Using analytics and social listening to target the right people for medical affairs and commercial engagement
CHALLENGE
Medical affairs teams often need to respond quickly to a variety of requests. However, simply maintaining a shortlist of top KOLs won’t suffice, and maintaining a massive profile database focuses on quantity over quality. The real objective is to quickly find the right people who can provide insight that will inform strategy. To identify these experts, teams need analytics that focus on objectives.
SOLUTION
Some data vendors view people – in this case, key opinion leaders – as a commodity. But this approach only considers individual criteria, and can never really provide context around who on a generated list can really provide the information medical affairs teams need. When teams need to identify experts quickly, it’s typically to learn something or to influence something. Both goals depend heavily on how the selected individuals are connected to other things teams are interested in.
Rather than building a database of individuals, Within3 builds a map of an entire community, enabling medical affairs teams to learn in minutes who has relevant expertise, who is connected to related collaborators, where centers of excellence are, and who else is a leading expert connected to the team’s specific goal.
USE CASE EXAMPLES
Quickly identifying advisory board members to discuss a comorbid condition
A client had just received a Within3 dataset on a large global disease community with almost 100,000 members. Shortly after, the client had an urgent need to find experts in a comorbid disease who could participate in an emergency advisory meeting. The comorbid disease had not been considered prior to developing the original dataset, but since the dataset included everyone with expertise in the disorder, it was simple to search the data for people who were part of the disease community and who were also experts in the comorbid condition. Within3 created a new filter for the condition and identified almost 100 people with expertise in both diseases. Because these individuals could be viewed in the context of the community, the client could quickly see who was best-networked to have a broad understanding of the relevant issue. A potential candidate list was developed within hours and the ad board was held a few weeks later.
Seeking fresh insights from new advisors
A client’s CEO was traveling to Europe and requested a list of KOLs to could call on in each city on his itinerary, with the specification that each KOL be new to the company and therefore capable of providing fresh insights. Within a few hours, Within3 was able to identify candidates in each city, looking not only at individual qualifications but those with connections to collaborations, centers, trials, or other KOLs relevant to business objectives. Instead of providing the CEO with just a list, Within3 was also able to provide rich context about why each of the individuals was of interest, show how they fit into the local peer network and how they were connected to competitor KOLs as well as the client’s own KOL network. This enabled the CEO to prepare in advance for productive in-person conversations.
