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Blog
The Future of Medical Affairs - Now
AI and RWD Insights are Changing Healthcare and Medical Affairs Can Lead the Way
Rob Swick, Healthcare Digital Marketing Specialist
Nov 04, 2022
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  • The Future of Medical Affairs - Now

When Cindy Weber tells Medical Affairs audiences about some of her recent artificial intelligence (AI) and disease modeling use cases, she often gets an incredulous response. Something along the lines of: “Can you really do that?”

Invariably the answer is yes.

Weber, IQVIA’s Principal, AI Solutions, describes her role as “using AI and Machine Learning (ML) to understand the patient journey analytically; and predict patient medical events before they happen” – in some cases, in ways that have never been done before – using the plethora of real world data (RWD) IQVIA has made analysis-ready.

AI is the Natural Complement to RWD

While vast data also means even more substantially vast complexity, complexity is what AI and ML are good at. Predicting a disease based on hard-to-find signals, anticipating a diagnosis, or preventing disease complications may sound like science fiction, but all these things are being done now.

In the famous words of author William Gibson, “the future is here, it’s just not widely available yet.”

One of Weber’s own goals is to help make that future happen for others by sharing IQVIA’s AIML solutions.

Predicting Asthma Exacerbations

Weber cites an example about a recent project using IQVIA’s AI algorithms to predict exacerbations for asthma that she is about to present at a conference.

She says, “by using AI we're able to understand the complexity of those drivers that are leading to an asthma exacerbation, so we can potentially design a medical affairs outreach to those appropriate patients to help mitigate and avoid the exacerbation risk.”

Asthma is hugely prevalent in the US where 25 million patients or about 1 in 13 people have it (CDC). That’s a lot of people to help, and a mammoth potential impact AI-driven patient and treatment insights can have.

Impact on Medical Affairs

In a recent IQVIA podcast, How AI and Real World Data are Reshaping Medical Affairs, Weber said the dramatic change in how information can be used and brought together to uncover new, important disease and care patterns is driving a crucial evolution in the role of Medical Affairs.

Traditionally, many medical affairs and medical science liaisons have dialogues with physicians, helping them to understand current treatment care, diagnosis, and disease dynamics.

In the podcast, Weber said AI and RWD analytics can make these conversations with physicians much more specific to those physicians’ actual patient population, comorbidities, and disease progressions. Backed by AI-driven insights, Medical Affairs can make these conversations much more directly relevant to the physician’s patients and the complexities faced by them now, to help more specifically shape care for the patients, instead of in a very abstract and general manner.

Identifying Rare Diseases Earlier

Another powerful example of where AI and ML are showing they can deliver important leaps of understanding is in spotting rare diseases earlier.

Weber says AI, ML, and RWD can help “find these needles in the haystack”. Rare diseases are of course uncommon individually, but collectively they represent hundreds of millions of patients. According to New Scientist (Jan, 2019), there are 350 million people worldwide with rare diseases; however, because of their infrequency, it takes on average of 5.6 years (UK figures) to diagnose them. That’s years of living with an untreated disease and emotional frustration for an enormous number of people with rare diseases.

Growing RWD Data and Expertise

Weber highlights the prevalence and richness of RWD that IQVIA is making analysis-ready, from electronic medical records including patient registry information, lab data, genetic testing, to personal digital devices, and to other sources from IQVIA’s broad array of partnerships, as making these technology advancements possible. IQVIA’s proprietary data sets currently include over 1.2 billion unique non-identified patients from over 50 countries.

IQVIA’s data science expertise also makes finding the right answers quickly possible by providing better, faster, and more powerful tools for connecting disparate information sources and delivering rapid analysis.

Bringing the Future into Your Organization

Advancements in RWD, AI and ML are enabling Medical Affairs to transition from an executional role to a strategic one, not only disseminating evidence but being directly involved in evidence generation activities that result in improved patient care.

The question many Medical Affairs leaders are now asking is “How can they accelerate this process and improve their use of RWD and AI today?”. In the podcast, Weber suggests that one good way is to identify a disease area or product with a key challenge or strong unmet needs and conduct a pilot to show what can be done.

Want to know more? Contact us for a demonstration or to learn how IQVIA’s AIML Solutions Suite can help you accelerate into the future. You can also hear the full podcast interview with Cindy Weber here.

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