Topic 26: Highlights of Day 3 of the Medical and Scientific Communications 2013 Forum

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The final half day for the MSC meeting had an excellent and well received discussion about MSL metrics.  I also attended an interesting talk on coordinating global publications.  My take on it below

DISCLAIMER:  My focus is on interesting information, I did not try to take verbatim notes and will not try to assign comments to a particular speaker.  Any mistakes are mine alone.

In no particular order, some of things are found interesting included:

-  Metrics

• Must vary as focus of the organizations varies
  
  
  
  • Plays back to earlier comments about staying focused if you want to see improvement over time
  
  
  • Mix of Activity, Value and Compliance measures are needed
  
  
  • IIS Metrics
    
    
    
    • Good to track in terms of just a sense of the program
    
    
    • NO goals should be put in place
    
    
    • Additional metrics discussed
      
      
      
      • Engagement with ACOs or Cancer Networks or other new healthcare entities
      
      
      • Congress attendance valued by quality metric of the outputs not the activity
      
      
      • Dollars saved by asking MA to assist CD, especially when CD has a bid from a vendor to provide the same service
      
      
      • Internal stakeholder feedback
        
        
        
        • Important – best to solicit directly via email/conversation
        
        
        • BE CAREFUL – some organizations do not allow feedback from Commercial
        
        
        
        
      
      
      
      
    
    
    
    
  
  
  
  

-  Reports/Dashboards/Scorecards

• Need to develop different outputs for different stakeholders


• What is needed internally at MA is not what you want to focus on with other internal stakeholders


• Always pair summarized numbers with text explaining value and highlighting accomplishments/learnings

-  MA IT Systems

• As mentioned earlier, a number of companies seem to be moving toward the Veeva Platform which is built on top of Salesforce.com CRM.
  
  
  
  • Veeva seems to be driven by the commercial side, but it has MA capabilities
  
  
  • Some people mentioned that you need to be careful about Veeva training and documentation as it often defaults to commercial language
  
  
  • Some organizations use it to track not only KOL interactions but also time spent in the office doing various projects
  
  
  • Focus on time tracking seemed to be for internal management not for external publication
  
  
  
  

-  Global Publication Coordination

• Increasingly important to have global plan


• Much easier to manage when Pub Team gets involved earlier in the development cycle


• MA on Pub Team should work as a facilitator for Pub Team’s interaction with other functions given their central role


• Press release management globally remains a major challenge
  
  
  
  • General consensus that prior to first presentation at a meeting, press release should be simply binary – met endpoints, did not meet
  
  
  • Too much data in press release can tick off journals threatening publication
  
  
  
  

-  Odds and Ends Ideas

• Heard from a number of different companies that MSL groups focused on payer support in the US need to be between 6 and 10 in size to cover all the needs – not scientific but an interesting convergence


• MSLs at clinical study initiation visits:
  
  
  
  • Good idea BUT has GCP implications
  
  
  • Need to hammer out how MSLs can fit within CD’s SOPs with ClinOps before engaging
  
  
  • May ultimately require update to CD’s SOPs
  
  
  
  

Obviously, this is merely a few key concepts from the day but it should give you some flavor of the type of discussions and the focus of the meeting.

If you were at the meeting and have other thoughts please leave them in the comments.