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The one-to-one advantage: Driving insights from field medical notes
Hywel Evans, Director, IQVIA NLP Insights Hub
Jul 25, 2023

For medical affairs teams, publicly available data can provide a broad range of insights about research, competitive activity, experts, patient perspectives, and other stakeholder insights. But the closest medical affairs teams get to the very latest perspectives, those dealing with the diagnosis and treatment of today’s patients, are in the interactions of field medical teams with physicians. From medical topics, real world challenges and perspectives on specific decisions being made to requests for education and information, these notes can be invaluable. The data can inform the next interaction with specific doctors. But together they can inform strategy, content development and evidence generation.

Medical scientific liaison (MSL) notes can be a rich reservoir of valuable information, but they are often inconsistent, vary in richness and take time to review manually. By using technology to streamline and scale the process of extracting value from field notes, this data can become a key component in a medical affairs insights process. At IQVIA, we use our natural language processing (NLP) tools to ingest raw MSL notes and any accompanying structured data about the interaction and employ text-mining techniques to tag each note with key topics and sub-topics. This is done with a blend of trained machine learning models, large language models and established rules-based linguistics and ontologies to work quickly and efficiently with a wide range of dataset sizes. For example, our toolkit includes a continuously updated library of more than 6.5m terms and synonyms for diseases, symptoms, drug names, biomarkers, genes making the time to results much faster than developing new models and custom ontologies. Beyond the technology, we collaborate with IQVIA medical experts, researchers and HEOR professionals to create annotated datasets to train large language models to classify notes in custom ways as well as inform the final summarization of the data.

Now is the time for medical affairs teams to be more data driven. You have the potential to improve responsiveness to a dynamic range of physicians and stakeholders by bringing together the rich data sources, with technology, to create a repeatable, scalable process across disease areas.

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