Wow, the MAPS 2023 Nashville conference was amazing. I left feeling great. The energy was contagious!

The conference felt huge. There were so many people (1000+) and sessions. One bad thing is that there were so many sessions that I wanted to go to but couldn’t.

I attended 12 different sessions. There was one theme that kept popping up everywhere: the need for Medical Affairs to build trust. Keep reading for a couple of specific examples.

To Effectively Educate HCPs Building Trust is Key

The trust theme emerged in the first field medical day’s keynote. In Brian Dunn’s talk on Standing up for Science, he discussed Valerie Reyna’s research on how humans process info to inform actions. Here are the 3 main principles Brian covered:

1. Multiple representations of info are encoded.
2. Verbatim (details and quantitative) info degrades fast. Verbatim and gist (the bottom line or impressions) are encoded in parallel, stored separately, and retrieved independently.
3. Decision-making relies on the simplest representation (gist). Gist will override verbatim. Gist is determined by prior knowledge and highlights the need for education.

There were several important trust-based implications for Medical Affairs:

👉 To understand how external stakeholders make decisions, we must develop deep relationships to determine the base knowledge present to educate effectively.

👉 Trust is required to understand someone’s value system and how they will develop key takeaways (the gist).

Trust is Required for Omnichannel

Omnichannel was the top business buzzword at MAPS 2023 Nashville. Medical Affairs will fail at omnichannel if commercial is not included. It’s not possible to have a seamless experience for HCPs across all channels if all the channels are not included. In several of the omnichannel sessions how to partner better with commercial was discussed. Check out this hack from Kirk Shepard on how to embrace a partnership mindset. 

If you are looking to gather omnichannel insights, take a peak at this guide! 

Be Better Leaders by Focusing on Building Trust

Chris Fussel, author of One Mission: How Leaders Build a Team of Teams, talked about his experience scaling small high-performance teams. The secret sauce is developing a culture focused on trust. Here is a great tip Chris shared to help build trust in your team and organization.  Break trust down into the different types: 

🤝Emotional – I know you as a person

🤝Intellectual – Have you done your homework, trust work

🤝Consistency – Up and down and never know what you get, hard to trust. Don’t change your thinking so quickly.

Map out where your team/organization is sitting in each trust element and how to fix it. He suggests focusing on one area at a time. 

Conclusion: Building Trust Will Boost Medical Affairs

In the last session, Deborah Long summed it up nicely. She said that we need to be closer partners. This is what will elevate Medical Affairs. Being a good partner means building trust. 

Here are some other great tips to help you build trust: