Turning medical information into a strategic asset

Co-written with Laurent Malivert

Pharmaceutical companies constantly engage key healthcare stakeholders through various personal and non-personal channels; however, the options for how these stakeholders proactively reach pharmaceutical companies remain limited. Nonetheless, medical information (MI) has become an outlier to this situation, since it’s one of the most prominent means of communication between pharma companies and patients, physicians and caregivers. MI has been used for decades, and it’s still a powerful resource for up-to-date, accurate and appropriate information on medicines.

But despite its success, MI capabilities have rarely been used to realize its strategic power as a tool to improve stakeholder experience, access to key information and ability to generate insights to help patients and physicians. As digital communication explodes around the globe—3.5 billion smartphones (and increasing) are used daily and can be used to access information about medications—pharma companies have an opportunity to re-design their MI capabilities to enhance patients’, physicians’ and healthcare professionals’ experiences while providing accurate and personalized information.

What is the journey of medical information (MI)?

Today’s MI journey requires strict oversight and manual interventions. It can be simplified into three parts: inquiry management, content curation and measurement.

Inquiry Management: MI requests are usually received and answered via dedicated inbound and responding channels such as call centers, company websites, emails, chatbots, remote conversations with field medical personnel, or congress engagement. Additionally, commercial representatives—who receive MI requests during their visits with physicians—can only answer queries about on-label use.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic has forced consumers to change their MI preferences—and pharma to adapt to remote engagement—healthcare professionals, patients and caregivers prefer a variety of MI communication methods.

• Healthcare professionals may prefer to self-search for information by using physician portals or manufacturing websites before sending an email for further information and perhaps request a call back.
• Patients are more likely to call the number on their prescription’s information to seek advice, perhaps unaware of the existence of other channels.
• Of all the channels, the product’s or company’s MI website has seen the most growth, since its fit-for-purpose webpage is seen as an efficient and faster way to attain specialized information 24 hours a day.

Content curation: Companies must respond to inquiries in a consistent fashion, which involves managing a library of medical content, ranging from patient safety to product quality. Validating each response requires several degrees of approval, different workflows depending on standard versus custom responses, the requestor (healthcare professional vs. patient), the country from which the request was originated, and the query type (adverse events vs. pregnancy exposure queries). Legal and compliance departments’ involvement during this process varies across organizations—based on their risk tolerance level—which may further inform the type and format of content available. Beyond that, multiple peer reviews are involved here, with a stricter validation procedure if the inquiry relates to adverse events. Finally, all inquiries and their responses have a shelf life, which depends on the query type and usage frequency rather than their creation date.

Measurement: Companies typically measure activity metrics such as inquiry management—such as response turnaround time—inquiry frequency and customer satisfaction. But beyond these quantitative metrics that help benchmark against top pharmaceutical manufacturers, there’s an increasing appetite and value in qualitatively assessing the impact of MI internally for insights generation. For example, reviewing and acting on the inquiry management process may prevent medical discontinuation, as well as frustration from healthcare professionals and patients. MI insights are often underutilized when they can be leveraged to help address healthcare professionals’ concerns with a product or data gaps needed to prescribe medicine and better inform patient subpopulations. Since several healthcare professionals are asking similar or multiple questions on a product, further education—and perhaps treatment or disease management guideline changes—is needed.

Since measurement is one of pharma’s key—yet underutilized—MI components, the industry has an opportunity to use MI through a more strategic input.

What opportunities and challenges does the medical information journey present?

The MI journey allows pharmaceutical organizations to communicate the value of MI, engage more effectively, discover products’ perception in the marketplace, and assess additional data the company’s customers and internal stakeholders need.

Although technology can solve some of these challenges and support the MI journey, it cannot solve everything, and should be viewed as an integral part of a well-designed approach alongside the process and people involved in the MI function.

