How Social Listening Strengthens Medical Affairs Strategy

Digital innovation continues to reshape the healthcare and biopharmaceutical landscape, and as it does, the role of Medical Affairs is changing. Traditionally, Medical Affairs was responsible for communicating with healthcare providers (HCPs) and engaging in scientific exchange. This entailed building one-on-one relationships with individual experts, sharing research findings and other scientific information, and listening to HCPs' perspectives.

Today's Medical Affairs teams are expected to play larger and more important roles in pharmaceutical companies' go-to-market and commercialization strategies. McKinsey has described Medical Affairs as an emerging third strategic pillar of the pharmaceutical organization, alongside research and development and commercial. In a world where medical science and business models are increasingly data-driven and complex, it is essential for Medical Affairs to refocus its efforts. It needs to gather insights that better inform medical strategy, product development and launch strategies, and other aspects of commercialization.

Key Takeaways

• Social listening gives Medical Affairs a real-time, unfiltered view of scientific conversation across a far wider set of HCPs than in-person engagement can reach.
• It complements traditional insight sources such as field medical engagements, literature searches, and advisory boards rather than replacing them.
• Because in-person KOL engagements can occur as infrequently as once every three years, social channels help fill the gaps between direct interactions.
• Insights surfaced through social listening can inform publication plans, engagement strategies, clinical trial considerations, and patient-care decisions.
• Social listening is generally less resource-intensive than expanding advisory boards or increasing face-to-face engagements.

Social listening in Medical Affairs is the structured monitoring and analysis of online scientific and clinical conversation to surface trends, validate field insights, and understand what HCPs and other stakeholders are discussing in near real time.

"The changing role of Medical Affairs is something that's been talked about in the industry for years, but I think that this year is when these discussions will finally lead to solid action," says Scott Thompson, co-chief executive officer at Acceleration Point. "Nowadays, Medical Affairs is becoming better and better able to measure the impact of its activities, which is driving teams to re-evaluate how they collaborate – and how they contribute to the organization as a whole. They're broadening their role across various segments of the medical community, as well as gaining traction and greater importance within the C-suite."

Why are field insights a top Medical Affairs priority?

Along with data generation and dissemination, gathering field insights is a top priority for Medical Affairs teams. Collecting such insights used to be a fairly passive and organic process. Today, however, teams' efforts tend to be more sharply focused. Medical Affairs is spending more time with organizational leadership upfront to clarify what they need to learn. This makes it faster and easier for field teams to gather more insights, analyze data from multiple sources, and communicate the results of their efforts.

When collecting insights, medical teams typically rely on a rich assortment of information sources, including conventional ones such as field medical engagements, literature searches, and market research. It is also common to find valuable information from advisory boards, analyses of claims data, and simulations. Web searches and ongoing monitoring are other rich sources of intelligence. As engagement models shift, a Deloitte benchmark study of 20 pharmaceutical companies found that many Medical Affairs leaders now report only about half of their HCP interactions take place in person, a move toward digital and virtual channels that accelerated during the pandemic. That shift makes structured monitoring of online conversation, including social monitoring at medical congresses, a more central part of the insight mix.

How does social listening support Medical Affairs?

Leading teams are also turning to emerging technologies to supplement the insights they gather from traditional sources with information that is more nuanced, or that can challenge or validate what they have learned elsewhere. Medical Affairs can benefit from a social monitoring, insights, and analytics platform built to ingest online scientific content from millions of sources worldwide and quickly surface trends and patterns within it using artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled analytics. A peer-reviewed review in Pharmaceutical Medicine notes that social listening projects have become part of the digital competencies Medical Affairs teams use to analyze disease and treatment conversation in a structured way.

"Social listening can complement field medical insights by providing a broader real-time view of what's being said about a company, its treatments or the diseases they target," explains Thompson. "This can help medical science liaisons and other field-based medical affairs personnel better understand the current landscape and identify areas where their expertise can be most useful. When they combine these sources of information, Medical Affairs teams can develop more effective and targeted strategies for engaging with healthcare providers and other key stakeholders. Such intelligence also empowers them to contribute key strategic insights to the organization's leadership."

Insight generation should be a fully integrated process in which the people making decisions based on data are analyzing as many data sources as possible to derive, challenge, and validate their insights. Social listening brings a new set of insights into the mix that are timely, unfiltered, and as broad as the industry itself. This is especially valuable for narrow populations, where patient social listening in rare disease can reveal signals that are hard to capture any other way.

Whereas in-person engagements with key opinion leaders (KOLs) take place no more frequently than once every three years, social media engagement happens all the time, providing immediate insights into what is being said in conversation. These discussions are neither peer reviewed nor colored by the biases of an interviewer. Social listening also gives Medical Affairs access to a much wider and more diverse array of HCPs than they could ever directly engage with, and it does so at a lower cost than running advisory boards or increasing the number of face-to-face engagements. It pairs naturally with digital approaches to KOL engagement already in use across the function.

How can Medical Affairs teams put social listening to work?

Social listening can give Medical Affairs valuable insights to prepare for in-person HCP engagements, to discern cross-industry trends shaping experts' thinking, and to validate research findings. It can also help teams ask the right questions, both of KOLs and when examining other data sources, to reveal today's most important trends and patterns and anticipate tomorrow's. Making the most of these signals depends on a disciplined insights process that turns raw conversation into decisions.

Those patterns can inform adjustments in publication plans, engagement strategies, clinical trials, and patient care. Asking better questions leads to the collection of more useful data, which in turn leads to deeper insights. The result is that Medical Affairs can use its growing awareness of patient, HCP, and other stakeholder needs to help the organization operate effectively in a fast-changing and increasingly data-driven world.

Kwello is a KOL social monitoring platform that helps MSLs and Medical Affairs teams follow scientific conversation and deepen their relationships with leading experts. Curious how this applies to your organization? Let's talk.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is social listening in Medical Affairs?
Social listening in Medical Affairs is the structured monitoring and analysis of online scientific and clinical conversation to surface trends, validate field insights, and understand what HCPs and other stakeholders are discussing in near real time.

How does social listening complement field medical insights?
Field medical engagements provide deep, direct insight from individual experts, but they happen infrequently. Social listening adds a broader, ongoing view of the conversation, so Medical Affairs teams can prepare for engagements, spot cross-industry trends, and validate what they learn from other sources.

Does social listening replace advisory boards or KOL engagement?
No. Social listening supplements traditional sources rather than replacing them. It works best as one input in an integrated insight process that also includes field engagements, literature, advisory boards, and claims analysis.

What types of decisions can social listening inform?
Patterns surfaced through social listening can inform adjustments to publication plans, engagement strategies, clinical trial considerations, and the questions Medical Affairs teams bring to KOLs and other data sources.

Further Reading:

• Developing Well-Rounded Engagement with Omnichannel Strategy → https://www.accelerationpoint.com/resources/developing-well-rounded-engagement-with-omnichannel-strategy/
• Innovation In Medical Affairs: Adapting Engagement Strategies → https://www.accelerationpoint.com/resources/innovation-in-medical-affairs/
• Medical Affairs Engagement Strategies: A Guide → https://www.accelerationpoint.com/resources/adapting-medical-affairs-engagement-strategies/