions
Patil anticipates these priorities will remain pertinent in the coming year because of similar industry pressures.
He also notes that last year, there were a lot of staffing changes and reorganization across biopharma companies.
“In most cases, the reorganization was designed with two priorities in mind: to eliminate redundancy and reduce manual effort, signaling an industry-wide bet on technology to drive operational efficiencies and to drive cross-functional collaboration across R&D, medical, and commercial teams to provide a better customer experience while aligning with organizational priorities,” explained Patil.
“In addition to these priorities, pharma companies will face strong competition for patient recruitment in clinical trials designed to include patients with similar profiles. Companies deploying novel investigator and patient engagement methodologies led by MA teams are more likely to emerge as winners in this competition.”
Recommendations
LifeSciencesIntelligence asked Patil to highlight what medical affairs teams should prioritize in the coming year.
“While companies have started acknowledging the impact of medical affairs teams on their overall success, it is very important for medical affairs leadership to demonstrate the impact of their investments and to work to sustain that momentum,” he responded.
For MA teams to receive the investments they need to cultivate talent, processes, and technology, they need to justify their existence and impact on the company’s overall goals. Patil reveals that many MA teams have historically struggled to quantify these changes.
However, he notes that establishing measurable KPIs can help overcome these challenges.
“MA teams have long struggled to demonstrate the impact of their activities on overall priorities. Medical affairs leaders should establish measurable KPIs for each of their business priorities,” he reiterated.
Additionally, companies should acknowledge that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to medical affairs.
“It is critical to consider asset and therapy area-level nuances to ensure successful implementation and adoption of any technology. Medical affairs leaders and technology champions should engage compliance teams early on with the overarching vision and tactics in designing and deploying any solution.”
Technology Integration
As technology continues to advance, medical affairs teams will also play a critical role in integrating and applying these tools, contributing to the successful implementation, adoption, and impact of AI/ML and other technological advancements.
“Medical affairs experts understand the scientific nuances of each asset and therapy area and will play a critical role in ensuring any technology designed for MA teams is appropriately designed to meet the business objectives of the particular team,” said Patil.
“Companies should involve medical affairs experts early in the process of designing products intended for expansion to medical affairs teams. Additionally, companies should increase the involvement of medical affairs stakeholders in cross-functional technology solution development,” he concluded.
