Medical Affairs is a critical function in Pharma because it is a unique point of contact with external customers like HCPs and patients and brings critical impact to payers, regulators and reimbursement decision makers.
One of the Medical Affairs’ most critical tasks is to reach out to HCPs and provide them with scientific and accurate information on medicines in order to allow informed decisions on patients’ care with the final aim to improve patient outcomes. In addition, by bringing external customers’ insight into the organization, Medical Affairs allows strategy tuning and development of specific tactics.
As a consequence of the COVID pandemic, some changes accelerated: the time of interaction with customers is shorter, they have a strong preference to receive scientific and accurate information that can enlarge their knowledge of our medicines, and the need for a customer personalised approach is becoming critical to successfully engage.
Medical Affairs needs to rethink its capacity and capabilities to strategically continue to be a critical function within the organization.