From the ubiquitous use of online and video calls to the emergence of telehealth, the pandemic accelerated digitalization across industries. In healthcare, digital technologies are improving prevention, screening and diagnosis, while enabling more precise monitoring of patients’ diseases progression and adherence to care plans. From the perspective of Medical Affairs teams in pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical technology organizations, digitalization allows new ways of generating, analyzing, and interpreting data, as well as emerging mechanisms for scientific exchange, insight generation/management and forward-looking strategies to communicate findings with internal and external stakeholders. In short, digitalization offers Medical Affairs teams working within the healthcare ecosystem the opportunity to rethink strategy and actions across the lifecycle of traditional and nontraditional products, elevating Medical Affairs as a strategic partner within and beyond the organization.¹

This article is the first in a three-part collaboration between the MAPS Digital and Medical Strategy Focus Area Working Groups (FAWGs) describing the role of Digital in guiding and enabling Medical Affairs strategy. Here we seek to define Digital, identify its value to internal and external stakeholders, and provide a recipe for embedding digital into Medical Affairs strategy.

Medical Affairs has long been a voice of patient-centricity in the industry. This term has now expanded to “people-centricity,” including the perspectives of healthcare providers, caregivers and everyone with whom Medical Affairs interacts. This means that in addition to bringing the organization’s priorities out into the world, Medical Affairs is also reactive to the external environment – watching, noticing and responding to societal trends. Accelerated by the pandemic, one of these trends is digitalization. On a societal level, this is immediately obvious in the shift toward personalized, online shopping; in healthcare, this can be seen in the shift toward telemedicine combined with personalized medicine.^2,3 Today, digital is inherent in the customer experience. On one hand, this creates the challenge of matching the sophisticated digital offerings that external stakeholders now expect. On the other hand, overall societal digitalization presents the opportunity to create valuable insights from dramatically expanding data sources such as telehealth and even social media.

In Medical Affairs, the term Digital goes beyond recreating in-person or on-paper activities in digital or online formats. Rather, it describes a true paradigm shift in the way organizations, teams and individuals conceptualize problems, solutions and actions. In this way, Digital is a mindset, a philosophy and a way of thinking that goes beyond any single technology. At the same time Digital is not a strategy that exist in a silo; rather, it is a partner that enables Medical strategy to be taken to the next level. In Medical Affairs, we start with the problem and then use Digital to solve the problem. In short, Digital describes the emerging reality of technology embedded in and enabling the ways we think and work as individuals, teams and society.

Strategy requires making choices. Digital thinking and the tools of technology that accompany this thinking can help to create understanding to inform the strategic choices of Medical Affairs leaders and teams. In this way, Digital thinking is an important perspective that has the potential to expand many strategic choices and actions; however, determining when digital tools will help strategic priorities or when, conversely, digital tools hinder strategy is key to using this partner well. Unfortunately, while many organizations are using digital tools to accomplish initiatives, most Medical Affairs teams are not yet leveraging the strategic value of digital thinking. For example, a 2021 survey by the Medical Affairs Digital Strategy Council found that while 73% of those surveyed reported their companies are planning to implement an omni/multichannel strategy driven by digital, only 27% had started moving toward this model.⁴ Likewise, a survey by Best Practices found that only 22% of surveyed Medical Affairs professionals had a clear digital strategy in their organization, while the majority of those surveyed (51%) reported no digital strategy in their organization but were implementing digital initiatives.⁵

Of course, Medical strategy requires not only understanding where you are, but where you would like to be. Strategizing for future situations is especially important for Medical Affairs, in that the function’s value depends on the creation and maintenance of long-term relationships. The information clarity offered by Digital enables teams to identify what is noise and what is a trend or pattern, and to plan strategically for emerging conditions. Likewise, digital thinking may help Medical Affairs leaders identify future possibilities that require more immediate actions. Note this is a “vision first” approach – Digital may extend thinking to allow for a new vision of what is possible but making these strategic decisions continues to occur per the vision of human leaders (Figure 1).

Medical Affairs Digitalizing Within the Organization