As with so many aspects of Medical Affairs, a successful insights management process requires a strategy-first approach; one example is defining listening priorities based on company and Medical strategic imperatives prior to initiation of insights gathering. The idea that insights management requires strategy before implementation may seem obvious (and, indeed, is a central point of the previous MAPS/Within3 white paper on this subject), but the specifics of how to clearly articulate and effectively implement the insights strategy remain a major challenge area for Medical Affairs teams, including the following:

Listening Priorities

Insights management may seem reactive in that it monitors the external scientific, clinical, healthcare, governmental, societal and patient landscapes for new knowledge/opinions/trends that allow an organization to react/respond accordingly. However, choosing what to listen for and designing the mechanics of data generation and analysis must be proactive to ensure it is strategically anchored. In fact, best-in-class insights management teams have a dual approach, first defining strategic listening priorities and secondly putting systems in place to answer the question, “Is there anything we’re missing?” This can be seen as listening both narrowly (for priorities) and broadly (for emergent learnings). Different people/processes/technologies may be more useful for these two different types of listening, for example using targeted strategies of Medical Science Liaison (MSL) engagements and advisory boards to monitor listening priorities, alongside a broader social listening strategy to identify unexpected landscape trends.

Insights for Insights’ Sake

Insights have become an expected deliverable and sometimes used as metric for Medical Affairs teams. This presents the danger of collecting insights only as a checkbox exercise. This is often the result of teams focusing on the activities they will use to gather insights and not on the strategic purpose of insights. This can result in executing many tasks for insights gathering but with little to no impact. Impulsive insights gathering can also stem from reacting to perceived “fires,” e.g., scheduling an advisory board to learn more about a recently surfaced trend, which in hindsight may not be the actual fire it initially seemed. These challenges can be mitigated by establishing a yearly insights planning cycle, leaving room for some spontaneous activities that respond to time-sensitive threats or opportunities, whilst remaining focused on listening for strategic priorities driven by overarching product and therapeutic area strategy.

Resourcing

Medical Affairs teams see insights as an opportunity to drive company strategy and help cement the function’s place alongside R&D and Commercial as a third strategic pillar in the biopharmaceutical and MedTech industries. Senior leadership, however, may require demonstration of insights value before they share this opinion. Allocating resources to insights generation may be especially challenging in small and/or precommercial companies, in which the appreciation of the potential impact of insights on R&D and Clinical Development lags behind the understanding of insights as drivers of HCP behavior. No matter the size of the organization, resourcing remains an ongoing challenge for many Insights teams. In generating organizational buy-in for insights infrastructure it is useful to look beyond the impact of insights on Medical Affairs strategic priorities to demonstrate how insights will benefit company-wide priorities.

Ownership

Medical Affairs is not the only function that generates insights. Commercial, competitive intelligence, investor relations and to some extent R&D also collect, analyze and report insights. It may be difficult to make the case for Medical “ownership” of insights, especially when Commercial insights are likely to be supported and/or justified by metrics measuring Return on Investment (ROI). That said, Medical Affairs has access to the most diverse sources of evidence based insights (KOLs, HCPs, RWE, patients/caregivers etc.) and also the clinical/scientific understanding to contextualize the impact of insights on driving strategy. For these reasons, many organizations are exploring insights structures in which Medical Affairs can serve as the unifying partner, gathering insights and then communicating relevant data and insights to cross-functional colleagues internally.

Need-to-Have (not Nice-to-Have)

Just as it may require tact and persistence to ensure C-suite buy-in for insights activities, it may require work on the part of Medical Affairs leaders to ensure team members on the ground and in the field appreciate the need to prioritize insights activities. One roundtable participant described an organizational structure in which global medical directors were tasked with analyzing and reporting insights – but insights hadn’t yet been added to their annual key objectives. Likewise, many participants report feedback from MSLs that insights gathering were seen as a distraction from their “real” job of communicating the company’s scientific and clinical data in support of the scientific narrative. Successful Medical Affairs departments ensure that insights gathering and analysis are placed alongside other strategies as key Medical objectives and that team members are given remit and held accountable for their roles in insights management.

Alignment

Many companies build insights systems in silos such that insights are reported upward to leadership but are not also disseminated throughoutthe organization laterally or downwards. These siloed insights systems may have been adequate when insights were only used tactically and thus only had relevance to specific subfunctions; however, now with the potential for insights to influence company-wide strategy, alignment on insights across the business is essential. Unfortunately, businesses that have implemented siloed insights systems may have significant challenges moving to a more integrated model. Differences in data sources and formatting, along with differences across the processes and technologies used to generate, analyze and communicate insights may make insights silos especially durable, requiring multi-year IT projects to dismantle existing structures and rebuild them into a more integrated framework. Ideally, critical success factors and key insights topics would be defined at the therapeutic area and/or brand level, then translated down to local customer engagement plans to involve MSLs in closing specific knowledge gaps, where they feed back into further strategic planning.

People, Process, Technology

The challenge is when any of these three – people, process and technology – are not clear or are not coordinated. Who is leading? What are the timelines? What are the expectations and deliverables? How can we ensure we are all capturing insights in the same way? Are we all sharing in the same way? The simpler these processes, the easier it is to follow. Unfortunately (to reiterate this paper’s introduction), only 9% of surveyed individuals felt as if their insights management processes/platforms were streamlined enough to not feel cumbersome.