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© 2024 Medical Affairs Professional Society (MAPS). All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
Identifying trends and determining the “so what” from medical insights is one of the best ways for Medical Affairs to demonstrate value. However, many organizations struggle to efficiently collect, analyze, and act on insights. Our objective is to collaborate in the development of new areas of industry standards and guidance for medical insights processes. While insights are a priority for Medical Affairs leadership, there currently exists little guidance in the way of industry standards. In this webinar, we hope to advance a set of standards that Medical Affairs leaders can use as a starting point to customize and develop cutting-edge medical insights processes for their own organizations.
In the webinar, we will share some common challenges with insights and propose easy-to-use, technology-enabled solutions. These challenges and solutions include:
Medical Affairs professionals must engage with multiple stakeholders in healthcare delivery, including clinicians, patients, payers and policy makers. Each of these audiences is focused on different value drivers and requires specialized communications and messaging to make informed decisions. Traditional scientific communications platform (SCP) usage is usually limited to the Medical team. Internal functions focused on other audiences (e.g. payers, patients, policy makers) often create their own message frameworks, duplicating efforts and potentially leading to misalignment. Increasingly, audiences expect to be informed of the bigger picture and to contribute to the wider value story through direct interactions with other stakeholder groups. HealthScience brings together clinical, economic, social, behavioral and policy perspectives to demonstrate therapeutic value in healthcare systems. The HealthScience approach can be used to expand the concepts and content of the SCP to provide an integrated engagement plan and proposals for evidence generation. At the conclusion of this session, participants should:
The Medical Affairs teams demonstrate leadership and value each year through the annual strategic planning process that aligns all multifunctional MA competencies on common objectives needed to support the product and organization. A focused and cohesive medical strategy must be developed to navigate the complex therapeutic environment for each product – overcoming challenges, taking advantage of opportunities and filling any scientific or clinical gaps. A comprehensive and supportive tactical plan aligned to the medical strategy should define the activities that will provide the most impact and benefit to stakeholders in therapeutic space while taking the MA team one-step closer to achieving annual goals.
The MAPS Medical Affairs Strategic Planning Guide and Template has been developed to provide guidance and recommendations to selected components that comprise the strategic medical affairs planning for a product – including the situational analysis, medical strategy, tactical/operational planning, and medical plan summary.
Executive Vice President & CMO, UCB, Iris Loew-Friedrich discusses the importance of a purpose-driven culture to employee engagement
Caring for people – patients and colleagues – coupled with the science are the twin elements that form the foundation of Professor Doctor Iris Loew-Friedrich’s approach to her role. And this aligns neatly with the vision of her employer, global biopharma company UCB, and provides a platform for collaboration both within and outside the organization.
A physician by training, Professor Loew-Friedrich started her professional life at the Frankfurt University Medical School and has always tried to combine patient care with high-quality research. Today she is Executive Vice-President Development and Medical Practices and Chief Medical Officer at UCB, where she provides global strategic leadership across a range of areas.
“I still very much consider myself a physician, so patient care is really at the center of what drives me – and more generally it’s care for people: people living with diseases and also people in our company, in my organization and people in our industry are what motivates me very much.” This approach chimes with the way UCB articulates its vision: “Inspired by patients. Driven by science.” Professor Loew-Friedrich is confident that this “really sends out a message about who we want to be.”
She explains: “I think culture is the key driver and so creating a culture that gives colleagues a sense of purpose and the opportunity to make a meaningful impact is important. At UCB, we have one central question that we ask all the time: how will what we do make a difference for patients living with severe diseases? It’s the value-creation topic that is at the center of all of our work.”
And, of course, this vision resonates especially within the Medical Affairs function.
“Our mission in Medical Affairs is to drive the continuous modernization and integration of data from multiple disciplines and sources. Then we need to translate them into actionable insights with scientific integrity, efficiency and transparency so that we optimize the patient and healthcare professional experience. That’s a mission behind which we can all align. We try to ensure that all colleagues in our Medical Affairs practice understand how each of them contributes to this mission and we combine this with forming a culture of high-performing teams.
