'Meet industry's new policymakers...shaping the future of healthcare'. Here's a 2 page transcript of Dr Glenn Carter's interview with Christine Spiteri published on Pharma in Focus. It follows the MAPA - Medical Affairs Professionals of Australasia event where himself and his fellow panelists (Krishan Thiru; Jan Lewis; Dr Gisela Mautner, MD-PhD, MPH, MBA, FACPE, GAICD, FIIDM, CCEO; Brigid Waite, Faizz Fattah (eMBA), Lauren Pasfield and Diana Lau) discussed a range of Medical Affairs topics.
...
The future of medicine is about to get a whole lot more complicated and Medical Affairs has a pivotal role to play, working with Market Access and Government Relations colleagues to help shape healthcare policy, a leading industry expert has predicted.
Australian recruitment specialist and HPG Managing Director Dr Glenn Carter told a Medical Affairs Professionals of Australasia event titled: “Successfully Navigating your Career Path in Medical Affairs: Key Insights from Industry Leaders” that the Medical Affairs role will become more influential in creating access.
“This is because it’s policy that determines whether patients receive treatments or whether they don’t. If they don’t, then the policy needs to be changed. And this can be done by taking all the data, all the evidence, and convincing policy makers to make changes. And it’s Medical Affairs who know the data and who can work to shape policy,” he said.
“In this regard we’ll be seeing more hybrid roles where Medical Affairs will be working on policy initiatives with their Market Access, Government and External Affairs colleagues.”
But in order to help shape healthcare policy of the future, Carter said a genuine and comprehensive understanding of business is required.
Although medical affairs professionals currently have scientific expertise, understanding of clinical evidence and relationships with KOLs, Carter warned that’s “only part of the equation” that delivers products to patients.
“The most important skill for success in Medical Affairs is to understand business,” he said.
*Dr Glenn Carter (far right) at the MAPA networking event.
“This means to truly understand how business works, and to understand how Medical Affairs fits into a company’s business model. Essentially, understanding how all functions within an organisation work together to deliver value.
“Success in business is not about chasing the dollar or closing the sale, it’s about understanding what’s important to customers and then providing it. It’s about providing value. Business acumen means understanding all the functional areas and how they come together to deliver this value.
“In embracing ‘business’, understand the context of business. It’s exciting, it’s creative. There are so many twists and turns that happen every day. Market dynamics change. Competitors come and go. The regulatory environment can change very quickly. Customer preferences change. There are people issues, product issues, opportunities and challenges.
“And being effective means that you are on top of all these and you have the skills to manage the complexity and at the same time deliver value to your customers - because that’s what it’s all about - delivering value.”
In a rapidly changing healthcare landscape, Carter said having a growth mindset is crucial - learning, adapting, being flexible, taking feedback and always improving. Another must-have skill is emotional intelligence and excelling in each of the five dimensions, self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, motivation and social skills.
“The future will be a lot more complicated. This is because there’s going to be a lot more science to understand,” he said.
“This science will be coming from a range of different areas - there will be the clinical trial data from the randomised trials, there will be Real World Evidence, and there will also be Real Time Evidence - that’s the data coming in from a range of wearable devices, all being captured in real-time. And advances in the fields of genomics, immunotherapy, oncology, and precision medicine are delivering more complex data than ever before.
“So a key skill for the future will be knowing how to gain insights from this data - and this is where understanding data analytics, digital health, and artificial intelligence become key skills.
“Business will also become more complicated. There will be new, agile start-ups and they will be challenging the major companies. So, again, understanding the dynamics of business will be essential.”
Christine Spiteri, Pharma In Focus