Regions
MAIN/REGIONS
regions/
Regions
  1. Americas
  2. Asia & Oceania
  3. Europe
  4. Middle East & Africa
  1. Solutions
  2. Products
  3. Insights
  4. About
  5. Careers
  6. Contact Us
MAIN/search
MAIN/Solutions
Solutions/
SOLUTIONS
  • Research & Development
  • Real World Evidence
  • Commercialization
  • Safety & Regulatory Compliance
  • Technologies
LIFE SCIENCE SEGMENTS
HEALTHCARE SEGMENTS
THERAPEUTIC AREAS

Impacting People's Lives

"We strive to help improve outcomes and create a healthier, more sustainable world for people everywhere.

LEARN MORE
Harness the power to transform clinical development

Reimagine clinical development by intelligently connecting data, technology, and analytics to optimize your trials. The result? Faster decision making and reduced risk so you can deliver life-changing therapies faster.

Research & Development Overview
Research & Development Quick Links
Real World Evidence. Real Confidence. Real Results.

Generate and disseminate evidence that answers crucial clinical, regulatory and commercial questions, enabling you to drive smarter decisions and meet your stakeholder needs with confidence.

REAL WORLD EVIDENCE OVERVIEW
Real World Evidence Quick Links
See markets more clearly. Opportunities more often.

Elevate commercial models with precision and speed using AI-driven analytics and technology that illuminate hidden insights in data.

COMMERCIALIZATION OVERVIEW
Commercialization Quick Links
Service driven. Tech-enabled. Integrated compliance.

Orchestrate your success across the complete compliance lifecycle with best-in-class services and solutions for safety, regulatory, quality and medical information.

COMPLIANCE OVERVIEW
Safety & Regulatory Compliance Quick Links
Intelligence that transforms life sciences end-to-end.

When your destination is a healthier world, making intelligent connections between data, technology, and services is your roadmap.

TECHNOLOGIES OVERVIEW
Technology Quick Links
MAIN/Products
Products/
CLINICAL PRODUCTS
COMMERCIAL PRODUCTS
COMPLIANCE, SAFETY, REG PRODUCTS
REAL WORLD PRODUCTS

CASE STUDY

"Data in a Day

LEARN MORE
MAIN/Insights
Insights/
BLOGS, WHITE PAPERS & CASE STUDIES

Explore our library of insights, thought leadership, and the latest topics & trends in healthcare.

DISCOVER INSIGHTS
THE IQVIA INSTITUTE

An in-depth exploration of the global healthcare ecosystem with timely research, insightful analysis, and scientific expertise.

SEE LATEST REPORTS

INSTITUTE REPORT

"Digital Health Trends 2024 - Implications for Research and Patient Care

READ MORE

EMEA Insights

"IQVIA thought leadership with a focus on EMEA.

Learn more

WHITE PAPER

"DCTs Deliver Big ROI

LEARN MORE

WHITE PAPER

"Capturing value at scale: The $4 billion RWE imperative

LEARN MORE
MAIN/About
About/
FEATURED INNOVATIONS
  • IQVIA Connected Intelligence™
  • IQVIA Healthcare-grade AI™
  • Human Data Science Cloud
  • IQVIA Innovation Hub
  • Decentralized Trials
  • Patient Experience Solutions with Apple devices
WHO WE ARE
NEWS & RESOURCES

INVESTOR RELATIONS

"Visit our investor relations site for more information.

LEARN MORE
Unlock your potential to drive healthcare forward

By making intelligent connections between your needs, our capabilities, and the healthcare ecosystem, we can help you be more agile, accelerate results, and improve patient outcomes.

LEARN MORE
IQVIA AI is Healthcare-grade AI

Building on a rich history of developing AI for healthcare, IQVIA AI connects the right data, technology, and expertise to address the unique needs of healthcare. It's what we call Healthcare-grade AI.

LEARN MORE

Your healthcare data deserves more than just a cloud.

The IQVIA Human Data Science Cloud is our unique capability designed to enable healthcare-grade analytics, tools, and data management solutions to deliver fit-for-purpose global data at scale.

LEARN MORE
Innovations make an impact when bold ideas meet powerful partnerships

The IQVIA Innovation Hub connects start-ups with the extensive IQVIA network of assets, resources, clients, and partners. Together, we can help lead the future of healthcare with the extensive IQVIA network of assets, resources, clients, and partners.

LEARN MORE
Proven, faster DCT solutions

IQVIA Decentralized Trials deliver purpose-built clinical services and technologies that engage the right patients wherever they are. Our hybrid and fully virtual solutions have been used more than any others.

LEARN MORE
IQVIA Patient Experience Solutions with Apple devices

Empowering patients to personalize their healthcare and connecting them to caregivers has the potential to change the care delivery paradigm.

LEARN MORE
MAIN/Careers
Careers/
WORKING AT IQVIA

Our mission is to accelerate innovation for a healthier world. Together, we can solve customer challenges and improve patient lives.

LEARN MORE
LIFE AT IQVIA

Careers, culture and everything in between. Find out what’s going on right here, right now.

LEARN MORE

WE’RE HIRING

"Improving human health requires brave thinkers who are willing to explore new ideas and build on successes. Unleash your potential with us.

SEARCH JOBS
MAIN/Contact Us
Contact Us/
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
  • Blogs
  • 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.

Have a question? Want a demo?

We’d love to show you how AI-driven insights can help your Medical Affairs team.

Just tell us a little about your needs and we'll connect you with a dedicated expert who can answer any questions you have.

SPEAK TO AN EXPERT

Related solutions

IQVIA Healthcare-grade AI™

Learn how unparalleled data, domain expertise, and technologies enable AI-powered solutions that are purpose-built for healthcare.

Contact Us