Medical Affairs is an internal bridge between a company’s research and commercial arms and an external bridge between the business and medical communities. That’s a tremendous amount of responsibility that teeters atop an ever-changing mountain of information whose growth is accelerating because of bioinformatics and artificial intelligence (AI). Medical Affairs teams can stay current by leveraging some of those same tools to help accelerate their own work.
Medical Affairs teams are rethinking their strategy given the rapid changes in the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries, with a growing emphasis on agility. More specifically, they hope to capture the potential of AI, ML, automation, and a widening array of data sources to accelerate everything from drug and device discoveries to personalized medical treatments.
Corresponding transformations in Medical Affairs touch upon every area in their domain. From strategy development to evidence platforms and communication facilitation, nothing can remain in business-as-usual mode.
Here are three ways AI can support Medical Affairs.
Strategy and operations planning
Establishing or improving controls over everything from resources and activities to outcomes are pressing concerns in increasingly fast and expanded environments. AI tools can assist by providing insights that can inform the overall transformation plan, and streamline processes to track activities and events, report outcomes, analyze patterns in external and internal customer responses, measure results, forecast and manage resources, and facilitate communications— complete with customized evidence strategies.
Digitally enabled medical and internal engagement
Both internal and external engagements leave complex trails of activities, events, wins, losses, and follow-ups that can stretch over long periods. Meanwhile, institutional memory can be lost due to retirements and job changes, changes in the underlying data, increasingly complex evidence chains, and new challenges and opportunities.
Tracking and measuring all of this is a daunting task. Yet it must be done for the sake of compliance and governance in a highly regulated industry, and to effectively manage medical affairs in a very competitive market. AI tools bring all these factors to bear in a more useful and productive manner that maintains business continuity in individual communications and at scale across many different constituencies.
Risk mitigation
Risk mitigation could fall short if changes brought about by transformation within Medical Affairs are not continually scanned and subsequent guardrails put in place. Benchmarking, established leading practices, and guardrails for emerging trends are all critical to contain risks at acceptable levels. So is establishing and maintaining a roadmap and managing change. There’s a lot at stake in getting all these moving parts right. AI, combined with automation and other tools, can help analyze data, recommend actions, and assign resources to aid in Medical Affairs’ overall quest to mitigate risk while expanding capabilities.
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