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Blog
Driving the Right Stakeholder Dialogue (Part 2 of 5)
Medical Affairs: Identify and Engage the Right Experts at the Right Times
Brian Harper, Sr. Director, Product Strategy, Medical Affairs, IQVIA
Christine Aber, Assoc. Director, Thought Leader Engagement, U.S. Medical Affairs, IQVIA
Mar 26, 2024

For Medical Affairs teams, finding and engaging thought leaders and other influencers isn’t as straightforward as in years past. Macro forces — namely, treatment complexity, digital acceleration, and data proliferation — have made it more challenging and more important to identify and engage the right experts at every stage of the product development lifecycle.

In large-molecule spaces or large therapeutic areas, potential targets number in the hundreds or thousands. But with highly novel specialty treatments, the list of potential targets is dramatically shorter. Similarly, it’s a straightforward process to determine which experts are prominent voices in peer-reviewed scientific journals. It's more challenging to surface the impactful voices who provide important messaging to their peers via more informal channels. All the while, life sciences organizations are navigating vast quantities of data from a greater variety of sources.

It adds up to a compelling opportunity for Medical Affairs teams to take a fresh approach to expert identification and engagement. What follows are three hallmarks of such an approach.


Holistic view of experts over time

An expert’s journey is not usually linear. When taking a holistic view, it becomes clear that an expert may be important to engage in different ways at different phases of the product lifecycle. For example, an individual may start the journey as a scientific leader establishing the scientific narrative through publishing, clinical trials, conference activity, and guideline authorship. Then the same expert may play a role in peer leadership by providing trusted treatment advice and guidance to their peers. As the lifecycle progresses, they may eventually transition to clinical leadership as a prolific treater.

Medical Affairs teams have an opportunity to help in identifying these personas and building a strategy for engaging them in appropriate ways at appropriate times. Start by determining key milestones across the product development lifecycle, and then segment experts into core buckets of expertise. Some may be well suited to generating your science, some to validating it. As you move closer to commercialization, there may be another segment well positioned to help disseminate medical information across the learning networks of other healthcare providers. Post-launch, experts may play a role in leading scientific conversations within digital and social channels.


Unified data and technology foundation

Achieving this holistic view of experts requires a wealth of data beyond traditional scientific or clinical data. Look not only to digital data, but also to claims data for understanding diagnostic and treatment leadership, along with data gathered through primary research.

Unfortunately, many organizations are still operating with fragmented and incomplete information — usually resulting from a disconnected technology infrastructure, a disparate partner ecosystem, or both.

The solution is to create a single environment for integrating and analyzing previously disparate data. Having a single infrastructure simplifies the steps that underpin a holistic view of experts: identifying and profiling, segmenting, and even surfacing insights at the individual level. Having a unified system also helps in executing engagements and measuring their effectiveness.

Connected, readily accessible expert data — powered by a unified technology infrastructure — is the foundation for next-generation engagement.


Precision analytics for finding ‘hidden’ experts

Medical Affairs teams typically have a set of expert personas and identification characteristics, such as scientific presence or treating and referral volume. These traditional frameworks overlook a critical cohort: the “hidden” regional and local leaders who are educating their peers and ultimately driving treatment and behavior change at the community level.

Surveys of the most relevant healthcare providers help to identify the experts they seek out for medical education and clinical advice about a specific indication. Using these known relationships as a starting point — and with a unified data and tech foundation — it becomes possible to predict peer learning relationships and networks for the entire U.S. market. In fact, IQVIA has a patented, innovative artificial intelligence machine learning (AI/ML) modeling process, which  produces these unique market insights.


Start building better strategies for expert identification and engagement

Gone are the days of focusing solely on nationally known scientific leaders and high-volume treaters. While those audiences remain valuable, Medical Affairs teams and their commercial colleagues must complement them by engaging the larger, more nuanced chorus of local and regional peer leaders and their learning networks. When you can create a 360-degree view of an expert and each role they play in the market, you unlock more granular profiling and segmentation — while enabling a more holistic view of expert engagement across your product’s lifecycle. 

 

In case you missed it, click here to read the previous blog in this series.

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