There are different understandings of digital healthcare. In my opinion, digital means quantifying everything for connection with computer technology. The keywords are connection, quantify, and technology. The connection is the final goal, quantify is the methodology, and technology is the tool. Among them, the connection is the leverage point for Medical Affairs to provide value through their expertise in therapeutic areas. Connection also represents the core spirit of digital.

So, how can Medical Affairs teams connect with stakeholders to create more successful digital healthcare systems?

1. Connect the Digital Pathway in Healthcare

Medical expertise is the basis and connection point for digital in healthcare scenarios, from identifying unmet medical needs to developing, assessing, deploying, collecting feedback, and updating digital solutions. Among these steps, medical expertise is of special importance for identifying unmet medical needs and assessing digital solutions. 

2. Identify Unmet Needs for Digital to Address

Identifying unmet medical needs is the first step for creating digital pathways in healthcare. Unmet medical needs exist almost everywhere in healthcare, but it’s not easy to identify them. It is critical for the success of digital healthcare. If the medical needs identified are invalid or fake, then no matter how advanced or fancy digital technology is, it will be abandoned. I have 2 examples here: 

1. Acromegaly is a rare disease with delayed diagnosis due to lack of typical symptoms, but the patients usually have characteristic facial features. So, a simple screening tool is needed. Can artificial intelligence deep learning on facial photographs generate a digital tool for early screening? This unmet medical need is clinically relevant and with an existing scientific basis. There’re already several machine learning studies on this topic. 

2. A project intends to help Alzheimer's patients by online early screening, education, and consultation. It seems to be a fancy online digital project. However, medical knowledge tells us that Alzheimer’s is a cognitive disorder in the elderly, and 1/3 of patients are older than 85 years (even their children are around 60 years old). Then, how can we expect online platforms to educate these people? No matter the website, social media, or apps, usage will be a challenge. 

3. Medical Affairs Can Assess Potential Digital Solutions for Healthcare

The criteria for the assessment of digital solutions for healthcare is not how advanced the technology is, but how efficient the unmet medical need gets solved. There’re a lot of fancy digital technologies nowadays, but technology can be valuable only when it can effectively solve a pain point in the real world. Medical Affairs staff, not digital engineers, are those who can make this judgment because of their medical knowledge and experience.  For example, a KOL mapping platform provides instant KOL profiling by web spiders, social listening, and other advanced technologies, to let the sales staff know what topics KOLs are interested in. However, sales staff don’t like it; even though they get the topics (many are basic research related), they don’t have the medical knowledge to understand them, let alone talk with KOLs about the topics. In this case, if the Medical Affairs staff is involved in the assessment of the platform, they can easily identify the gap between the topics found and the sales team’s knowledge level. Meanwhile, many unmet needs do not need cutting-edge technology to solve. There are plenty of examples in the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, remote monitoring of isolation wards was developed based on existing technologies of digital camera. But it has been proved in the real world to be effective and is among the topmost useful digital tools in fighting COVID-19, and even become part of the new normal. 

4. Connect Digital Among Healthcare Stakeholders.

Digital healthcare is a huge ecosystem with different stakeholders besides pharma, such as hospital leadership, physicians, nurses, drugstores, pharmacists, patients, insurance companies, government, e-commerce companies, logistics companies, etc. Medical Affairs have connections with many of these groups in our daily work. Therefore, Medical Affairs can be the medical bridge to close the loop of needs and supply.

How can Medical Affairs be Enabled for Digital Healthcare?

Medical Affairs should further enhance our key strength: knowledge. We should deepen our medical knowledge in specific therapeutic areas and widen our views on digital technology progress. Some of us may be worried that the value of knowledge will decrease in the era of digital, as artificial intelligence will soon surpass the human brain. Nowadays, more and more observers agree that a Centaur team of human+AI is the best model. AI is good at choosing answers, while humans are good at raising questions. It’s the centaurs of Human+AI, who won the online chess tournament among Human+AI, supercomputers, and human grandmasters.

Further studies found that, when you create a “Human+AI” team, the hard part isn’t the “AI”; it isn’t even the “Human”; it’s the “+” (Journal of Design and Science, Feb 07, 2018). That’s probably why the brain-computer interface (BCI) is one of the hottest topics nowadays. The value of the human brain in BCI is to ask the right question. To do that, we’d need a comprehensive knowledge reserve, both in-depth and in breadth. For Medical Affairs, we should have the deepest understanding of our therapeutic areas in the pharmaceutical industry, to represent the human part of centaur Human+AI, together with top academic KOLs. 

Content Is King, Knowledge Is The Baseline

The phrase “Content is King” has become even more true in the digital era. With digital, the channel is no more the bottleneck for HCPs and patients to obtain medical knowledge, quality of knowledge now becomes the key success factor to win customers and attract traffic. To generate good content, knowledge is the baseline.

Medical Affairs should start digitalization from our minds and from our sides. Digital is to quantify everything for connection. Computer technology is the tool to better achieve the goal. Technology is updating every day, but the core goal of digital never changes. Quantifying and connection can also be done with available technologies, provided we have a digital mindset.

We’re used to talking about digital and pursuing cutting-edge technologies for external uses, while our internal digitalization falls far behind. Why can’t we quantify our work for continuous improvement? We’re still unable to quantify most Medical Affairs-related work; Why can’t we connect our existing online systems for data integrity and synergy?

We’re still using tens of isolated systems and repeatedly enter information in different systems; Why can’t we collect customers’ information and insights from digital platforms automatically?

We’re still updating CRM systems manually to update information for customer management. All these don’t need cutting-edge technologies. The problem lies more in our mindset. Only when we have a digital mindset and dare to change ourselves, can we maximize the value of digital technology for healthcare. 

Medical Affairs should grow acumen for identifying unmet medical needs in real-world populations. Medical Affairs should pay attention not only to knowledge gaps among internal and external stakeholders but also operation and process gaps. 

For example, while we’re doing a lot of digital education to patients on the right treatments, patients’ top pain point is where to access treatments. In a healthcare application, the function of showing on a map the nearest drugstore with the drug is much more welcomed by patients than education or consultation functions. This example again proves that asking the right questions or identifying the right unmet needs is more important for a good solution than advanced digital technology. To identify the right pain points, Medical Affairs teams should go into the field and observe real-world scenarios with a customer-centric mindset, based on their medical knowledge.

Summary

Medical expertise is the key to strengthening Medical Affairs to incorporate the digital era, by closing the loop of healthcare unmet needs and digital solutions, across different stakeholders. To achieve that, we should enhance our medical knowledge, digital mindset and acumen for unmet medical needs.

Su Zhou is Head of China Medical at Ipsen