Medical omnichannel: Reimagining HCP engagement to drive patient outcomes at scale

A fireside chat with Alex Condoleon, head of medical engagement and impact at Pfizer, at Reuters Pharma Customer Engagement USA.

Key takeaways:

• Medical affairs is evolving to connect with physicians where unmet patient need is the highest.
• Organizational culture and structure are as critical as technology in enabling successful medical engagement transformation.
• Maintaining scientific integrity while innovating is essential as medical affairs expands its organizational footprint.

No surprise, the pharmaceutical industry is on the cusp of significant change—with the launch of new molecules and a deluge of new evidence to be assimilated into clinical practice. This creates both a challenge and an opportunity for medical affairs teams, which must find more effective ways to communicate scientific information to healthcare professionals to drive patient outcomes at scale. Traditional approaches that concentrate only on a few key opinion leaders (KOL) are proving insufficient to meet the evolving needs of the broader medical community. Our current medical engagement model can drive even greater impact for our HCPs and the patients we serve.

In this fireside chat at Reuters, I talk with Alex Condoleon, head of medical engagement and impact at Pfizer. At issue are practical strategies for medical affairs engagement transformation—how data-driven omnichannel approaches can help reach more physicians with relevant scientific information and improve patient care by addressing clinical care gaps and knowledge gaps at the places it exists.

Jones Jaick: It’s an overall very exciting time for pharma with the next seven years having 830 plus launches—which means a ton of science and a ton of data to be shared across physicians and patients. However, our current engagement model within medical affairs is not really set up to serve that medical impact. Medical affairs institutions are mostly KOL-focused, and pharma is largely product-led as opposed to HCP-led or science-led. This approach simply doesn’t align with what physicians need from us.

Alex Condoleon: We’ve taken the approach, until now, that if we start with the opinion leaders, the knowledge will trickle down. But when we start to think about impacting patient care, we need to understand where the patients and HCPs are in their journey. HCPs need immediate access to relevant scientific information. The less an HCP must search for information—and the more that information is brought to them based on their needs via their trusted sources—the better it is for our patients.

We also need to move from traditional real-world evidence, which is at a population level and looking backward, to real-time evidence that shows the evidence HCPs are confronting right now and how they can make an immediate impact on the patient population. That’s a great way to leverage the medical and scientific capabilities within our organizations.

JJ: At ZS, we’ve seen transformational results when companies implement proper medical omnichannel strategies. We can connect with five times more physicians and connect more meaningfully with them. We can reach them five times faster with the right evidence and scientific information they need for adoption in clinical practice. As medical organizations, medical can start to engage way ahead of launch to really shape the scientific landscape, both with KOLs and community physicians. This approach allows us to engage a broader community, as well as address a sizeable amount of knowledge gaps and care gaps.

AC: In my mind, it’s not a question of whether medical affairs teams are effective—if we weren’t impactful, we wouldn’t have large professional services teams in medical affairs. It’s a question of whether we’re willing to be more effective and get more signals to inform us on how to increase our effectiveness. Are we willing to take accountability for the results? If we aspire to but don’t get care gap or scientific knowledge closure right away, we shouldn’t blame methodologies or teams, instead we should look at the entire value chain and see what needs to be enhanced and improved to get to the desired level of medical impact.
 

The key is our willingness as medical organizations to learn and improve to further drive that impact. Are we willing to change our approach and rethink our ways of working to break down the next barrier and seize the next medical impact opportunity?

JJ: At ZS, we’ve identified several core capabilities that are essential to making medical omnichannel work. You can’t take what’s done in commercial and simply apply it to medical. What we need is more of a strategy-driven, data-informed, integrated approach that is bespoke to medical affairs. You need an integrated data foundation to support personalized medical engagement. You need a dedicated medical analytics function, which is becoming such a core piece across organizations. We need a global content capability that can transform information in a way that’s suitable for our audience. And we need an integrated channel and automation capability to deliver that personalized last-mile experience providing what HCPs need and when they need it. All of this must be situated within a proper operations and execution framework so it can work systematically.

AC: Whether sitting under one organization or connected through collaborative ways of working, it’s critical to build out some of these new medical capabilities to help us all move closer to personalized medical engagements. By connecting an end-to-end value chain, build upon integrated data foundations and powered by medical analytical capabilities, we can maximize the ways in which we impact patients. We’ve got to innovate on each of those capability pillars Jones outlined, and we’ve got to be able to create a coherent workflow that reaches the customer effectively. That’s where it gets critical. There is value in each capability pillar, but most value is in the interdependency across pillars. That’s how we get the knowledge transfer that improves care.

This is a massive piece of change, and it’s going to take medical organizations a while to fully embrace it. The critical part is how we challenge ourselves to build the right skills, ensure the right data logic and the right analytics to make it effective.

JJ: Organizational structure, talent and culture are absolutely foundational to making this transformation work. You can have all the technology and data in the world, but without the right organizational setup and culture that embraces this change, you simply won’t succeed. The companies we’ve seen succeed have invested heavily in enhancing talent, building digital literacy, partnering with commercial colleagues compliantly and enabling a center of excellence with matrix teams. These are core considerations for any organization undertaking this transformation.

AC: It’s one thing to see an opportunity and another to seize it. Something has changed externally that demands a system change. This is all about magnifying how we turn up to work every day—it’s also about leveraging the right data and analytics. It’s a major transformation within the function and how we think about the function. It’s a major lift in the maturity of how we talk to our internal business partners. It’s a major learning curve in how we present ourselves to a broader set of HCPs including those in community practice that manage a large patient population with huge disease burden.

JJ: Analytics and AI are completely changing what’s possible in medical engagement. We’re seeing organizations differentiate themselves by infusing analytics and AI across the entire medical engagement value chain—from physician planning to understanding physicians’ needs and patients’ gaps. Companies can now be truly personalized in content, using AI for analytics, experience optimization and channel choice. AI within channel platforms and decision engines allow teams to be more responsive, and generative AI is revolutionizing HCP interactions in ways we couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago.

AC: You’re absolutely right Jones. Our medical analytics function, for example, is focused on solving a range of issues—identifying HCPs with unmet needs, analyzing content effectiveness and channel mix, and exploring Gen AI-based initiatives etc. These advancements inform the foundation of the entire value chain to working with medical stakeholders.

There’s a phrase “In the absence of data, we are always right.” The data may not always be 100% complete, but at least we’re challenging our notions and testing our ideas instead of believing we’re 100% right every time. It’s one thing to know what we’re seeking to solve for and who we should be engaging. It’s another thing to understand if our content is fit for purpose and if we’ve understood where we should be investing in the channel mix.

JJ: With firm strategic thinking and dedicated capabilities, we can get a more HCP-centered plan, leveraging responsive channels to address care gaps. The key is to lead with the HCP in mind, their needs and the science that is required to deliver the best care. That’s the transformation that will truly differentiate medical affairs in the coming decade.

AC: We need to stay true to the value that we know we bring to HCPs. Our objectivity, our balance, our commitment to science, our belief that good science is going to translate into good clinical practice has to be foundational and maintained.

At the same time, we need to understand that as we have a much bigger footprint in organizations, we need to talk a different language internally to explain why we keep demanding more resources and how those resources are being responsibly deployed.

Compliance presents both an opportunity and a perceived challenge—it helps us do the right thing, but sometimes we can self-impose constraints in our innovative mindset. The rules of the game are the rules of the game, and the question is how we can innovate within constraints while maintaining our scientific integrity. That is what our success will look like.