Bringing omnichannel to medical affairs: what do you need to know?
January 16, 2024 | CRM, MSL, commercial strategy, emerging trends, medical affairs, omnichannel
By Frank Fisher
Early in 2023, we posted a piece on LinkedIn outlining five questions you needed to ask yourself if you were planning to bring an omnichannel approach to medical affairs – at that time, perhaps 20% of the inquiries we had from our clients fell into the medical omnichannel category. Today, that’s more like 75% – what a difference a few months makes! But this growth is of no surprise to us. In medical affairs, it is definitely this year’s hot topic, even more so than AI (let’s save that for another day). So hot in fact that we thought we’d revisit the topic, giving you some extended bonus content to consider.
Preparedness is key to any transformation, so if you’ve been asked to revolutionize any or all aspects of your medical affairs activities to fit within an omnichannel strategy, we encourage you to read on. Note: some of these questions will be most relevant to global or regional leads, but even at a country level, we hope there’s something that will resonate.
To help gauge where you are in your omnichannel journey, here are our original five questions, along with additional details and some real-world insights.
1. Is my medical field force ready to work within an omnichannel framework, and do my medical science liaisons (MSLs) understand what the benefits are?
This isn’t just about training. It isn’t just about taking your scientific narratives and converting them into Veeva-enabled interactive visual aids, although of course that’s part of it. In order to get your key account managers and MSLs using the new content you create and to help accurately segment your healthcare professionals (HCPs), you need to get their buy-in. They must know what omnichannel delivers for them, and for their HCPs, and they must believe in it. Remember, many of your MSLs will be thinking ‘omnichannel is for marketing, it’s all about sales, it’s commercial invading the medical space.’ At AMICULUM, we know it is anything but!
With omnichannel for medical we can build up a 360-degree picture of HCPs that will deepen our knowledge of them, their patients, their concerns, and their medical and scientific understanding. We can work from this to provide a better service, giving pinpointed communications and tailored educational materials. We can even incorporate machine learning and AI to monitor analytics and suggest next best scientific actions to MSLs to significantly increase HCP affinity. Done right, medical omnichannel makes an MSL’s job easier, makes them more effective, provides better information for HCPs and, in the end, better care for patients. But this needs to be explained to MSLs! We find that our educational tactics, such as 101 webinars, are the best way to kickstart internal buy-in, and often head off disquiet at an early stage. For omnichannel to work, you need field force enthusiasm.
2. Do I have all the practical necessities like a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database and medical communication consent in place?
Omnichannel isn’t hard, but it does have a lifecycle all of its own; try to break out of sequence and you will encounter problems. The CRM comes first, then once that’s populated, everything else follows. But don’t worry, we have yet to find a medical client who isn’t implementing this technology after their commercial colleagues, and your IT department will be well versed in what’s required. You may find that medical, legal, and regulatory (MLR) are as vital as IT in developing this framework, so get them involved early too.
3. Am I restricted to channels that commercial teams use, or can I include others such as congress activities and conversations?
You most definitely can use those channels – just make sure you have a good reason for it, and the technical capacity to capture those activities. As an example, we’re helping clients track HCP actions at physical events via congress apps and unique QR codes to indicate which HCPs visit certain breakouts. The technology isn’t the only critical factor. It’s planning your activities so that capturing these HCP actions is of value to you. So, consider your segmentation and what it takes to move a HCP from one level to another; how would actions at these meetings indicate this transition had taken place? Now build that into trackable touchpoints and you’re done!
4. Have I considered a role for publications in this strategy?
A basic standard would be ensuring that field force have the right tools in their hands following publication. For example, we developed a Veeva-compliant interactive publications tool that updated so rapidly, our clients could have their field force explaining the precise relevance of new publications to HCPs within a week. Ideally, you’d want to move beyond this by incorporating trackable phrases in publications and titles, monitoring social and scientific media for these terms, gauging spread and impact, and then looking back at HCP activities to monitor the uptake. As you might imagine, getting your publications colleagues on board is the most crucial step!
5. What would successfully implementing omnichannel for medical look like, and can that be measured?
In short, knowledge is success and success is knowledge. A perfectly executed medical omnichannel strategy helps you and your team learn all about HCPs as they are learning all about your products, and the science underpinning them. Medical omnichannel is actually the best way we know of demonstrating return on investment for Medical. Done well, your HCPs learn what you want them to learn, focus on what you want them to focus on, accept what you want them to accept, and align perfectly with your presentation of the scientific story. Plus, with omnichannel analytics, you can measure this progress, objectively, every step of the way.
Answering these five questions will give you some initial direction in applying omnichannel to medical affairs. We know everyone’s at different stages of their omnichannel journey and, for medical teams, the jargon can be an irritation.
If you’d like a jargon- and obligation-free chat to dig a little deeper into any of these topics, please get in touch with Frank Fisher at frank.fisher@amiculum.biz. For more insights, visit the AMICULUM blog site.
This content was provided by AMICULUM
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