David McMinn, PhD – Lay Summaries Practice Leader
As a medical director for nearly a decade, I’m thrilled to share how Sorcero’s AI-powered Medical Insights Management (MIM) platform has revolutionized my approach to insight generation. Until now, insight generation was a time-consuming and resource-intensive task that involved gathering vast quantities of data from disparate sources and coordinating multiple stakeholders. However, with the advent of AI-assisted insight generation, and in particular the Sorcero MIM platform, my role has become more efficient and impactful, benefiting not only the pharmaceutical company I work for, but also patients.
Insights, Data, & Challenges
Medical affairs insights are critical in my role, helping me to make informed decisions, develop effective strategies, and drive innovation. These insights encompass a wide range of information, including market trends, patient needs, healthcare professional feedback, regulatory updates, and more. They serve as our compass in navigating the complex and ever-changing pharmaceutical landscape.
Insight generation relies on the collaborative efforts between various stakeholders, including medical representatives, competitive intelligence teams, market analysts, and data scientists. Each of these teams plays a crucial role in providing valuable information that contributes to our insights.
Data for generating these insights are sourced from various channels, such as Customer Relationship Management Systems (CRMs), call centers, Medical Science Liaison (MSL) meetings, advisory boards, and interactions with healthcare professionals at conferences. These sources provide a wealth of data, but the traditional process of manual data collection, organization, and analysis is extremely labor-intensive and time-consuming.
Previously, challenges like the sheer quantity of data, varying formats, and time constraints made the manual approach to insight generation an arduous and inefficient task. This is where Sorcero’s MIM platform has made a significant difference.
Benefits of MIM
With MIM, many of the manual tasks associated with insight generation have been automated, and the results are not only more accurate but also more consistent. The platform offers several efficiency-enhancing features that have transformed the way my team works:
Centralized Data: MIM centralizes medical affairs data, promoting collaboration between our teams and simplifying data access. This ensures that we can work together effectively and share insights that might have otherwise been missed.
Handling Data Quantity: MIM can process vast quantities of data quickly and accurately, far beyond what our team could previously achieve.
Automated Data Tagging: MIM’s AI technology automatically tags and categorizes data, making it easy to retrieve and utilize. This automation streamlines data organization and enhances the efficiency of our insight generation.
Trend Identification: MIM’s advanced analytics can rapidly identify emerging trends and patterns, which is invaluable in the fast-paced industry in which we work.
Visualizing Data: AI enables innovative data visualization through interactive dashboards. MIM’s dashboards allow for a deeper understanding of insights and trends, which can be filtered on different variables for comprehensive analysis.
Automated Insight Reports: The MIM platform can generate downloadable reports and summaries automatically, meaning we have reports much more quickly than when relying on report generation from our external agencies. This has saved significant time and effort in disseminating insights to key stakeholders. Report generation has been condensed from weeks to days.
The value of MIM to my role has been immense:
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It has helped me identify trends that might have been missed through manual processes.
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It has significantly reduced the time required to discover insights, leading to faster decision-making and better market responsiveness.
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It has enabled quicker implementation of strategies, allowing my team to pivot quickly in response to market changes.
Ultimately, the true value of MIM insight generation lies in the benefits it brings to patients. Faster insights mean that my team can develop and deliver informed strategies more rapidly, potentially improving patients’ quality of life and overall health.
A Caveat & Closing Thought
It's important to note, however, that MIM doesn't replace the need for researchers, analysts, medical writers, and medical affairs professionals. Instead, it facilitates our roles, helping us to work more efficiently. MIM optimizes the end-to-end process, ensuring that I can focus on asking the right questions, collecting the right data, and structuring reports appropriately to present relevant insights. I can confidently say that since moving from the traditional manual insight generation approach to using MIM, my role has been transformed for the better. Rather than wrangling massive volumes of data and stakeholders, I’m now able to give more time to ensure that the correct kind of data are being collected, that my team is asking the right questions of the data, and implementing strategically-astute initiatives on the back of the insights that are generated.
AI-assisted insight generation in medical affairs is revolutionary. It has streamlined my team’s processes, reducing the time and effort required, and has a direct and positive impact on patient well-being. By identifying insights that may otherwise have been missed, we can mitigate against potential harmful consequences to patients, such as unidentified diagnosis opportunities, delayed treatments, harmful side effects, unnecessary healthcare costs, and sub-optimal ongoing care. As the pharmaceutical sector continues to evolve and as data mountains grow, AI-assisted insight generation will undoubtedly play an increasingly central role in shaping the future of our industry.
