Capabilities
Medical Insights
Is the value of your Medical Insights fully realized? Are you puzzled and frustrated with AI approaches to analyzing insights? Is it challenging to identify critical and actionable insights? If the answer to any of those questions is Yes, please read on!
We have been helping Medical Affairs teams with their Insights programs since 2005. We assist companies to:
- collect relevant, meaningful, and actionable Medical Insights,
- collate and analyze those insights, and
- disseminating those Insights across all Medical functions to gain the greatest impact from your Medical Insights
Most field medical organizations today are well versed in collecting insights. In fact, field medical teams may be collecting too many insights, many of which are not genuine insights (see our white paper on the Six Keys to Collecting Better Insights). Valuable insights can be missed if Medical organizations cannot adequately digest large volumes of Insights. These missed Insights could have identified new opportunities or help judge the success of adopted medical objectives. We assist companies in collecting pertinent insights.
To realize the maximum value from your collected insights, relevant Insights should be available to all medical functions. Even if Medical Insights are widely available, not all medical functions take advantage. The reasons for non-consumption are varied and range from no time to read and review to misperceptions of medical insights value. Just distributing insight reports or having insights dashboards available is not enough. Medical teams today are inundated with information. To find those valuable Insights, Medical teams need tools that that filter, collate, and deliver insights to them. We assist companies to utilize better the insights they collect.
Insights are also an important metric by which to evaluate MSL performance. Collected insights are indicative of the interactions that MSLs have with their KOLs. Deep, insightful insights come from deep, insightful KOL conversations. Well-established KOL relationships are more likely to generate insightful KOL conversations.
Insights are also an important source for evaluating medical strategies and valuable input to the medical planning process. A well-functioning and beneficial insights program is reliant on all aspects of the insights process:
- Collection
- Analysis
- Consumption
Whether your medical affairs team is large or small, we can design and implement a successful medical insights program for you. Still counting insights and waiting for that critical insight to bubble to the top, let us help you move to the next level and extract greater value from your Insights.
Medical Plan Performance Evaluation
Most Medical organizations have a well-thought-out and defined medical strategic planning process, usually resulting in a detailed PowerPoint deck or Word document saved on a SharePoint somewhere. Are your medical team members thoroughly familiar with the medical plan objectives that they are responsible for? Can senior executives readily access an up-to-date holistic view of Medical Plan performance? Are medical activities mapped to the medical objectives they support? If the answer is No to any of these questions, then you do not adequately measure your medical plan’s performance.
Creating a medical plan without measuring its performance is like creating a grocery list and going to the supermarket without it. You may get most of the items on your list, but
inevitably, you will forget some critical ingredients and purchase items that you do not need or already have. This analogy holds for your medical plan!
Without timely measurement of medical plan performance, critical medical objectives may not be adequately supported with pertinent medical activities. Without a process for vetting medical activities against your medical plan, you may expend resources for activities that do not or marginally further your medical objectives.
The greatest challenge in measuring Medical Plan performance is collecting the metrics necessary to do so. Unlike individual medical affairs functions, which generally utilize a single system, Medical Plan activities span all Medical functions, requiring collecting information from various applications in various formats. Further complicating the process, not all evaluatory medical plan metrics reside within a formal application. Subjective performance judgments by individuals and teams are also required. Identifying, gathering, and maintaining all this information has proved the most significant obstacle to continuous medical plan performance measurement.
Our approach to alleviating this information collection burden is to utilize collaborative processes and through process automation. By setting up collaborative processes to facilitate medical activities execution, the by-product is performance data sources. Extracting and consolidating performance data into a single database, including collaborative platforms, is automated.
We assist pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to measure Medical Plan performance by implementing collaborative and automation processes to collect performance data across the whole spectrum of medical activities. We then massage this data to create key metrics and analyses that provide the decision support that guides the entire medical team. The resultant metrics can then be incorporated into an existing dashboard, or a new dashboard created.
If you are not currently tracking your medical plan performance, contact us to learn how this could work for you.
Medical Executive Decision Support Optimization
Can your analytics and KPIs be better correlated to corrective business actions? Is the complete performance picture spread across multiple dashboards or reports, i.e., not consolidated in a single dashboard? Are requests for new, non-standard, or unique analyzes challenging to obtain timely?
