Before the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything, pharmaceutical advisory boards could often be laborious, expensive, and slow-moving. Now, pharma teams use virtual meeting spaces and AI-powered tools to get more value from these important activities. Here’s our best pharmaceutical advisory board guidance for the next 12 months.
While pharmaceutical advisory boards remain high-stakes endeavors, these discussions offer more efficiency, economy, and the ability to generate higher levels of participation and actionable insights. This is true across their spectrum of utility: from clinical R&D, including clinical trial design, recruitment, and retention, to preclinical work, medical affairs needs, and commercial initiatives, including post-market analysis and adjustment.
Our best pharmaceutical advisory board guidance relies on excellence in the following:
KOL mapping
Before you hold a virtual advisory board and other KOL engagements, you’ll want to ensure you’ve identified the right KOLs. Preeminence measured by publication volume or tenure does not necessarily make a KOL the right person for your project. Effective KOL mapping, supported by technology that measures influence in your disease community, ensures you identify the experts you want to help you achieve your team’s goals, regardless of global region or clinical area.
“We confidently estimate double the cost savings with double the volume and specificity of insights from KOL programs run on Within3.” – Karen Scott, Lead-Up Medical Network
KOL mapping improves your understanding of your target disease community, increasing the likelihood of collecting more actionable insights aligned with your goals. It finds the right experts faster, accelerating time to important milestones.
Identifying the right KOLs is crucial regardless of how you’re engaging with them. But remember that a tech-enabled approach can provide what many experts want from knowledge-sharing opportunities: convenience, exposure to global perspectives, time for thought and reflection, and more frequent opportunities for learning and interaction. If your team plans periodic in-person interactions, virtual engagement is a great, low-impact strategy to augment and strengthen KOL relationships year-round.
Asynchronous engagement
Now that a hybrid approach to pharma advisory board execution has become standard operating procedure, you must give your KOLs what they need, when and where they need it, on their schedule, anywhere on the globe to generate maximum value and opportunity for milestone acceleration.
Done right, pharma advisory boards should no longer be subject to the loudest voices dominating conversations and squelching contributions from more introspective, contemplative participants.
Within an insights management platform, group engagement applications should provide ease of access to pre-reads, co-authoring capabilities, private and anonymous questions, and compliance features. Ideally, these tools also provide instant translation capabilities and allow all participants – peers, colleagues, patients, and HCPs – to participate on their schedule.
“When we go into in-person meetings we really expect maybe 10% something new, 90% things we’ve heard already. This was more of a 30-70% split or 40-60%” – Medical affairs team lead
AI-supported moderation is another important feature of modern group engagement applications. It can help pharma teams understand conversations in near real-time as they unfold, allowing them to refine follow-up questions and use their time more effectively.
AI-supported insights reporting
Industry insight indicates that 72% of medical affairs professionals named activities related to engagement – including moderation, analysis and reporting results and creating and sharing a summary of the full session – the most taxing aspects of group meetings with key external stakeholders like advisory boards.
This challenge presents an opportunity for AI, which can free pharma commercial and medical affairs teams from labor-intensive analysis and reporting tasks so they can do more high-impact strategic work. Within3’s AI-supported insights reporting eliminates more than 90% of the burden of analyzing data and developing insights.
As data is collected in the Within3 insights management platform, our system uses artificial intelligence to analyze and summarize the data into key insights, determine potential next steps and action items, and ultimately provide a beautifully designed report delivering on knowledge and insights generated from in-person advisory boards among other data sources.
With human curation and oversight, AI gives time back to pharma teams working in drug development, launch, scientific education, and patient advocacy.
Why trust Within3’s pharmaceutical advisory board guidance?
Launched initially as a clinician peer-to-peer engagement platform, Within3 was intentionally developed for pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical device companies to gather the insights that drive innovation and life-changing results for patients worldwide.
Pharmaceutical advisory boards on the Within3 insights management platform deliver insights that other engagements can’t – with 24/7 accessibility, structured dialogue, and total security and compliance.
Pharma teams enjoy fewer logistic headaches, build strong relationships with KOLs and other stakeholders, and most importantly, achieve deeper and high-quality actionable insights that drive their strategy forward,
Results and ROI
Research breakthroughs with new voices
Thanks to the insights provided by [an] overlooked KOL, one biotech team unlocked a high nine-figure out-licensing opportunity that hadn’t been considered, leading to the development of a potential blockbuster drug. Trial data suggest that the drug could emerge as a best-in-class solution for the condition, significantly improving patient outcomes for more than 10,000 patients annually. The development of the drug led to the company being acquired by a major pharma company in a lucrative ten-figure merger.
3-4X gains in novel insights
“A couple of advisors were brand new. A lot of times in these meetings, when there are global experts in the room, new advisors tend to not speak as much. But not only did the new advisors contribute more than I would have imagined, they also got the conversation on a really good trail of thought as a result of having that more innovative thinking.” Learn how a pharma team got fresh insight with a new approach to a post-market advisory board.
Pharmaceutical advisory board guidance, in summary
Highly efficient, highly effective pharmaceutical advisory boards now exhibit the following qualities:
- Begin with state-of-the-art KOL mapping to identify the right experts, including the new breed of digital opinion leaders, not just the most frequently published
- Provide what everyone needs (access to pre-reads, transcriptions, reports, supporting publications, etc.), when needed, with instant, in-platform translation
- Offer a hybrid approach that marries asynchronous with in-person engagements and typically generates 100% participation rates 3-7x feedback
- Easily integrate other data sources like field medical notes, clinical trial data, social listening, and other key data sources to gain a more holistic view of resources, status, needs, progress, and goals
- Trim weeks or months off time to complete projects and plans
- Make reporting highly efficient with AI explicitly trained for the task, allowing medical affairs teams and MSLs to reduce time and effort spent on data analysis and reporting while producing consistent, reliable insights reports to share with leadership and key stakeholders
Additional resources
A medical affairs team implemented an AI-supported insights management process to improve therapy performance and potentially extend market share by 40%.
Pharma teams wishing to build relationships with key industry influencers must be purposeful in their HCP digital engagement strategies.
Learn more about Within3’s AI-supported insights reporting by booking a demo.
