JULY 2024LIFE SCIENCES REVIEW9Medical affairs and their knowledge, acumen, skills, resourcefulness, gravitas, and relationships can and should be a difference maker for your strategy teamsays, "To sleep; perchance to dream: ay there's the rub: for in that sleep of death what dreams may come?" But what does "the rub" mean, and from where did it originate?The 'rub' is medical affairs. Great medical affairs are both strategic and tactical. It is informed and informed. How does your medical affairs leadership address these opportunities and challenges? Can your medical affairs leader energize your advocacy, bring passion to your messaging, be a patient advocate, and lead? How do you design and enroll your trials? Can they galvanize the universe of internal and external stakeholders? Can they facilitate lagging trial enrollment? Do they have the skills and money to intervene, educate, prompt, and cajole? Can they be both entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial? How do they educate and elevate your commercial and marketing colleagues, patient groups, stakeholders, and payers? Through strategy and tactics, how do they advance impactful HEOR and RWE? Do they provide a publication plan that is cogent? How will they engage to amplify your publications for maximal benefit? What is the quality and derived value from how they connect, and does this resonate with your KOLs? How do your treating clinicians respond to your messaging? Is your Omnichannel delivering and informing effectively and on target? To what degree are advisory boards informing and yielding actionable insights? Do they include the right participants, questions, objectives, and yield? Are you getting strategic and tactical value from Phase IV Trials and post-approval registries with supporting narratives and indication expansion?An effective global strategy requires medical affairs to broaden the stakeholders it engages with. This entails moving beyond the key opinion leaders to meaningful engagement and scientific exchange with community physicians, payers, and other value-based decision-makers. To yield this end, medical affairs needs to be both informed and empowered to support and coordinate with external-facing teams, be visible, educate, inform, align, and advance critical agendas. Great medical affairs are about winning, competing, and delivering on the promise of today's breakthroughs to approval, strong indications, and market success.Medical affairs are not a commodity. Your team needs and deserves a medical affairs lead with connectivity, creativity, emotional intelligence, scientific excellence, and communication skills with HEOR, RWE, and publications wherewithal. Medical affairs are your diplomats, your source of scientific and educational credibility, and the crucible through which science meets real-world clinical practice. Diminution of the value and respect for medical affairs in your organization not only compromises your clinical program but can impede life-changing options for patients and their families. Medical affairs and their knowledge, acumen, skills, resourcefulness, gravitas, and relationships can and should be a difference-maker for your strategy team. If not, don't demean medical affairs, but rather critically seek, build and embrace the medical affairs paradigm your team needs and deserves. Someone with a rare or genetic disease is counting on you to live, to hear, to see etc.
< Page 8 | Page 10 >