Digital Transformation — Pharma Med Affairs
Project Overview
A leading pharmaceutical company, part of the Dow Jones index, was going through a digital transformation of its Medical Affairs group. They were looking at digital capabilities for the Medical Affairs team to drive better engagement and effectiveness with healthcare professionals (HCPs). The pharmaceutical company engaged the Sabii Digital team to ideate around different use cases, develop, implement and rollout pilot programs.
Capabilities: Design Thinking, Digital transformation, Technology assessment, implementation, rollout and operations.
Methodologies, Tools & Softwares: Design Thinking, Sabii’s proprietary pilot framework, Custom technology, and Zoom.
Industry: Pharmaceutical/Life Sciences
Project Duration: 1 year
Business Problem
The role of Medical Affairs within pharmaceutical companies has been evolving from a support role to a proactive lead role. In the past HCPs and company sales reps would reach out to Medical Affairs for supporting questions and off-label discussions. However, with the advent of specialized and expensive novel treatments, the role of the Medical Affairs teams has evolved into focusing more on customized patience care including access to medications and improved outcomes. Our client was looking at ways to achieve this through digital transformation of the Medical Affairs group.
Proposed Solution
The Sabii team was engaged jointly by the client’s digital leadership as well as the medical affairs leadership. The internal teams were brainstorming opportunities in the form of use cases for trial and test to see what digital capabilities could be most useful as part of this transformation. Sabii was tasked with working with the joint medical and digital teams to come up with a prioritized set of use cases, and to detail, scope and test these use cases leveraging internally or externally available digital technologies.
Sabii setup a working governance framework to help with this study. Working with the client, the Sabii team identified the various stakeholders and their personas and their resulting needs. The team also looked at the client’s product strategy keeping in mind their product pipeline and the future needs. The team then identified key pain points and defined a future state experience between the engagement and interactions between the HCPs and the Medical Affairs teams.
The team then prioritized three use cases that met the strategic, urgent and complexity criteria – the Important if the use case would work, the value it would create and if it was realistic to implement given the technologies needed and change management required. The Sabii team also setup advisory boards (“ad boards”) with external stakeholders to validate and test the hypotheses presented for each of the use cases.
During the course of the project, the team scoped out the use cases and the technologies needed for success, evaluated various technology tools and platforms and implemented the use cases as pilots with a robust setup of evaluation KPIs and metrics to determine whether the pilots were successful.
Conclusion
All three use cases were successfully implemented as pilot programs. Of these, two of the use cases were deemed successful and the actual solution was rolled out to all the medical affairs departments.
One of the successful use cases was focused on immediate digital engagement and connection between the HCPs and the medical affairs specialist at the moment of need. This was accomplished by allowing sales reps to seamlessly connect HCPs and medical affairs specialists during Zoom conversations and then be able to exit the conversation for any off-label conversations. Sabii defined the business requirements, researched and implemented a third-party technology and helped train and rollout the solution for over 300 medical affairs team members.
The second successful use case focused on providing the medical affairs team the ability to seamlessly share bite sized content with HCPs in a seamless way across all mediums (website, mobile, email, etc.) with the relevant tracking and auditing capabilities.
The success of the Sabii team in this project was due to their understanding of pharmaceutical trends, the medical affairs function and the methodology to evaluate and setup pilots and then scale them based on measured results.