Answering Yes to any of these questions indicates that your decision support metrics can be improved so that you can make better-informed, timely, business decisions. The three keys to effective decision support are:
- Update-to-date and easily accessible metrics and KPIs
- Metrics that relate directly to corrective business actions
- The ability to quickly develop evaluatory metrics for new business processes
Most analytic dashboards contain a standard set of KPIs, most of which take system-generated data and count it. How many MSL interactions, how many medical insights, how many clinical trials, how many medical documents, etc. These numbers are sliced and diced across a variety of parameters and displayed in multiple chart types. In short, available data is charted and graphed. As Einstein famously stated, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
We take a different approach and work with you to establish the business questions that need to be answered. Once the business questions are identified, we look for the data available to answer them. When directly related information is not available, we identify proxy data. Proxy data are measurements not directly related to the business question being asked but suggest how that question can be answered. For example, no system directly measures the impact of a published study or a data release. However, a combined analysis of medical inquiries, medical insights, social media, SR and publication utilization, and congress presentation attendance provides a proxy to measure impact.
Exception reporting is another approach we use that efficiently conveys business performance. Instead of looking at all the data, only look at the outliers that significantly differ from the average. Deviations in trends are indicative of significant changes in a business function.
Once all the required data is established and their sources are identified, we create a prototype dashboard with actual data to test drive. Throughout the trial period, we take your feedback and tweak the dashboard metrics until those metrics quickly and concisely communicated business performance. The result is a set of performance-focused decision support metrics which complements your existing dashboard analytics.
We work with medical executives to understand their information needs. Together we create solutions that ensure the required information is continuously available, up-to-date, accurate, and bias-neutral while eliminating the fire drills. If you are not getting answers to your business questions, contact us for a free consultation.
Collaboration and Automation Productivity Improvement
Is too much time spent attending meetings and responding to e-mails? Is time spent each day on repetitive tasks? Is it challenging to locate critical documents and know you have the latest version? If the answer is Yes to any of these questions, then Collaborative Work Management and business process automation may be the solution for you.
If you attend three fewer meetings per week, spend 15 minutes less each day responding to e-mails, and saved an hour each week by automating routine tasks, over the course of a year, 30 workdays are saved, Thirty (30)! Saved workdays mean more time spent on meaningful and engaging work and a better work-life balance, resulting in a
happier and more productive workforce. Collaborative platforms and simple automation tools make this possible.
Collaborative work platforms centralize all information regarding a particular initiative in one place. Employees who job responsibilities require this information can easily access it at any time. This transfers the burden of being informed from the meeting or e-mail initiator to the information consumer. Instead of holding meetings and sending e-mails to exchange information, a collaborative communication stream is established and updated with the latest information by the individual(s) responsible for that information. Everyone knows where to find the most up-to-date information and can consume or update it on their schedule. This is a much greater efficient and productive means of communication and use of everyone’s time. Meetings will always need to and should be held, but collaborative platforms can drastically reduce the number of meetings and e-mail exchanges.
Some Collaborative work applications have project management capabilities that manage an activity by breaking it down into its component tasks, tracking who is responsible for the task, when task status updates and completion are due, and providing reminders to task owners to follow up. Separate automation tools can automate almost any routine task performed. Information stored across corporate applications, websites, and local computer storage can automatically be accessed, manipulated/consolidated, and be used to create a report, update an office document, or be posted to a website or information stream.
Collaboration and automation are well suited for the activities that Medical Affairs performs. Repetitive activities where component tasks are consistent can benefit the most from incorporation into a collaborative platform. Medical Affairs performs many activities that require repetitive tasks, including congresses, publications, medical communications, ISR, HEOR, and phase IV studies, advisory boards, symposiums, TL engagements, among others.
While collaborative platforms and automation tools are easy to use, their application and implementation must be well planned to have the greatest impact. We assist medical affairs organizations with every step of this process. Specifically, we work with your team to:
• identify the business processes suited for a collaborative platform
• select the appropriate collaborative platform if your company does already have one
• design and document business procedures for collaborative platform use
• identify repetitive tasks for automation
• build automation streams
• provide training, quick reference guides, and user support
Want to see some light at the end of the meetings and e-mails tunnel, or just curious to learn if collaboration and automation is right for you. We are happy to discuss how collaboration and automation can benefit you.
