Medical Excellence Across Field Teams: Insights from Sanofi

Medical Affairs professionals are increasingly recognized as a strategic bridge between scientific innovation and real-world application. Lori Long, Field-Based Medical Excellence Lead at Sanofi, brings 25 years of experience to that challenge. She recently transitioned from leading a single field medical team to overseeing medical excellence across seven therapeutic areas -- a shift in scope that required rethinking how consistency, alignment, and innovation are built at scale.

Lori joined Acceleration Point Co-CEO Scott Thompson on OnPoint: The Medical Excellence Podcast to discuss how she approaches that complexity -- from standardizing dashboards and KPIs to deepening relationships with Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) and navigating the operational realities of a large, multi-team organization.

The Role of Medical Excellence in Scaling Consistency

Medical Excellence, as Lori describes it, is about more than standardizing processes -- it is about enabling teams to operate at their full potential while maintaining strategic alignment. In her role, Lori focuses on harmonizing critical elements across field medical teams: data dashboards, key performance indicators, and medical value stories that communicate the impact of Medical Affairs in a consistent, meaningful way.

This approach ensures that while each therapeutic area retains the flexibility to address its unique challenges, the organization as a whole moves toward shared goals. One of her central initiatives has been developing a unified dashboard system for field medical teams -- addressing foundational inconsistencies so that senior leadership can more effectively evaluate field activities and make data-informed decisions. For a deeper look at how Medical Affairs leaders approach measuring field impact, see Measuring Medical Affairs with Paul Minne.

Partnering with Key Opinion Leaders for Strategic Alignment

A cornerstone of Lori's strategy is structured engagement with KOLs throughout the full lifecycle of a therapeutic area -- from pipeline products to those nearing end of lifecycle. These relationships provide valuable clinical perspective and help align field medical strategies with the needs of the medical community.

"Collaboration with KOLs isn't just about gathering insights; it's about building trust and creating a shared vision that aligns with medical and organizational goals," she noted.

This collaboration is particularly important in shaping the medical value story -- a framework for communicating Medical Affairs impact in a way that is both consistent across teams and grounded in real-world clinical context. By incorporating KOL feedback into that framework, field medical teams can ensure their strategies reflect current practice rather than internal assumptions alone.

Balancing Innovation and Consistency Across Field Teams

Scaling medical excellence across a large organization requires holding two things at once: the need for consistent structure and the need to allow individual teams room to innovate. Each of Sanofi's therapeutic areas -- spanning rare diseases to mainstream treatments -- has distinct operational and scientific requirements, even as all of them share a common orientation toward advancing patient care through effective Medical Affairs strategy.

Lori addresses this by engaging Senior Directors and MSLs in a collaborative process of sharing best practices across teams. One practical mechanism is piloting new approaches within specific therapeutic areas before scaling them more broadly. This allows for structured experimentation and gives teams evidence of what works before committing to organization-wide implementation. For perspective on how other organizations have approached this challenge, Scaling Medical Excellence: Insights from Merck with Wendy Fraser offers a useful parallel.

Navigating the Challenges of Medical Excellence at Scale

Lori was candid about the demands of her role -- particularly the coordination required across 12 field teams and seven therapeutic areas. Staying aligned requires regular touchpoints at multiple levels: individual MSL meetings, senior leadership sessions, and advisory councils that bring field input back into central planning.

She also works closely with Sanofi's global medical excellence team to ensure that U.S. efforts align with broader organizational priorities -- a layer of coordination that is essential in a global company but requires deliberate effort to maintain.

"It's like turning a cruise ship," Lori explained. "Change takes time, but by staying connected and prioritizing effectively, we can make meaningful progress."

Her guidance for others in similar roles centers on building trust, maintaining flexibility, and communicating clearly about the reasoning behind organizational changes -- particularly when those changes are met with resistance. Teams navigating similar scaling challenges may also find value in the How to Maximize Field Capacity webinar, which addresses operational design for field medical organizations.

Looking Ahead: Technology and the Future of Medical Excellence

Lori sees real potential in emerging technologies -- particularly AI and digital tools -- to support field medical teams in analyzing data, streamlining workflows, and surfacing actionable insights. Her own focus on developing digital fluency reflects a broader orientation in the field: Medical Affairs leaders are increasingly expected to engage with these tools as strategic capabilities, not just operational conveniences.

For teams exploring how AI fits into Medical Affairs operations, the AI for Medical Affairs: From Medical Leadership to MSLs webinar provides a grounded perspective on where these tools add value and where the constraints lie. The Medical Affairs Professional Society (MAPS) also publishes frameworks on Medical Excellence competencies that complement the kind of operational work Lori describes.

Conclusion

Lori Long's work at Sanofi illustrates what it takes to build and sustain medical excellence at scale: clear infrastructure, structured KOL relationships, a willingness to pilot and iterate, and consistent communication across a complex organization. Her experience highlights how the operational foundations of Medical Affairs -- dashboards, KPIs, value stories, team alignment -- are not administrative tasks but strategic enablers.

For more perspectives on Medical Excellence and field medical strategy, explore the OnPoint: The Medical Excellence Podcast.