“Everybody is focused on the same purpose of creating value for patients. On top of this, we try to ensure that we are an organization that cultivates learning, innovating and high performance and all of that integrated with opportunities for personal development, recognition, and rewards. It is the entire package that is required to attract the talent for the future and to maintain and develop that talent in our organization.”
Moreover, continuous learning is key to fostering agility and adaptability, according to Professor Loew-Friedrich. “As the environment keeps changing so quickly, the ability of an organization to be agile and to adapt is very important and so these are important traits that we’re looking for when we are hiring talent – a mindset to innovate, to grow, a mindset of continuous learning.”
How can the organization attract this type of talent? “We aim to create the sense of purpose, the sense of belonging, and key opportunities for personal development and growth. In line with our practice thinking, we are trying to establish communities of colleagues who either have the same role in the organization or who work in the same geography or who are engaged around the same patient population. So, our communities are aligned on common themes and we see that as a major driver of identification with the Medical Affairs organization and a source of inspiration and learning.”
Leadership for Loew-Friedrich has always been about empowering people to have maximum impact in a team environment. “I consider myself very much as someone who creates opportunities and empowers people. I believe you cannot be a leader without being passionate about what you are doing. Of course, we need to be very objective in our decision-making.”
Asked about the key capabilities to be developed within Medical Affairs as we move towards value-based medicine, Professor Loew-Friedrich is clear: “From my perspective the biggest topic is probably around creating and mastering medical insights. The second area of focus is collaborating very broadly for evidence generation.
“In terms of generating and mastering medical insights, I think we have already plenty of data available but how do we then use the data to truly generate insights? For me, this means that it’s not about just generating outputs and results, but really going one step further and distilling meaningful insights, providing context and ultimately driving impact. “On the second topic – collaboration for evidence generation – I think we have plenty of opportunity to join forces with academia or other institutions outside of our industry to invest our joint resources into the acceleration of the advancement of medical science. If a medicine gets to a patient in its first indication, there is a vast opportunity in terms of further knowledge and insights being generated: how can we get to the best ideas and how can we turn them into a true win-win situation that will create value for patients? This is where I believe we can collaborate closely with academic institutes, patient advocacy groups and other stakeholders to really get to the best possible outcome.”
Professor Loew-Friedrich points out that collaboration will be enhanced by advanced technology. “What I am seeing for the future is that we need to launch artificial intelligence capabilities – so that we use the data to simulate scenarios that will very objectively inform the next steps and ultimately enhance patient care. One of the big topics around collaboration for evidence generation is building on the strengths of human intelligence and artificial intelligence and establishing seamless interaction between both.”
How can we measure our performance in this new world? “Performance management is a topic that we continuously need to evolve and that is not as easy as it sounds. We’re trying to move away from very simple, quantitative measures – number of scientific exchanges, number of publications, impact factors – to measuring the quality of our analytical skills and the insight generation. Getting to meaningful qualitative measures is not an easy task. And I understand it’s not only difficult for UCB, it’s a challenge for the entire industry.”
Finally, the new operating model elevates Medical Affairs from a supportive role into a strategic decision-maker and trusted scientific partner: how is this change manifesting itself within the organization? “We are moving towards an integrated model that provides the Medical team the right space to be a trusted scientific and strategic partner ‘eye-to-eye’. What we need to continue to enhance is leadership and business acumen of our medical colleagues. This is not only about scientific leadership and leadership in insight generation, it’s also leadership in the most classical sense of providing direction, engaging and inspiring colleagues – inside Medical Affairs and beyond. That’s a work in progress and a key competency that we continue to strengthen in the organization.”
602 Park Point Drive, Suite 225, Golden, CO 80401 – +1 303.495.2073
© 2024 Medical Affairs Professional Society (MAPS). All Rights Reserved Worldwide.