December 1, 2023

8 reasons Medical Affairs teams require an AI-augment solution

Medical Affairs performs a vital function in how pharma companies develop new drugs and therapies. These teams coordinate how a new drug moves from product development to commercialization.

Additionally, Medical Affairs will identify market gaps to exploit, liaise with KOLs, oversee clinical trials, conduct research, and work as a source of medical expertise to support marketing and commercial teams.

The primary objective of Medical Affairs is the creation of a new product’s value proposition. These teams work closely with various stakeholders, including key opinion leaders, regulatory bodies, and internal research and development departments, to ensure that the proposed value proposition aligns with the latest medical insights and industry standards. In this process, they meticulously analyze clinical data, conduct comprehensive market research, and collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure that the value proposition is robust and addresses unmet medical needs effectively.

Therefore, Medical Affairs are crucial to the success of an HCP companionship. We are all aware that it’s challenging, complex, and intensive work, and this blog discusses how Artificial Intelligence (AI) may boost the efficiency of the Medical Affairs team and create further added value.

Reducing The Volumes

Medical Affairs gather and collate an extensive volume of medical information and data. Given today’s accelerated pace of medical innovation, many databases are needed to stay on top of the latest advances. AI assists medical affairs teams in exploiting these growing resources driving out deeper insights, strengthening the medical community engagement, and finding positive outcomes for the whole organization.

Speed Up Literature Reviews

Literature, by nature, is unstructured data. It’s almost impossible to link data points in an array of text documents, for example, data presented in a spreadsheet. However, AI can quickly and efficiently connect undifferentiated written sources and extract information that helps Medical Affairs understand the entire content. AI enables KOL data, medical information, and open medical sources to be rapidly utilized to supplement search results or merged into a single source to provide a complete picture.

Leverage existing content repositories

Large biopharma companies store scientific information, KOL logs, and data from clinical trials across multiple teams over several geographies. This situation is a barrier to insight generation as the data may exist in various formats or languages, and sharing methods may be inefficient. These fragmented systems cause the Medical Affairs team to miss vital trends that promote the rapid development of therapies that will help patients. 

AI cuts through this undifferentiated morass effortlessly circumventing language issues and technical challenges to give Medical Affairs teams a global view to inform their work.

Real-Time Data Analysis

AI can assist medical affairs teams in gathering and analyzing data uncovering patterns and trends that analysts consume lot of their valuable time. These hitherto unknown links can assist in many areas including clinical trial design, patient population identification and inform product development and commercialization.

Improve HCP Experience

Medical Affairs teams use CRMs like Veeva or Salesforce to capture the conversations they have with HCPs while conducting field research. This knowledge is frequently underutilized. Medical Affairs teams may gather these high-value client encounters in one place by using AI tools to extract value from them. As a result, Medical Affairs can regularly monitor key topics, views, data gaps, and other relevant areas. Additionally, the medical strategies of pharmaceutical firms continue to evolve by incorporating HCP feedback.

Enable Better Patient Experience

Today, with the growing integration of digital health tools, NLP-driven AI Assistants on patient websites have a profound impact on the delivery of product-related information to patients.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has revolutionized the way patient websites deliver product-related information, enhancing the accessibility and comprehension of medical content. Through its advanced linguistic analysis, NLP enables patient websites to offer personalized and user-friendly interactions, empowering patients to gain comprehensive insights into various products and treatment options. This streamlined approach not only fosters a deeper understanding of medical products but also promotes patient engagement and informed decision-making, ultimately improving the overall patient experience and healthcare outcomes.

Data-Driven Decision Making

Medical affairs curate a large volume of medical information and data. But because most datasets are curated manually, this ends with a complicated data structure. The knock-on effect is ongoing difficulties engaging KOLs in clinical trials and identifying relevant information, leaders, or individuals that offer beneficial support. AI makes it simpler and faster to uncover hidden associations and visualize the data in these resources by generating interactive graphs. As a result, Medical Affairs teams have additional resources to make better data-driven decisions.

Power Through Complex Processes

AI can assist medical affairs teams with complicated procedures such as regulatory compliance.  AI systems that have been properly instructed will be able to spot potential adverse events, keep track of negative outcomes, and ensure regulatory compliance. Pharmaceutical products must be entirely compliant, safe, and effective while promoting patient health. Currently, the process is manual and relies on an Excel spreadsheet or similar uncertain tool, making mistakes more likely (and with more serious consequences). AI streamlines this procedure by getting rid of plain text files and structuring the data in a usable, searchable manner.

Conclusion

As we have seen, AI has enormous potential to impact Medical Affairs throughout their value chain. Of course, as with all new technologies realizing this promise requires careful consideration of ethical and legal issues and a comprehensive understanding of the capabilities and limitations of AI algorithms. But the advantages of gaining this knowledge are plain to see commercially.

Medical affairs teams can use AI to enhance patient engagement, support regulatory compliance, and drive innovation in the pharmaceutical business while saving resources and, essentially, developing drugs and therapies that improve the lives of HCP and patients.

At phamax, we’ve trained Ariya, our AI digital assistant, to serve everyone in healthcare firms, from marketing, medical, leadership, or scientific teams. And especially the always diligent Medical Affairs Team.

To discover how Ariya phamax’s AI digital assistant can enhance the value for Medical Science Liaisons, schedule a demo with our expert.

References

https://within3.com/resources/artificial-intelligence-medical-affairs

https://f.hubspotusercontent10.net/hubfs/8423710/Downloadables%20(to%20send%20to%20customers)/White%20Papers/W3_Whitepapter_4Tech_Disrupts_InsightsManagement_020922.pdfhttps://www.papercurve.com/post/how-artificial-intelligence-will-transform-medical-affairs-and-commercial-teams

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/potential-ai-medical-affairs-digital-health-exploring-trenton/

https://f.hubspotusercontent10.net/hubfs/8423710/Downloadables%20(to%20send%20to%20customers)/White%20Papers/W3_Whitepapter_4Tech_Disrupts_InsightsManagement_020922.pdf

https://www.papercurve.com/post/how-artificial-intelligence-will-transform-medical-affairs-and-commercial-teams

Indu Behera

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