It was a shock when COVID cancelled our in-person meetings with HCPs. And then we found a better way.

It came as a shock to me and my colleagues last year when we realized that office appointments and face to face meetings, core activities for those of us who work in the field with medical professionals, would be cancelled because of COVID. How would we interact if we couldn’t visit doctor’s offices and clinics? How could we get expert opinions and advice without convening face-to-face meetings and advisory boards?

In retrospect, it took our medical affairs organization all of about five minutes to figure out that this new environment wasn’t a problem, it was a solution, and would help us make a clean break from how the pharmaceutical industry has historically operated. Instead of spending hours travelling between various clinics, we could focus our time where it mattered: engaging with clinicians and seeking their insights. COVID was the impetus that enabled us to modernize and drive forward a new era of engagement.

Not only could we change our ways of working, we could make that shift without changing our mission of providing accurate, fair, and balanced information to health care professionals (HCPs) about the data that supports our medicines. Our successful adoption of a new model for engagement has been highly successful, measured by our ability to maintain and even increase pre-COVID engagement numbers and increase our average length of engagement pre-COVID by nearly 10 minutes, to 52 minutes.

Recently, I was part of the Reuters Pharma USA 2021 conference to discuss these points and how we can continue to best support the HCPs and patients we ultimately serve. Here are a few key takeaways:

Make investments for the new era: It’s critical to invest resources specifically in medical/digital that allow for a dedicated focus on content creation and virtual engagements. At ViiV Healthcare, the only company solely focused on HIV, we’ve specifically built a small, dedicated team to focus on digital engagement at virtual medical congresses. It’s also essential to rethink the kind of content that healthcare companies provide to ensure it’s digestible and packaged in a way that’s fit for purpose. If you simply take the content you’ve created for a face-to-face engagement and use it in a virtual format, it’s not going to be successful.

Challenge yourself to think differently: One of the more important approaches we’ve prioritized in the last year has been a mindset shift and an evolved way of working that’s probably had more impact than any organizational change. For example, some of the early medical meeting platforms were not very user friendly.  So we asked, “What role can we play to make sure physicians can access the information that they need and become a bridge to support them in this virtual world?” It’s an approach that’s allowed us to build stronger relationships with the HCP community, while also ensuring they can access the information they need to make decisions.

Develop better metrics of success: We need to develop better metrics for ourselves. So much of the old way of thinking used to be quantitatively focused on how often we were able to visit with HCPs and how much time was spent “in the field.” But as we develop newer medicines that we believe are improvements to the current standard of care and have more patients who take them, that should translate to better outcomes for patients. The industry needs to explore how we can measure patient outcomes as a marker for the quality and the type of work we do within medical affairs. 

It’s not about you: In the midst of this change, it’s critical we don’t lose sight of what’s most important. The voices of physicians and patients need to be baked into a company’s mission and purpose, and it must be a very deliberate strategy. How this is done very much depends on relationships and ensuring there are robust mechanisms in place to gather those insights from physicians and patients, and then foster them in internally. This keeps the individuals who are in need of care at the heart of what we do. For us, people living with HIV are our North Star, and we remain focused on our mission of ensuring no one living with HIV is left behind. 

Let’s carry the insights of 2020 forward

The pandemic has placed pressure on pharmaceutical  companies to reinvent the way we connect with our stakeholders, marking shifts in ways of working that could have taken decades to bring about organically. While we still believe in the value of in-person engagements and  look forward to a return to face-to-face interactions, it’s critical we also carry forward the innovations, best practices, and new ways of thinking that have emerged from the past year and align our work to our mission.

In medical affairs, we need to focus on continuous improvement, continuing to challenge the status quo and remaining committed to an agile, patient-centered mindset. The days of maintaining an approach or way of working, “because we’ve always done it that way,” are gone.  The time of Medical is now! And we are ready to adapt in the moment to ensure we are meeting the needs of clinicians, regardless of our environment, for the benefit of patients.