Field Medical Effectiveness Measurement
How effectively does your Field Medical team execute your medical strategies? Are high-profile KOLs visited with the appropriate frequency? Is strategic messaging delivered with the frequency and periodicity for maximum launch and data release impact? Are pivotal clinical trials adequately supported? If the answers to these questions are not readily available, then you are not measuring Field Medical effectiveness.
Twenty years ago, we designed, built, and operated for a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company, one of the first customer resource management (CRM) systems designed specifically for the Medical Affairs field team. While technology has evolved significantly, resulting in CRM systems that are more functional and easier to use, the metrics derived from these systems have not evolved to the
same degree. Today we capitalize on our vast experience to assist Biopharma companies to best utilize the data collected by their CRM platforms and related operational support systems.
Measures such as the # of interactions and # KOLs impacted, while interesting, do not measure MSL effectiveness. MSLs are most effective when their influence changes a KOL’s behavior to be consistent with their company’s medical strategies. To drive changes in KOL behavior, MSLs must effectively manage their KOL territories. Are they seeing the right KOLs, delivering the appropriate message, with the correct proximity and frequency relative to launches and key data releases?
While it is easy to measure an MSL’s efforts, it is much more challenging to measure their effectiveness. You can measure KOL participation at congresses, in clinical trials, and with publications, but it is difficult to correlate that with MSL efforts. Our approach is to compare MSL metrics across launches and data releases. A launch’s success can be quantitatively and qualitatively evaluated. By comparing MSL activity metrics for a launch deemed successful to one less so you can determine the best application of MSL resources and apply that knowledge to future events. We refer to this approach as “internal benchmarking.” This approach can be taken at both an individual and team MSL level to measure effectiveness for a variety of field medical functions, including:
- field management MSL coaching
- clinical trial recruitment
- medical insights
- MSL territory management
- medical objective execution
The result is a concise set of analytical metrics that indicate the effectiveness of field medical functions. All pertinent metrics are assembled in a single dashboard to provide a holistic view of performance at an individual or team MSL level. We can create new dashboards and manage them for you or assist with incorporating them into an existing dashboard. Some metrics are ad-hoc or are not routinely needed. In these cases, we create standalone metrics reports and provide them to you on-demand or on a periodic schedule.
Field medical is the face of the company to the medical community. This role has strengthened with the COVID-19 pandemic and will remain so once the pandemic has subsided. As such, Field Medical is a crucial asset in achieving your company’s medical objectives. CRM platforms must be structured to appropriately captured activity metrics and analyzed them to measure objective performance.
We are happy to provide a free consultation to see if we can help you better measure your field medical team’s effectiveness.
Dashboard Data Integrity Assurance
Do you often hear “the numbers can’t be right”? Does lack of data confidence reduce utilization of your analytic dashboards? Are unnecessary efforts expended to correct or adjust reports? If the answer is Yes to any of these questions, then our Dashboard Data Integrity Assurance product may be right for you.
Dashboards are a popular, efficient, and effective way to communicate business metrics and analytics. Their proliferation has been swift and advances in this technology have led to a variety of eye-catching graphics. The data sources for dashboards such as CRM, clinical trial, content management, and medical inquiry systems have complex data structures that have increased in complexity as the
application is modified over time. Between the data sources and dashboards sit Data Warehouses that consolidate data from multiple systems, “cleanse” it, and process it for dashboard consumption. Where data is consolidated across regions or globally, more than one data warehouse may be used.
This transferring and processing of data in multiple steps can unintentionally result in dashboards reporting inaccurate or unintended results. This usually occurs after system modifications have been made or new business processes use the application functionality differently. While rigorous system testing will catch most errors, inevitably, an unforeseen combination of user machinations and applied business rules can cause an unintended result.
Because of our understanding of the Medical Affairs functions, Medical Affairs operational systems, and technology knowledge, we find data inconsistencies and errors that have gone undiscovered. Your time, efforts, and emotional energy should not be wasted worrying if the information is correct. We trace data flow from application entry to dashboard analytics, so you are confident that metrics displayed in your dashboard are accurate.
If you have troubling inconsistencies in your dashboard metrics that just never seemed to get fully resolved, we can uncover the root of the issue and fix it!