Lessons from Vericel on Streamlining Medical Information Management
Vericel, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, manufactures advanced cell therapies for the sports medicine and severe burn markets. The medical affairs team previously managed their scientific content and medical inquiries in shared folders. This decentralized approach made it difficult and time-consuming to find the information they needed. Based on the marketing team’s success using Veeva Vault PromoMats for commercial digital asset management, they chose Veeva Vault MedComms for medical affairs. Vericel quickly implemented their solution and have since streamlined their medical operations and captured valuable field insights.
Four ways Vericel is streamlining medical information management with Veeva Vault MedComms:
- Single solution for both scientific content and medical inquiry management
- Increased efficiency with pre-approved, compliant response packages
- Real-time insights into medical inquiry trends and content use
- Replaced manual reports with automated metrics and dashboards
The primary goal of the medical affairs team was to create a centralized content management system for the company’s scientific information. Vericel migrated their content to Vault MedComms and then classified it, archiving older materials. By creating a single source for the company’s scientific content in Vault MedComms, the organization made the retrieval of important information more effective.
In addition, Vericel implemented the medical inquiry functionality within Vault MedComms to further streamline their response processes. Inquiries come in through customer service calls, email submissions, and by reps adding surgeon inquiries. The cases are entered directly into Vault MedComms where the team accesses, prioritizes, and quickly responds to inquiries. The medical information workflows were tailored to meet Vericel’s specific business needs but they also used “out-of-the-box” configuration to evolve their current processes.
Vericel also leveraged Vault MedComms to create new response packages that help automate their replies to medical information requests and increase content reuse. Cover letters and custom responses are easily created in the system to supplement pre-approved content as part of each individual response package. The response is sent to the HCP directly from the system and there is no need to export or download each package or manually email, making the whole process simple.
The reports and dashboards in Vault MedComms give the medical affairs team real-time metrics for medical inquiries such as current status, question topic trends, and content usage. This information helps Vericel to prioritize workloads, measure content usage, and identify gaps where new standard medical information is needed.
Reporting was a very manual process that took weeks of searching through folders for information. Now, with Vault MedComms, the executive leadership team can get important data through automatically generated reports and dashboards. Leadership gets easy access to the information they need, and the medical affairs team can focus on responding to inquiries rather than pulling data.
Vericel is now looking towards their next phase for Vault MedComms and hoping to further speed the creation and approval process for new content. Additionally, there is an ongoing initiative to further streamline the management of medical and related information by storing it as records (as opposed to Word documents). The flexibility of Vault MedComms will allow Vericel to evolve over time as their business needs change and they expand to different therapeutic areas.
To learn more about how Vericel centralized scientific content and medical inquiries with Veeva Vault MedComms, read the case study.