Need for speed, collaboration and consistency: Healthcare professionals, patients and company stakeholders are often expected to answer a range of queries, adding pressure to the MI teams and slowing down the process. If a specific query cannot be answered with existing content in a relatively short period of time, an off-the shelf response must be written. While occasionally useful, this strategy is unsustainable, as inquiries increase in frequency, complexity and personalization.

It’s critical for MI teams to partner with other medical colleagues—such as medical science liaisons (MSLs), patient diagnosis liaisons and patient advocacy teams—within their organization to provide customized responses to these queries. This collaboration plays a central in the customer experience, as MSLs can share insights about response follow ups or become informed about new or more common inquiries. Additionally, companies must implement a feedback loop within their MI process, which also helps measure the performance of this collaborative model. The pandemic has accelerated the need to streamline content, resulting in bite-sized, interactive material that has forced pharma to further adapt to varying customer preferences.

Moreover, differences in regulations, patient populations, payer considerations and product availabilities make it difficult to ensure uniform MI throughout a company. While a product specialist in Spain may have a different MI knowledge than a colleague in Brazil, having a global product specialist—a worldwide expert in one drug—constantly performing global MI audits, overseeing standardized process, taking feedback and improving query responses can be advantageous. However, this wouldn’t work for all pharmaceutical manufacturers, since factors such as scaling and national regulations may get in the way. At the end of the day, there’s no universal strategy to improve MI speed and consistency.

Finally, levels of responsibilities, authorship, access, editing rights, distribution and knowledge of individuals’ data privacy must be clearly defined internally with regards to specific roles. For example, if regulatory bodies want audit trails through document ownership and editorial, pharma manufacturers must have clear authorship, review and final certification policies in place to ensure consistency in answers throughout the entire organization.

Moving away from the operational and transactional mindset: The role of MI is often considered as a one-way information dissemination channel, ran by individuals with an operational mindset. MI groups are usually seen as passive participants, only stating the facts instead of offering solutions. There’s an opportunity to move away from the transaction of information provision, and to use this channel to better communicate in a two-way fashion. Leaders must train MI employees to have substantial internal communication skills and the ability to connect the dots between functions (while providing up-to-date information or assessing for insights).

With pharma competition on the rise and the marketplace becoming more crowded with new and more complex molecules, there’s an increasing need for more trained, strategic and knowledgeable people in MI. Given the clinical orientation of MI teams, there’s generally a skew in what is considered credible evidence, with clinical trials being MI’s gold standard. To become more of a strategic resource, this could also include real-world evidence. MI specialists should be encouraged to think more strategically and dive into the data available from both internal and external sources and from public and private sources.

Finding the right technology solutions: Technology can be leveraged to create a strong foundation and address most of the key challenges, but it must be harnessed with the appropriate level of human touch. According to a recent ZS whitepaper, two-thirds of KOLs said MSLs are pivotal in quickly connecting them to an organization’s resources—such as other stakeholders and programs—when this process could be automated. The logical first step of technological support is likely to focus on automation, consistency and standardization of responses. Moreover, to gain more efficiency and free up resources and people, pharma can harmonize communication across the organization. MI teams must manage their language diversity, ensure consistency in content across different regions and remove bias. Technology can support as translation can be automated through content creation procedures.

Historically, communication has been built around call centers, which help communicate the content and diversify engagement channels while considering customers preferences. However, new and robust communication platforms ensure a swift integration of MI changes and updates within the organization. For example, the pandemic has forced manufacturers to quickly adapt to a rise in digital channel usage—such as chatbots and live chats—while also seeing an increase in traditional emails and call centers requesting on-demand access to field experts. Customer needs must be assessed and established to provide the best solutions; this can be done through user-friendly considerations or easily accessible, on-demand facilities of the channels. Customer preferences—such as how an email response should appear for one patient compared with the second—are also essential and can be more customized

Technology and human interventions can help pharma transform their MI department and change their perception of this function, while preparing them for years to come. But this is easier said than done. So, where do they begin?

We will soon publish a second article to explore the journey to making medical information a strategic asset.