Insights are transforming – or have already transformed – practically any industry you care to name. From professional sports to recruitment to climate science, people are using insights to make better-informed decisions, discover new opportunities and find new efficiencies. For medical affairs teams, insights reporting has become table-stakes as a way to ensure companies remain compliant, competitive, and profitable. But much like the pharma industry itself, the process of insights reporting does not stand still – with new technologies and processes constantly transforming the way we think about medical insights. And as the pharmaceutical industry gains a wider appreciation of the strategic importance of insights management, companies need to find new ways to stand out from – and get ahead of – their competitors.
In this article, we’ll explore how artificial intelligence (AI) is driving insights reporting to new heights as a component of a comprehensive insights management platform.
What is insights reporting?
“Quite simply, an insight is an ‘aha moment’: something that you’ve learned that either validates your current strategy is correct, tells you your strategy is incorrect, or surfaces something that should be part of your strategy that you weren’t even aware of.” – Lance Hill, CEO, Within3
Insights reporting is an integral aspect of any medical affairs strategy, and can be broken down into four distinct stages:
- Insight gathering – Medical affairs teams generate insights through examination of disease community data, and verbal or written exchange with external stakeholders. This first stage is simply where information is collected – data can’t be considered an ‘insight’ until further processes have been undertaken.
- Filtering and analysis – Information gathered by medical affairs must then be filtered and analyzed to identify trends, patterns, gaps and any relevant information that could be polished into an insight. This process is like mining diamonds, and can be enormously time-consuming if performed manually.
- Communication – Relevant insights need to be communicated to the correct departments and decision-makers across the organization. Medical affairs must develop a communication plan to ensure insights reach the correct internal stakeholders while they’re still relevant and actionable.
- Action – The final stage in the insights reporting process is for decision-makers to act on those insights. An insight is effectively a tool to aid in decision-making: to confirm your existing strategy or to suggest a pivot that might make it more successful. Effective insights reporting in pharma should involve using insights to continuously evaluate processes and strategies to ensure constant improvement.
“Medical Affairs insights can help identify the current state and pinpoint areas of knowledge, opinion or behavior change necessary for the successful launch and use of an emerging drug, diagnostic or device, accelerating the delivery of the right therapy to the right patient.” – MAPS
So, insights reporting refers to the movement of information through an organization – beginning as raw data from a diverse range of sources, before being analyzed and processed to become insights capable of informing strategic decision-making. But how is artificial intelligence transforming this process, and how does this new approach to insights reporting differ from the traditional methods employed by medical affairs?
Traditional insights reporting in pharma
Historically, medical affairs gathered data via one-to-one meetings with field medical teams, in-person advisory boards, and other face-to-face interactions. However, medical affairs data sets have broadened to encompass more diverse market and customer data sets – including social listening, congress, US medical claims, global publications, clinical trials, industry transparency data, CRM integration, medical information, market studies and more.
Technology has enabled medical affairs teams to capture more data than ever before – in terms of both variety and quantity. But this data deluge comes at a cost:
“Sometimes, the abundance of information can overwhelm our resources – limiting the ability to analyze and gain valuable insights.” – Rosana Cabello Moruno, Roche, via Reuters
New, tech-enabled engagement methods have multiplied data streams for medical affairs, and this information must be sorted, analyzed, stored and shared before it can be acted upon. And unfortunately, many of these processes remain frustratingly manual. “It’s slow,” says Within3 CEO Lance Hill. “You can’t keep up with the data volume for any sort of large organization.”
Data analysis is time-consuming and resource-intensive, and many pharma companies can only perform such analysis a couple of times each year. As such, potentially valuable insights can be lost in the noise – becoming irrelevant or outdated before they can even be reported on. The current state for many medical affairs teams is that the proliferation of data does more harm than good.
“40% of medical affairs leaders say they collect so much data it’s difficult to know what to focus on to generate insights, while just 9% of pharma teams use 75%+ of the data they collect to generate insights.” – Reuters Health
AI-driven insights management for medical affairs
“[Artificial intelligence] can help to tag and categorize data, generate and summarize content, and ultimately free humans to focus on more complex tasks.”– Reuters
The ascent of artificial intelligence has been rapid. A decade ago, AI still felt like science fiction. Now, it’s everywhere. AI is disrupting countless industries, and life science is no exception. But how is its impact being felt in the medical affairs function?
AI applications such as natural language processing are already being used to generate insights from field medical reports, HCP interactions, and more. Social listening and social monitoring, meanwhile, allow teams to glean additional valuable insights around medical congresses, and through online interactions between HCPs, patients, and advocates. But these are just some of the myriad ways AI is supporting medical affairs:
“Particularly promising use cases for AI in Medical Affairs are dashboards that can integrate evidence from multiple unstructured and structured data sets into a single view. This may prove especially valuable in leveraging real-world evidence (RWE) for clinical research.” – MAPS
“AI can be used to accelerate and synthesize insights from real-world data. AI can also be used to optimize digital channels for medical content and to understand the patient experience.” – Customer Centricity in Medical Affairs Needs Human-centric Artificial Intelligence
As these quotes illustrate, AI is capable of tackling the ‘data dilemma’ we touched on earlier – integrating diverse datasets including market and customer data, and providing ‘always-on’ access to the insights they contain. Furthermore, human beings no longer have to perform the laborious process of data analysis themselves – and can interact with AI systems in plain speak to receive the answers they need. Within3 CEO Lance Hill describes the latest iteration of AI-enabled insights management as “third generation AI”:
“This third generation of AI allows users to speak in plain human language with the system, get results in plain human language… and covers everything from how we gather information, all the way through to presenting those findings across the organization and tracking action.” – Lance Hill, CEO, Within3
This third-generation AI underpins the Within3 Insights Management Platform. Combined AI supports the insights reporting process from strategy to impact – touching the insight gathering stage, analyzing the data, creating insights and reports, and communicating them to relevant stakeholders in actionable plain speak. The result is a 90% reduction in moderation, analysis and reporting time – while simultaneously generating valuable insights to inform strategic decision-making and demonstrate the value of the medical affairs function.
So, is an insights management platform like Within3 the right investment to help your pharma organization stand out from its competitors? Check out our buyers’ guide and decide for yourself.
