From Silos to Single Source of Truth: Ferring’s Journey to ‘One Medical Information’

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A leader in reproductive medicine and maternal health, Ferring Pharmaceuticals is a research-driven, specialty biopharmaceutical group committed to building families worldwide and helping people live better lives. The over 475,000 searches conducted online about fertility per month reflects the growing desire for patients to self-educate along their journey. But in today’s busy information landscape, it’s easy to get lost in the noise — and you create additional noise when you don’t speak with one voice.

So, when Nybie Philipsen took over as Ferring’s global medical affairs business operations director, her first order of business was to ensure consistency in the way in which medical affairs was communicating. Their previous medical inquiry management solution had been implemented and rolled out globally over the span of three years, but adoption was surprisingly low — just 20 percent of the countries in which Ferring has an operating subsidiaries were using the system. Even those who were using it were operating in silos, creating inconsistencies.

Looking to harmonize processes and improve user adoption, Philipsen and team decided to implement Veeva Vault MedInquiry, a modern, cloud-based solution that would:

• Enhance global to local knowledge sharing
• Improve response consistency, quality, and inspection readiness
• Enable medical insights gathering from medical information data

Journey to ‘One Medical Information’

Following its decision, the team was given just six months to go live. “We couldn’t go deep into configuring all of our wildest dreams,” explains Candice Galé, global medical processes and systems manager at Ferring. “We had to be ruthless in prioritizing what we could do to enable the critical paths of our process.”

Learnings from its Veeva Vault PromoMats implementation gave Ferring a head start. They had already established a best-practice approach to governance and knew that a strong focus on change management would be critical to the project’s execution.

The initial implementation focused on standardizing the routine tasks of intake and fulfillment and streamlining adverse event and product complaint triage. One year in and Philipsen is already seeing it making an impact: “With the help of Vault MedInquiry, we’ve gone from silos to a single source of truth. It has enabled global process harmonization and set us on a course to realize our ambition for implementing ‘One Medical Information’ across the organization.”

Looking back on their journey, Philipsen and Galé attribute the following three things to their successful rollout.

1. Alignment and clarity of scope

Ferring’s analysis phase set the foundation for the project’s execution. Philipsen aligned with global stakeholders on the project design and guiding principles, explaining that “to succeed, the organization must change its ways of working, break down silos, and do everything it can to avoid complexity along the way.”

First, they defined the scope of business requirements at the global level and then sought input from local affiliates to address any potential gaps. End users were a key stakeholder in this stage as well. Creating space for dialogue helped decision-makers understand the nuances of their work and how technology and process improvements would benefit them.

2. Balancing global and local needs

The scalability of Vault MedInquiry was a huge advantage for Ferring. In addition to enabling global standardization, it offered the flexibility to compliantly adapt to local needs. However, having operating subsidiaries in over 50 countries translates to a considerable amount of needs. Teams from different countries had different ways of working, each with their own best practices to bring to the table.

“That’s where the balancing act comes in,” Galé explains. “It was important to make sure we heard every one of their considerations and then together assess where there’s need for compromise. We drew clear lines between regulatory requirements and ‘nice-to-haves’, and what is strictly process-based versus how we can enable technology to further streamline the user experience.”

3. Activating champions to support adoption

Strong processes, enabled by technology, form the backbone of successful implementation, but as Ferring learned from their previous solution, adoption is not guaranteed – it is reliant on the governance and support that users receive after going live.

So, this time around, Philipsen focused on building champions who could get end users bought into their new system and processes and provide them with ongoing support to drive their continued adoption.

To do this, Ferring created two new roles – a global business manager and an IT system manager – to ensure proper governance, effective knowledge sharing, and continuous user support as they moved forward with subsequent phases of implementation.

“This is about people and technology and has to continue to be that,” acknowledges Galé. “Putting a name and a face on user support has had a really big impact. We want users to know there is a human on the other end, not just a black box where they submit a support ticket and hope to get an answer.”

The path forward

Ferring is eager to continue its global rollout while expanding the functionality of Vault MedInquiry to support new processes and touchpoints across teams. Current areas of focus include:

• Automating the Medical Information Request Form (MIRFs) flow between CRM and Vault MedInquiry for prompt assignment and timely response to customers.
• Leveraging reports and dashboards to generate insights that can inform medical content, impact broader strategic initiatives, and ultimately improve patient outcomes.

Learn more about the core features in Vault MedInquiry that help streamline end-to-end medical information management.