November 21, 2022

What’s on the mind of medical affairs?

Questions raised at Reuters Pharma Europe reveal what medical affairs is prioritizing for 2023.
2023 priorities for medical affairs

At the recent Reuters Pharma event in Nice, France, Within3 CEO Lance Hill responded to audience questions following his talk, “Medical affairs takes over: technologies to unlock the power of insights and gain strategic ground.” Based on two key questions, we learned that 2023 priorities for medical affairs include understanding the benefits of better insights management and how to get started with artificial intelligence (AI).

In this brief Q&A, learn what Hill sees as one of the primary benefits of modernizing the insights management process and how to approach using AI to streamline operations.

Audience question: Where do you see pharma making the most improvement in their insights management?

Lance Hill: I think companies are really starting to look at insights management as a single process versus just chunks of activities to be looked at centrally and managed centrally, whether at a team level, a franchise level, or a global level.

When you’re able to do that, you can save yourself – first of all – a lot of time and headaches. You’re able to be much faster, so you can get a reaction to what’s happening, market signals – something is happening at ESMO, and I’m able to realize that in real-time with these technologies, apply that back, make changes, get the sense back of those changes, link that to what’s happening online.

And so, the ability to have much more comprehensive visibility and be more straightforward and less time-consuming is probably the most significant impact on medical affairs. And ultimately, that makes medical affairs much more valuable to both R&D and commercial because you can quickly bring that truth to those organizations.

Audience question: How do you get started if you have yet to dabble with AI?

Lance Hill: AI causes a process – in our case, insight analysis – to work much better. So the way to get started with AI is not: this is something we need to look at as a technology, but instead to look at what AI is affecting and dabble with that.

If you have a challenge, that might be, for example, how do I quickly, in real time, categorize and manage all sorts of insights? An AI-backed toolset can help you. [A vendor] should be able to show you how AI affects the outcome versus saying, “My AI is really wonderful.”

That doesn’t really help because [you’re not in AI]; you’re in medical affairs. So you need things that actually affect outcomes. And that’s really how you get started. You’ll inherit AI by choosing the right technology partners that use AI to make something that you care about work better.

Listen to the full recording from Reuters Pharma Europe.

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