There is a lot of talk and confusion around what artificial intelligence (AI) can do for Medical Affairs teams. Thoughts about AI range from it will take our jobs to I don’t trust it to what does AI stand for. To help Medical Affairs team get a better understanding of how AI can be used in our space, I partnered with Matt Lewis, an expert in using AI in Medical Affairs. Matt shares one of his favorite hacks for how to use AI to put the scientific literature into context. 

READ NEXT: 3 Creative Ways To Use AI in Medical Affairs

How Should Medical Affairs Think About AI?

Treating human disease is complex and it is keeps getting more complex. This is good for Medical Affairs. We can just keep being experts in science and medicine and not worry about AI stealing jobs. That doesn’t mean we should ignore AI.

The way Medical Affairs should be thinking of AI is as an assistant. 

Read this article for ways AI can help you be more creative and productive. 

Computers can do things humans are slow and bad at much more quickly. A great Medical Affairs AI use case is tagging MSL insights.

Some MSL teams gather hundreds to thousands of insights that need to be collated and analyzed. Some poor medical director may have to tag all these insights manually. It takes forever and can introduce bias. AI can tag insights much more quickly and with less bias. Then the medical director/leads can spend their time identifying trends and using the info to drive decision making.

Medical Affairs Case Example: Use AI to Put the Scientific Literature into Context

Matt has been working with AI in Medical Affairs over the last 5 years to help augment the work Medical Affairs is doing and make them more effective. One of his favorite new tools is scite.

scite uses AI to analyze citations of scientific literature to understand what the research community thinks. It looks at all the papers citing your paper of interest and then assigns sentiment. This is what he means by using AI to put the scientific literature into context. 

Think about how helpful this is for Medical Affairs. For example, you have the publication of your company’s clinical trial data. Over time this paper will (hopefully) accumulate a lot of citations. Ideally you have time to read all of the citations and understand the overall sentiment. In reality this doesn’t happen. scite does it for you and saves boatloads of time. 

scite is an excellent example of how Medical Affairs can leverage AI to be more efficient. Watch the video to see how Matt’s team integrates this tech into Medical Affairs platforms. It’s a really cool application of AI!

P.S. scite has a chrome extension. 

Conclusion: AI Can Help Medical Affairs Be More Efficient

The increased interest in AI is great for Medical Affairs teams. Thinking about it as an assistant will help understand how it can make Medical Affairs more effective, think more strategically, and ultimately create better outcomes for patients. 

How are you currently using AI to be better at your job?