Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13915
Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.
Publication type: news
Zuniga A.
Medical Affairs Teams Prove Value Again ... and Again
PharmaEdge 2008 Jun 27
http://blog.cuttingedgeinfo.com/archives/2008/06/index.html#a000142
Full text:
Medical affairs groups often serve as the main scientific conduit between
pharmaceutical companies and the medical community. Companies rely heavily
on medical affairs groups to deliver scientific information and messages.
While companies steer away from tying medical affairs value to sales figures
because of compliance issues, medical affairs teams evaluate their value on
other terms.
To demonstrate their teams’ worth, most medical affairs groups use a
combination of hard and soft success measures. Ranging from soft measures,
such as feedback from thought leaders, to harder metrics, such as the number
of medical abstracts produced over the year. However, a number of the
activities medical affairs groups are tasked with are difficult to quantify
with hard measures. Nonetheless, it is important for medical affairs groups
to have some sort of measurement model in place in order to understand the
value created by their activities as well as identify improvement areas.
Another reason medical affairs groups should make a concerted effort to
measure their success is that they can leverage their value to justify
additional funding or resources. In many cases, medical affairs group have
to vie for limited resources against functions such as marketing and
commercial operations which are able to point to definitive sale numbers in
support of their success. Thus it is critical for medical affairs group to
have some form of measurement that they can leverage to demonstrate their
value to the organization. It is often important for senior management to
have some indication of the value medical affairs brings when making
resource allocation decisions.
