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June 27, 2008
Medical Affairs Teams Prove Value Again ... and Again
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.
Posted by Amanda Zuniga at June 27, 2008 02:24 PM