Everyone in Medical Affairs always says to gather relevant insights you need to be guided by strategy. But what if you don’t have a Medical Strategy? How can you gather valuable insights without a Medical Strategy? A great approach is to focus on the product cycle life.

The Importance of Medical Strategy for Guiding Insights Gathering

If you work for a company that has a solid Medical Strategy and creates listening-priorities for the MSLs, you are LUCKY! This makes your insights gathering job so much easier. Listening priorities (sometimes called key insight topics, KITs, key insights questions, KIQs, strategic priorities, etc), tell you exactly what to focus on when engaging with your HCPs. It makes it so much easier to do pre-meeting planning, develop questions to ask, think of resources to use, etc. Watch this Strategy Hack with Ralph Rewers on using key questions to get better MSL insights to learn more.

But what happens when you don’t have the luxury of having listening priorities made for you? What can MSLs do to still gather valuable insights without a Medical Strategy?

Rich Swank and I hosted a webinar on the Difference Between Raw Data and Insights (watch the recording here) and what to focus on if there is no Medical Strategy came up. If you don’t focus on gathering insights that are relevant to strategy it results in MSLs trying to boil the ocean. They bring back information that is all over the place. Then the Medical Leadership team has to work extra hard to find something relevant.

How to Gather Valuable Insights Without a Medical Strategy:

1. Make sure there actually isn’t a strategy.

It’s possible that it hasn’t been communicated very well or that it has a different name. Focusing on the corporate strategy or medical objectives is the way to go whenever possible. This is the top way an MSL can bring back insights that are valuable and that leadership cares about.

2. Leverage knowledge about the product life cycle

If you are 100% convinced there is no strategy start thinking about the product life cycle. There are types of stakeholders and insights topics that are more common during the different life cycle stages. For example, in the pre-approval stage insights around the clinical trial are highly valuable. Are there barriers to enrollment that the company should be aware of? Is there an educational tool that could be created to help the study team?

Rich also recommends focusing on disease state education and gaps in this space. What do HCPs think of this disease area and the unmet need? Are there educational gaps? As an example, some disease areas benefit from genetic testing and not all HCPs are familiar with this. The Medical Affairs team may need to spend extra time and resources educating HCPs on genetic testing. Insights around how to better educate HCPs on genetic testing are also highly valuable.

For more ways to improve your understanding of the product life cycle and how to leverage this for insights gathering, check out our mini course on how to gather insights without a Medical Strategy.

Conclusions: How to Gather Valuable Insights Without A Medical Strategy

Focusing on the product life cycle to guide insights-gathering doesn’t mean ignore the Medical Strategy. We always recommend having a clearly communicated Medical Strategy in place and that MSLs use should this as a guide. MSLs that don’t have this luxury can start to think from a product life cycle perspective and the typical topics relevant in each stage.

For more info on how to leverage the product life cycle to gather insights without a Medical Strategy, check out our mini course!