In medical affairs, data alone isn’t enough to drive impactful strategies. Medical science liaisons and their teams work with a wealth of information – but understanding how to transform this raw data into actionable insights is the key to success.
By exploring the transition from raw data to insights, our guide will help your medical affairs professionals harness their skills to make more strategic, informed decisions, anticipate trends, and improve patient care.
We’ll also walk you through important concepts like the insights loop to equip your team with the knowledge to align their strategies with the needs of healthcare professionals and patients alike.
Revisiting The Basics: Data, Patterns, And Insights
Understanding how to transition from data to patterns and ultimately to insights is essential for boosting your medical affairs efforts.
In medical affairs, data refers to information taken from sources like verbatim notes, direct observations, and records from interactions with healthcare professionals (HCPs) and other thought leaders. Typically, this information is then stored in a customer relationship management (CRM) system.
When it comes to your medical affairs teams, medical science liaisons (MSLs) are at the frontline of raw data collection. However, they focus more on gathering facts without diving into their analysis just yet. This crucial first step sets the stage for what this data can tell you about HCPs’ views and behaviors.
Identifying patterns
Once all of the raw data has been collected, the next step is to analyze it for current and emerging trends among different groups. For example, you can divide them by specialty or location. This analysis helps identify patterns, which show common behaviors or ideas among HCPs.
While patterns can provide you with useful information, they don’t offer enough detail to guide your strategic decisions. Patterns provide a way to see the ‘bigger picture’ by highlighting connections between data, but they still need deeper analysis to show their significance in terms of your medical affairs strategies.
Turning patterns into insights
Actionable insights are the takeaways your teams can gain from examining these patterns more closely. Unlike data or patterns, insights are meant to allow for informed decisions that can directly impact your team’s goals and, in turn, patient outcomes.
For example, your MSLs may collect data showing that HCPs plan to continue using telemedicine, even long after the effects of COVID-19. But knowing this information isn’t enough. Instead, by looking at these data points together, your teams can develop strategic insight into the future of medical affairs outreach.
Understanding Insights
Insights are crucial understandings that come from combining multiple data points. But it’s important to distinguish between raw data – like notes from meetings – and true business insights. True insights require analysis and combining information to draw meaningful conclusions.
Your medical affairs professionals need to practice strategic thinking to generate more valuable insights. This means connecting different data points to identify patterns and, in turn, make more informed decisions.
By adopting this approach, medical affairs teams can turn scattered data into useful understandings that guide their work and improve patient care.
The insights loop
The insights loop is a continuous process that can help you refine insights from various sources, which leads to better overall decision-making. Here are the essential steps within the insights loop:
- Define key topics: This involves identifying specific areas of interest to help you focus your data collection.
- Gather insights from different sources: You can gather insights from advisory boards, online interactions (particularly through digital KOLs), and real-world data. This will help you gain more validated insights.
- Collaborative analysis: Ensure cross-functional teams are used to analyze the insights your medical affairs professionals have collected. By doing this, you can also bring in various perspectives, which will make your findings deeper and more meaningful.
- Refine your strategies: As new insights come in, you’ll need to refine your strategies. To do this, examine how well they achieve your goals and tweak them to ensure alignment.
- Emphasize iteration: Remember, this process is cyclical. The insights you gain will lead to new strategies, which then create further insights. Ultimately, this fosters ongoing improvement.
The role of technology in the insights loop
Technology, especially artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, is important in streamlining the insights process.
A comprehensive medical insights management platform like Kwello, for example, helps tackle repetitive tasks like collecting online data. As a result, this frees up your teams to focus on more strategic work.
By using innovative medical affairs technology to your advantage, your teams can work faster and gather more valuable insights.
6 Components Of Business-Critical Medical Insights
In medical affairs, business-critical insights are essential for coming up with strategies that truly resonate with the wider market, patients, and HCPs.
Here are six core components that drive more impactful decision-making:
1. Patient insight
By understanding patient needs, attitudes, and motivations, you can create strategies that focus on patients. This insight helps ensure that your medical affairs teams address patients’ specific challenges and concerns. Ultimately, it creates more patient-focused and impactful approaches.
2. Customer insight
Customer insights focus on HCPs and their motivations, needs, and attitudes. When you align your brand strategies with HCPs’ expectations, your teams can build more trust and foster better relationships with them. This is great for helping decision-making and improving patient care.
3. Clinical insight
A comprehensive understanding of unmet patient needs and treatment pathways is essential for bettering patient outcomes. That’s where clinical insights come in. They enable your medical affairs professionals to identify potential treatment gaps. This then informs the development of new strategies and interventions to address these gaps.
4. Market insight
Being aware of the competition and emerging trends allows your medical affairs teams to stay ahead of the curve. By understanding market dynamics, they can position your brand more strategically to gain a competitive edge. They’ll also be better equipped to adapt to changes in the market.
5. Brand insight
Ideally, you’ll want your medical affairs teams to have a deep understanding of a brand’s strengths, weaknesses, and unique proposition. This will enable them to clearly communicate to HCPs and patients about what sets their brand apart.
Of course, this insight is critical for building a positive brand image and maintaining consistent messaging that will resonate with your target audiences.
6. Value insight
Value insights generally focus on payer concerns. These may include cost-effectiveness, budget impact, and patient outcomes. By addressing these factors proactively, your medical affairs teams can ensure accessibility to the brand and align their strategies to payer priorities, too. This helps sustain the brand’s value and overall market presence.
FAQs
What are the benefits of actionable insights for medical affairs teams?
There are several advantages to actionable insights for medical affairs. These include:
- Better decision-making: Actionable insights provide your teams with the strategic benefit of better decision-making. This means they can anticipate trends, adapt their strategies proactively, and support the product development process with informed recommendations.
- Continuous improvement: The insights loop supports continuous improvement, which ensures your strategies are consistently updated and refined to stay relevant.
- Real-world benefits for patients and HCPs: These insights-driven strategies bring real-world benefits by improving patient outcomes, strengthening relationships with HCPs, and boosting your organization’s value.
How do you measure the success of medical affairs strategies?
Measuring the success of medical affairs strategies and their overall impact involves examining certain key performance indicators (KPIs). These KPIs should reflect the impact of your strategies and how well they align with organizational goals.
Success is typically tracked through metrics like engagement quality with HCPs and the depth and relevance of the insights you take away from these interactions.
Final Thoughts
If you’re ready to help your team achieve medical excellence, this guide is the first step on your path to success. With a better understanding of how to transform data into insights, your teams will be able to stay ahead of the competition. Plus, by utilizing technology and platforms like Kwello and Acceleration Point, you can drive your medical affairs professionals to better themselves and their strategies.
