Five tips for Medical insights
One of the key pillars of medical affairs is providing medical insight to drive a project forward. Your role is to engage in scientific exchanges and amplify your evidence-based solutions for your therapy area. If you want to succeed in this role, it is crucial to grasp that giving game-changing medical insights puts you in a position that drives data-driven decisions.
Medical affairs provide a deep understanding of emerging science and the current unmet needs; this helps shape the commercial strategy. The outcome of providing valuable insights is that you prove yourself to enhance your innovative value, improve decision-making, and help get things right the first time.
So, what are the tactics you can employ?
1. Medical Information
Spotting Medical trends in medical information is great for understanding real clinical practice and how the information is used in the clinical setting. Suppose a healthcare professional contacts you to discuss a difficult patient case or you as a healthcare professional come across a difficult case. These are the type of trends and queries that become interesting.
Of course, it should d be a priority to answer the query safely and responsibly; however, don't prod too much into asking questions in response to the query, which doesn't help answer the query.
2. Conferences and Speakers
If you find yourself in a position where you are attending a conference or a speech with an influential person at the helm, you may find it useful to be briefed so you can gain a better experience. During these conversations and meetings, you can better understand how the audience is receiving this information as well as their interest and needs.
I wouldn't recommend convincing a key opinion leader (KOL) of your point of view; they're in their element and have prepared a speech for their audience. There is also more information on this site on how to prepare for a conference,
3. Face-to-face meetings
When you meet with key opinion leaders or healthcare professionals face to face, insights may come to you naturally; this has happened to me. Face-to-face meetings provide you with an opportunity to steer the conversation into topics you need insight on too.
From experience, I can say that face-to-face meetings are suitable for complex insights when you need to dig deeper and fully understand healthcare professionals' opinions, challenges and concerns. (HCP) Your ability to listen and seek first to understand and then to be understood will greatly benefit you.
This is not the opportunity to state your opinion or showcase your knowledge. It is the HCP's moment to shine.
4. Advisory Board Meetings
Advisory board meetings can be very time-consuming and complex to organise. They require a lot of thought, budget and working cross-functionally to get them off the ground. However, They're very highly powered tactics for gathering medical insight.
Advisory boards, in a nutshell, are essential focus groups for healthcare professionals to share their opinion and views on a subject matter to give their "advice". Advisory boards are suitable for complex medical insights and add greater value than singular face-to-face meetings.
I will recommend having a strong structure and organisation for an advisory board, allowing room for debate and association exercises to gain strong medical insights. They can be a fun and engaging way to learn and understand the medical horizon better. Make sure you follow up with each participant afterwards to deepen your understanding.
5. Hospital Presentations
Hospital presentations are useful because you will have the opportunity to present your scientific data to a small group of healthcare professionals and increase your understanding of the clinical reality and the opinion of practitioners.
Hospital presentations allows you foster discussions. A tip from me is to prepare case studies, statements, and questions for health care professionals and, if possible, follow up with patients face to face.
Thank you for reading and until next time.