How to Successfully Engage Healthcare Providers in a Post-Pandemic, Digital World

Three key trends from the Medical Affairs Professional Society Congress

The role of healthcare providers (HCPs) in driving the adoption and demand of new therapies is one of the most critical aspects of successful product commercialization and ensuring patients receive optimal care. This necessitates that pharmaceutical and biotech companies clearly communicate complex medical information about new therapeutic solutions and how these therapies can improve patient experiences and outcomes. While the relationship between pharmaceutical companies and HCPs began to evolve even before COVID-19, the pandemic has transformed how pharmaceutical and biotech companies connect with HCPs, leading to a preferential digital shift in the way HCPs want to consume information and engage with brands. While attending the Medical Affairs Professional Society (MAPS) Congress, which brought together over 1,000 of the most innovative minds in our space, we observed three major trends in Medical Affairs:

1. Generative AI and technologies such as ChatGPT are here to stay but still require human intervention. We see a ton of potential for ChatGPT, specifically in applications such as personalized learning, creating content to facilitate learning, and data and insights management. ChatGPT is a generative AI service that can generate natural language responses to a wide range of prompts and questions that are remarkably like human written content. However, like any other statistical models, ChatGPT contains errors. Currently, AI has limitations and cannot be considered a replacement for human capability and knowledge.

While the potential of ChatGPT is huge, considerable ethical considerations cannot be omitted from any conversation about it. With the launch of ChatGPT and other advanced generative AI models, it is vital that we assess and align with how to use these increasingly intelligent and capable tools ethically and safely. The technology has tremendous promise as it becomes even more sophisticated, and we see its potential to transform our approach to medical education and clinical management. However, ChatGPT will need human intervention to ensure data integrity.

2. A successful omnichannel strategy starts with clearly defined goals and welcomed collaboration across multiple disciplines within an organization. Just like consumers, HCPs crave seamless integration of communications across email, the web and other channels. They want highly personalized experiences and content tailored to their needs to help drive positive patient outcomes. It's increasingly important that Medical Affairs, IT, compliance and commercial teams collaborate to create optimized HCP user experiences that seamlessly transition between multiple channels. To build a successful omnichannel strategy, you must understand HCPs.

Whether you are a medical affairs professional or on the commercial team, it is critical to understand the specific HCP audience and identify and quantify unmet medical needs so the right content is delivered and optimized across an effective channel mix. Using data-led, audience-first strategies, we can know how and what information is being consumed, identify the right and wrong channels, and develop real-time insights that lead to specific informed actions. Content strategy and creation decisions should not be a siloed function — rather, it should be a collaborative process across all company stakeholders. As you begin to formulate an omnichannel strategy for the first time, it is important that you start small and focus on a few channels with excellent content and build from there.

3. It is imperative that Medical Affairs teams demonstrate their value to their colleagues or organizations using key performance indicators (KPIs). We have seen a major evolution in the way the biopharma industry is measuring the impact of Medical Affairs activities. However, there is strong agreement that standardized benchmarking is still needed. Historically, we have looked at quantitative measures, but how do we begin to benchmark against the qualitative measures that help illustrate increased knowledge about a disease state or therapeutic approach?

In addition to measuring against common benchmarks such as share of voice and sentiment analysis, Medical Affairs professionals should benchmark against the specific goals that are anchored to your product or therapeutic strategy. For example, if your product is a targeted therapy with a specific biomarker and a specific target, and the testing rate for that biomarker is extremely important, a good benchmark would be to measure the uptake of biomarker testing. Medical science liaisons (MSLs) can create or amend a strategy to help drive up that testing rate and measure for effectiveness by benchmarking before MSL intervention and then after in determined time intervals, often in a group of centers or a region. This helps provide a very measurable and objective way for an MSL to measure effectiveness.

I am excited to see how innovation continues to evolve the role of Medical Affairs and what it means for our clients and the patients and communities we will be able to serve more effectively. We will see greater transparency in delivering care for our healthcare community through increased dialogue and feedback with HCPs that create opportunities for real-time action. It’s pretty cool to think that, possibly in five years, we will even stop using terms such as AI, advanced analytics and omnichannel — they simply will be integrated into our patient and HCP experiences as the norm.

As a disclaimer, Real Chemistry observes and adheres to local external regulations and relevant data privacy laws as part of this process.

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Watch the below recording of our recent LinkedIn Live event discussion about what is happening in Medical Affairs with:

• Donna Holder, Pharm. D., Executive Director and Head of Global Oncology Medical Affairs Digital Strategy & Innovation, Daiichi Sankyo;

• Luca Dezzani, M.D., Vice President of U.S. Oncology Medical Affairs, Johnson & Johnson; and

• Karsten Friedrich, PhD., Head of Medical Digital Innovation, AstraZeneca.

To connect with our team to learn about our Medical Affairs practice, email w2oscistrat@realchemistry.com.

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