Customers Discuss Multichannel Medical Communications – Recap from Commercial Summit 2014

Last week I had the honor of hosting the medical content track at the annual Veeva Commercial Customer Summit in Philadelphia. It was great to hear from some wonderful presenters and interact with so many industry peers.

The sessions focused on creating a “single source of the truth” for medical content, as well as best practices for implementing Veeva Vault MedComms. Attendees shared their experiences around receiving requests from healthcare professionals (HCPs) through multiple communication channels. With the widespread industry consensus that HCPs want to interact with pharma on their own schedules, the discussion centered on the need to get them the right medical content, quickly, via the channels they prefer. Multichannel is no longer coming … IT’S HERE!!

To deliver on this imperative, companies are looking for a means to centralize medical content, while distributing and tracking it across channels.

The audiences were very engaged, asking questions about how Vault MedComms customers handled challenges like migration, validation, and integration. Experienced speakers from top life sciences companies were on-hand in the track and presenting. Having lived through these scenarios, they could speak to attendees’ key questions and explain how they successfully navigated through the obstacles. Between sessions, new face-to-face introductions were made and ideas shared. This was a quick couple of days, but it spoke to the growing user community of Vault MedComms and the bonds forged between our customers. Some key takeaways from the sessions included:

• Seamless integration with CRM and mobile CLM is critical for efficient content distribution.
• Customers are demanding digital access via the channels of their choice, and ensuring a single source of truth is imperative to making this a reality.
• Enhancing the customer experience is a key business objective, and consistent and personalized medical communication is at the heart of it.
• One global solution is required to manage all customer requests and fulfillments.
• Capture metrics about content access and usage across channels and analyze for continuous improvement.

As we wrapped up the Summit, our focus turns to the next time we bring our tight-knit group together in another few weeks on our bi-monthly Vault MedComms community call. Now that many of us have had a chance to meet in person, I’m sure that is going to spill into very active interaction there and in the coming months, as we continue to gather periodically. When we gather again at next year’s Summit, I expect more of the same – great discussions, the forging of new connections, and continued insights into how we can empower HCPs with the medical content they need.

Dan Glass leads Vault MedComms strategy at Veeva.