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.

Topic 17 – New MA Organization – MedComm/SciComm

A reader and I discussed her dilemma the other day.  She was being tapped to create a new MA function for a small biotech that was bringing its first product to market.  She had fairly broad latitude but was not sure where to begin.  Some of the points of our discussion are captured below.

We have already discussed preparing an MA team for launch here, the effective way to manage MSL groups here  and the best way to develop a MedInfo function here, I thought I would focus on the Medical Communications or Scientific Communication group with this post.  A note about function names.  I very much prefer the term Scientific Communication because it more correctly reflects the role of the function which is to provide scientific data to the market place some of which is purely medical but some of which may be of a health economic nature that are not purely medical.

SciComm is a critical function for MA but developing one from scratch is as much a challenge in internal politics as a challenge in terms of operations.  At a small company, before there is a SciComm group the company is already publishing.  So, developing a group can be sensitive and many toes can be treaded upon if one is not careful.  The best approach is to co-opt the staff that have been driving the publication efforts in designing (and maybe leading) the new SciComm function.  But, it is critical that everyone involved realize that publications take on a broader role in SciComm than they did in CD.

In CD the role of publication was primarily focused on the results of clinical trials.  That continues to be a responsibility of SciComm but its role of sharing scientific data expands to identifying the scientific questions that the marketplace needs answered, some of which will be answered through literature analysis or through non-clinical studies.

Given that CD is typically handling the publications in advance of the SciComm function, the temptation may be to put developing the group on the back burner until other MA functions have been more fully developed.  This would be a mistake.  SciComm needs to be analyzing the scientific needs of the HCP community and ensuring that the required scientific information is available concurrently with launch.  Any delays can result in a vacuum of information and who knows what will fill that vacuum (or which competitors will try to fill that vacuum).  So, at least 18 months prior to the launch the SciComm group should be launched, right along side the MSL function.

What has been your experience with SciComm groups at launch?  Leave a comment.