A Holistic Approach to Measuring Impact

Medical Affairs Strategies that Demonstrate and Improve Impact

Medical Affairs plays an essential role in evidence-based medicine, disease education, and driving better outcomes. Their knowledge is crucial as medications become more specialized and complex. They enable healthcare professional (HCP) education, which supports closing clinical care gaps. Even those organizations with mature Medical Affairs strategies still struggle with how to measure it accurately.

The challenge is that the typical key performance indicators of key opinion leader (KOL) engagements, collected insights, medicine information requests, and congress attendance only tell part of the story. These metrics need qualitative context, including practice advancements among KOLs, Medical Science Liaisons (MSL) peer connections, follow-ups on identified insights, and survey results.

Having the right balance of qualitative and quantitative measures within Medical Affairs strategies is the path toward a holistic approach. With this framework, you can demonstrate and improve the impact of your team’s activities.

The New Paradigm for Measuring Medical Affairs Impact

The traditional route of measuring medical impact has many gaps. These methods matter, but lack the breadth and depth of Medical Affairs activities. You’ll always want to measure:

• Activity metrics
• Counting calls/insights
• MSL advocacy
• External KOL surveys

Combining that with Medical Affairs digital strategy components provides this new shift beyond internal actions. Enriching these with additional data and insights connects patient outcomes with clinical behavior and scientific sentiment.

To begin this new Medical Affairs strategy outlook, you’ll need to focus on five key areas.

Medical Affairs Strategies: What Life Sciences Needs to Do to Truly Measure Impact

Undertaking this new strategic vision for Medical Affairs requires five steps to address, identify, and modernize the system.

Address Clinical Care Gaps

First, you’ll need to evaluate HCPs and healthcare systems failing to deliver positive patient outcomes. The data will signal that treatment, diagnosis, or testing have challenges.

When this HCP information is available for analysis, you can link it to the negative consequences, including decreased reimbursements, higher mortality rates, and more frequent readmissions. Each of these seriously affects clinical care delivery, with increased costs that don’t equate to care. Readmissions alone are a worrying trend, as they are 12.4% higher than index admissions.

By applying this clinical data, your life sciences data partners, like H1, can uncover these gaps. We do this by referencing established protocols like CMS and HEDIS. Then, we use the same criteria on our data to find hospital-acquired infections and patient survey feedback.

Once discovered, these challenges are solvable. In turn, you can gain higher reimbursements and provide better patient outcomes.

Identify Agents of Change

Next, you’ll move to understand who can be an agent of change in an organization. It depends on the size. An HCP may be the best option for smaller practices. For large healthcare organizations (HCOs), you’ll be classifying various stakeholders.

So, how do you find these innovators? Our data platform supports this initiative. It enables you to engage thought, digital opinion, and treatment leaders. Additionally, you can identify more characteristics of target audiences, such as rising stars and HCPs with diverse backgrounds or those who treat diverse patients.

By overlaying care gap insights within your MSL territory planning, you can locate thought leaders and determine how this impacts scoring. Track trends and topics on social media and as well as the influencers who are actively participating. Results of a study on HCP’s usage of social media found that 91.9% use it at work, with 31% spending one to two hours a day.

Having this additional information can help you refine and tailor your Medical Affairs strategies.

Use AI-Driven, Real-Time Insights

No conversation about the future of Medical Affairs strategies is without the infusion of AI technologies. They help you find connections in data faster, eliminating manual work for greater productivity.

Our AI-powered solutions simplify and operationalize HCP and HCO links. It is possible to integrate your existing customer relationship management (CRM) system as well. With this capability, personalized data is now in one central hub. With a real-time understanding of the interests of the HCP or HCO, those in the field can have more relevant conversations and provide insights proactively.

Using the H1 mobile app as your trusted resource ensures that pre-meeting research is fast and comprehensive. This allows your Medical Affairs expert to have more productive engagements.

Build Relationships via Omnichannel Engagement

The interactions between HCPs and HCOs with Medical Affairs now occur in a modern technology environment, which means your Medical Affairs digital strategy needs to be omnichannel. Relationships between MSLs and HCPs or HCOs can be high-touch and time-consuming, so adding omnichannel engagement strategies ensures that you are reaching the right KOLs in the places where they are already active.

HCP digital engagement is becoming the preference of the industry. A survey found that 60% of these roles said the integration of interaction with MSLs across channels was important to their experience.

Track Behavioral Change via Data Analytics

Now you need to be able to measure all of these activities and track behavioral change. If you don’t know the true impact, you can’t adjust it to be more effective. Our team analyzes the breadth of scientific influence and whether it is shifting physician behaviors.

H1’s data gathering, technological innovations, and analytical aptitudes give you the most accurate impact measurements. Some highlights of this include:

• Understanding scientific share of voice
• Sentiment analysis
• Seeing where you’re making an impact and what influenced the change

H1 Empowers Medical Affairs Strategies

HCP Universe offers all of these insights and connects your medical affairs team with the right HCPs and HCOs. Strengthen and adapt your strategies with a solution that helps you measure the results of your efforts. Request a demo today to learn more.