Expert Insights on Medical Affairs Strategic Planning

Sorcero recently sat down with Carlos Eid, Executive Medical Director at Novartis, to hear his expert perspective on the evolution of strategic planning in Medical Affairs – and how AI can support this critical effort.

Note: The views expressed here are solely those of Carlos Eid and do not represent the views of Novartis.

Part 1: Upleveling Strategic Planning in Medical Affairs
Medical Affairs teams invest considerable time developing comprehensive yearly strategic plans, but these documents are often forgotten as soon as the planning cycle ends. How can teams optimize this process amidst the increasing complexity of stakeholders, data sources, and the evolving healthcare landscape?

Embracing a Company-Wide, Patient-Centric Approach to Strategic Planning

Firstly, companies need to think about breaking down silos in strategic planning. Instead of having individual strategic plans per group, each team – from medical affairs to commercial to patient access – should work from the same central strategy.

From there, organizations can identify team-specific tactics that ladder up to the core company strategy. This approach ensures cross-functional alignment and keeps everyone focused on the primary goal: putting patients at the center. While Medical Affairs teams and companies have historically focused strategies on different stakeholders, like HCPs or payors, the top priority should always be driving patient outcomes.

Lastly, strategic planning isn’t a one-and-done project - it’s an ongoing cycle. Companies need to continuously monitor how well tactics are aligning to strategy, and course-correct as needed. While it may take months to measure patient outcomes, teams should still monitor progress to ensure they’ve identified the right strategic pillars and tactics.

Intelligence vs. Insights - How Each Shape Strategy

Medical Affairs organizations all agree that insights are foundational to strategic planning and aligning to patient outcomes. But there is still a lot of untapped potential when it comes to fully leveraging insights.

One key reason for this is that some organizations don’t understand what constitutes an insight. What many teams think of as an insight is actually intelligence, or key information. Intelligence becomes insight only when teams analyze, structure, and transform it into actionable and valuable information that can shape strategy or tactics.

Intelligence becomes insight only when teams analyze, structure, and transform it into actionable and valuable information that can shape strategy or tactics.

Gathering intelligence and defining insights is a team effort – not just the responsibility of MSLs. While the field provides a wealth of information, Medical Affairs must gather intelligence from numerous sources like publications, claims data, advisory boards, and more. This intelligence should also be combined and shared with other cross-functional intelligence. Even an HCP’s feeling on a particular topic – or sentiment – can provide useful information. However, teams should exercise some caution. Leveraging opinions as intelligence can prove difficult, as it’s challenging to accurately assess and interpret sentiment. 

How to Best Leverage MSLs

Despite the critical role MSLs play in supporting evidence generation and driving launch excellence, many companies have limited MSL resources. To get the most out of these lean teams, MSLs should focus on more than just medical education and relationship building. They also need to spend time actively cultivating impactful partnerships focused on delivering positive patient outcomes.

Generating insights is important throughout the entire strategic planning process – but is especially crucial for launch preparation. Ahead of launch, commercial teams need to allot enough time for gathering evidence and using this data to drive launch decisions. Given the proximity of medical teams to key stakeholders like HCPs, medical affairs and MSLs should truly drive this effort of evidence generation. Unfortunately, many companies underinvest in medical teams pre-launch - which undermines their ability to gather this key information.

Most importantly, teams should begin their launch preparations early to ensure they have sufficient time to develop and execute a robust strategy.

Part 2: AI’s Role in Strategic Planning

Building robust, patient-first strategies and generating evidence to inform these plans require significant time and energy. Fortunately, tools like AI have proven instrumental in augmenting these efforts.

Using AI to Help Prioritize Tactics

From the start, AI can help guide organizations on what tactics they should leverage to hit their strategic objectives. AI can enhance content for engagements, personalize medical education, and support medical information. Even when it comes to clinical trials, for example, AI could be used to predict the most effective sites and patient demographics, optimizing recruitment and success rates based on disease prevalence and past trial data. As another example, AI can help forecast the impact of medical affairs activities, helping organizations allocate resources efficiently and prioritize what tactics to employ.

AI has the capacity not only to prioritize tactics but also to accelerate insights generation and help companies derive actionable insights from data. 

Using AI to Enhance Insights Generation

AI has the capacity not only to prioritize tactics but also to accelerate insights generation and help companies derive actionable insights from data. Through powerful and fast analytical capabilities, AI can dive deep into notes, social media, documents, reports, and market research, summarize takeaways, and identify trends that drive strategic planning and better tactics.

Afterall, even the largest organizations don’t have the resources to sift through thousands and thousands of data points each week – let alone surface all relevant trends and insights across that information.

When it comes to pharmacovigilance, AI can also help uncover safety concerns over time that might not otherwise be obvious when assessing data manually and in smaller time frames.

Another key source of intelligence is sentiment, which provides critical context that may sway strategies or tactics. However, accurately capturing sentiment can be challenging as sentiment is easy to misinterpret. AI can assist MSLs by analyzing verbal and non-verbal cues to provide a nuanced and unbiased understanding, ensuring insights reflect a physician’s true perspectives.

In addition to sentiment, AI can surface comprehensive HCP information with just a few clicks, saving hours of research across various websites and forums. AI can quickly identify top HCPs by analyzing social media activity, events, and speaking engagements, enabling companies to prioritize and select the most influential stakeholders that can help them impact the desired patient outcomes.

When it comes to pharmacovigilance, AI can also help uncover safety concerns over time that might not otherwise be obvious when assessing data manually and in smaller time frames.

To impact patient outcomes, companies don’t just need to know what to measure — they also need to know whether outcomes are improving or declining. This is a huge challenge for organizations, but AI can potentially help by establishing a baseline and monitoring progress based on historical data, RWE, or Investigator Sponsored (IS) evidence generation.

It is important to note that data – and therefore AI – is only useful if information is high-quality. Incorrect or insufficient information can cause AI to hallucinate and possibly generate inaccurate or biased insights.

Contact us to learn more about how the Sorcero AI Platform can help inform your strategic planning.