Medical affairs teams are at a pinch point. Inundated with data, at the mercy of disparate tools, and increasingly expected to supply insights to the entire organization, you need a better way to collect and organize information. We conducted insights management research among medical affairs leaders, and here’s what they had to say.

Insights management – the challenges

In our Reuters Health insights management survey, we learned that you’re dealing with a rapidly evolving environment. Data from field teams, social channels, patients, payers, and experts increases daily. You can’t be everywhere at once, so technology must lend a hand. But for some of you, that’s part of the problem. Solutions either don’t integrate at all or require manual data entry – sometimes more than once. And not all teams have access to all systems.

The good news

There’s no single way medical affairs teams approach data collection and insights generation. Teams told us they use a variety of file repositories, business intelligence tools, and databases to process information. But there is an emerging best practice – of those who say they use a single, central way of managing insights, 85% say that approach helps them work more efficiently.

But our survey also revealed that there are roadblocks to adopting a single, central approach across the organization. Many leaders said that major upfront investment in new systems and resources aren’t practical, and others cited the need to use existing legacy systems – in other words, to make do with what’s already installed.

Understanding what’s next

Get a deeper exploration of the topics revealed in our survey in our new white paper, “Medical affairs versus an explosion of data: focusing on insights that matter,” featuring experts from Merck, Pfizer, Astellas, Spark Therapeutics, Within3, and the Medical Affairs Professional Society.