The topic of the latest MAPS webinar was "Future Proofing Your Medical Affairs Organisation"
Here are the summary notes:
Medical Affairs is strategically positioned to drive positive customer experience.
Medical Affairs has always been at the frontline, leading external medical interactions with HCPs.
HCPs want scientific non-promotional peer dialogue and to receive information in a way that they find most convenient.
Medical Information and Field-based medical groups have played a key role in delivering this and increasingly have employed digital solutions to deliver and improve customer experience.
With Medical Affairs already leading initiatives in this space, there is a great opportunity for it to step up to drive a more enterprise-wide digital strategy for improving customer experience.
A MAPS survey showed that the majority of organisations either do not have an enterprise-wide digital strategy or are in the initial stages of development or communicating the strategy; and that the majority of digital initiatives within Medical Affairs often run in silos, driven by ad hoc projects and requirements.
It is recognised that the key driver for adopting digital is the changing customer (HCPs, payers and patients) expectations.
The key challenges for driving digital include a lack of a culture of innovation, resourcing constraints and siloed digital activities.
The majority of organisations indicated a clear need for new capabilities in Medical Affairs to accelerate their digital journey; including partnering with enterprise data and analytics teams, hiring resources with data science expertise and working with external solution providers to leap-frog digital transformation.
The 3 key issues to address include: changing organisational mindset to put customers first; championing the technological changes that are needed; and challenging and evolving the regulations that don’t make sense for customers.
Thank you to the presenters:
Sameer Lal
SVP, Head of Medical Affairs, Indegene
Mary Alice Dwyer
MAPS Chair, Executive Program Committee