Empowering Medical Affairs to Take on its Expanding Leadership Role
By 2030, medical affairs leaders are expecting their teams to transition from an executional to a strategic role and serve as the industry’s external earpiece. However, they need the right technology and solutions to generate, disseminate, and discuss evidence and secure safe product use to achieve this.
The latest innovations across Veeva’s medical solutions help medical teams work more effectively as a strategic partner and voice of the patient. From optimizing content dissemination and coordinating with clinical teams to streamlining medical information, here are the key capabilities medical affairs can leverage to successfully take on its new leadership role.
Strengthen scientific relationships through enhanced engagement
Today’s field medical organizations must navigate a more hybrid engagement approach that includes in-person and digital channels, pushing them to rethink and optimize how they work. Recent Veeva Pulse data shows that 70% of medical engagements happen in person, with the rest spread across video, email, phone, chat, and text1.
Capabilities introduced in Veeva’s medical solutions help medical teams leverage engagement opportunities regardless of channel or device to establish long-lasting relationships with HCPs.
Support new ways of working
Field medical teams today are looking for more choices in the devices and platforms they use to navigate new engagement models. Veeva enables CRM across all major platforms, including iPad, desktop/laptop (both PC and Mac), iPhone, and Android. This expansion provides the ultimate flexibility in mixing and matching devices for the right user at the right time and ensures medical science liaisons (MSLs) can work efficiently.
Making it easier to find and share content
Content powers engagement and makes interactions more valuable to customers. However, it can be difficult for MSLs to find the right content from a continuously growing asset library, quickly modify it to best suit the conversation, and deliver it in the stakeholder’s channel of choice.
The Veeva CRM Desktop app and new capabilities introduced in Veeva CLM optimize the finding, assembling, presenting, and sharing of content. They help to ensure field medical teams can access the most up-to-date and relevant content for their stakeholders, along with automated insights and traceability. Highlights across releases in 2022 include:
- Advanced Text Search to help MSLs quickly find specific content across large libraries
- Multi-Presentation Support and Custom Presentation Assembly to quickly and easily reorganize and tailor content
- Instant and seamless content sharing, no matter how the interaction happens (over the phone, in socially distanced in-person meetings, through email)
- Fully tracked interactions to provide automated insights into content usage and sentiment
Improve cross-functional collaboration
MSLs frequently call upon the same thought leaders involved in their company’s clinical studies. But clinical operations and field medical teams often track their interactions in different systems, leading to inefficiencies, poor coordination, and missed opportunities with key opinion leaders.
New bidirectional integration connects activity records from Veeva Medical CRM and Vault Clinical to ensure activities planned and completed in Vault Clinical inform MSLs in Medical CRM. Likewise, as MSLs log their interactions, clinical research associates have visibility to them in Vault Clinical. This sharing of actionable information provides a 360-degree view of each HCP and allows for a more coordinated customer experience.
Communicate effectively across the connected ecosystem
With the life sciences industry’s shift to digital and more remote engagement, medical teams are doubling down on creating compelling digital content to better inform and educate HCPs. This also applies pressure to medical information departments, which must quickly answer inquiries from multiple sources and stakeholders. Veeva Vault Medical can help these critical medical functions communicate with a consistent narrative across the organization.
Create a single scientific voice across channels and functions
To ensure consistency and improve operational efficiency across scientific communications and medical information organizations, Veeva recently introduced Veeva Vault Medical. Vault Medical comprises two applications, Vault MedComms and Vault MedInquiry, which can be used together or independently of one another. Vault MedComms supports the creation, review, approval, and distribution of medical and scientific content. Vault MedInquiry streamlines case management and the intake and fulfilment of medical information requests.
With a dedicated operating model, product roadmap, and increased investment in both medical content and inquiry management, Veeva customers can expect an increased focus on product excellence and customer satisfaction.
Disseminate medical content with speed and accuracy
Creating memorable scientific narratives at a fast pace that are consistent, scalable, and easily distributed can be challenging. That’s why Vault MedComms helps get content out to the field quickly and ensures effective content management across the medical ecosystem.
Highlights across 2022 releases include:
- Auto-publishing to simplify content creation and distribution of medical content and Approved Email
- Vault Mobile to review and approve documents on-the-go from mobile phones
- Based-on Notification improvements to help keep documents up-to-date and accurate across global and local affiliates
- Google Workspace Integration to allow content teams standardized on Google Drive to collaborate more efficiently and compliantly
Streamline the intake and fulfillment of medinfo requests
For many medical information teams, focusing on automating and scaling inquiry fulfillment helps them respond to more cases quickly and accurately.
Recent innovations in Vault MedInquiry center around email intake, including the automated creation of cases and the pre-population of case details from email inquiries. In addition, the dedicated medical inquiry user interface helps med info teams rapidly capture all the essential case details dynamically in one place.
To further streamline this process, the data-agnostic CRM connector automatically sends contact information entered by sales representatives or MSLs to Vault MedInquiry without requiring CRM account records to be synched. With the new Network Connection for OpenData HCP Search, users can search for reliable and accurate HCP reference data when creating a contact for their cases.
Gain deep customer intelligence and insights
Gain deep customer intelligence and insights Gaining deeper insights into customer preferences and behavior patterns helps medical teams better understand the educational needs, activities, and interests of their key stakeholders to maximize the impact of their engagements.
Ensure relevant engagement with new stakeholders
Veeva Link Key People provides rich profiles of scientific and medical experts in one place and seamlessly integrates into Veeva CRM, helping users make real-time decisions without navigating multiple applications.
In addition to curated profiles across 24 therapeutic areas, Link Key People now offers enhanced data sets, including profiles of local community leaders. Community leader scores combine claims data with referrals, peer nomination surveys, and local association and congress activity to help identify HCPs who are shaping clinical practice locally.
These recent innovations are focused on helping medical affairs take on the responsibilities of their expanding role and work more efficiently with an outcome-oriented mindset.
Learn more about innovations for medical affairs teams.
1 Veeva Pulse Metric data, April-October 2022