The Medical Affairs (MA) function in the pharmaceutical industry has grown in importance in recent years, having a more influential voice internally across organizations large and small and becoming significant budget holders. MA has grown into a trusted leadership pillar in pharma alongside colleagues from commercial and research and development making an impact with key stakeholders including healthcare practitioners, patients, and payers.

Medical Affairs teams are collaborating with other departments more than ever because of the rich datasets and insights generated by this group. Additionally, given we are in the age of digital transformation, we are seeing a whole new suite of communication strategies and tools arise in medical affairs.

These trends give us more opportunities to partner with our clients to strategize and help them navigate the changing market dynamics and bringing insights together from multiple stakeholders. For example, traditional publication work has experienced new life by embracing digital innovation, with publication enhancements such as animated figures, e-posters, and author videos.

New strategies, technologies, and tools, driven by artificial intelligence and personalization will come into play to shape communications strategies that achieve greater reach and impact than ever before. Medical Affairs teams will need deeper insight to determine what tools and channels will work best in communicating scientific data and messages with patients, payers and healthcare providers on their interconnected journeys. Scientific engagement is becoming much more sophisticated, which places a strong emphasis on greater internal collaborations between medical affairs, other departments, partnerships between patients, payers and healthcare professionals.

The hope is that all of these efforts in concert will allow for faster drug development and enable expedited access to life saving medications for patients across therapeutic areas.