CCC recently moderated a panel discussion on best practices and strategies for Medical Affairs teams when acquiring, managing, and disseminating scientific articles and other content to internal stakeholders, as well as sharing content externally in ways that are copyright compliant.
The panel was hosted by the Medical Affairs Professional Society (MAPS), and CCC was joined by two experts in the field: Cassie Singleton, Director, Medical Information from Becton Dickinson (BD), and Sarah Guadagno, Ph.D, the Founder/Principal of 8X Life Science Communications.
Below is an excerpt from the discussion. For more, you can watch a recording of the entire session now.
What are the top two to three challenges medical affairs teams face when searching for and leveraging content?
Sarah Guadagno:
The first is always navigating copyright permissions. “How can I reuse and share scientific information publicly, from the published literature?” That’s one of the biggest questions people have and continue to have. The second one is difficulty with efficiently searching for and discovering relevant content, building search terms, figuring out where to go to search for something, getting relevant results back, etc. The last one is analyzing and synthesizing those types of literature into actionable insights and formats that you can then share internally.
Medical affairs team members often indicate that getting copyright permission and sharing literature can be a real challenge day to day, and can be an impediment to their work. And challenges for searches range from “I have to go to lots of different sites and places to search for things,” or “I don’t know exactly how to write a search query that actually reflects what exactly I’m looking for.” And people often say, you know, “I do the best I can. I rely on colleagues. I might have to go to a vendor to help me.”
I would highly recommend cultivating a group of super users. This really makes a big difference to help getting people on board with a platform and using it effectively. Your super users will be the ones who really know the ins and outs of the tool that the company has in place, and they can help team members, and oftentimes it’s easier than having to go to like a help desk or something like that. They’re sort of your built-in experts.
Cassie Singleton:
BD is a very large organization, we have 100 medical affairs associates alone. I can’t claim to know everyone’s struggles, but what I see is with an organization so large, sometimes it’s hard to know what resources are available to you. You have your onboarding and training, and you’re drinking from a fire hose because all this information is coming in so fast. And you have an intranet where you can go and search for stuff, but if you don’t know what you’re looking for, it’s hard to find what you need. So to be able to communicate what tools are available is a big challenge.
Another challenge I see is with healthcare professionals. Many were bedside two years ago, they’re not copyright lawyers. I don’t think you need to go to law school to understand the basics, and there is a need to educate them on copyright. They need to know that just because they can go and pull a piece of literature from their school library doesn’t mean it’s okay for them to share it with a customer, or just because they have it on a shared drive it’s not okay to share with customers, either. Within my team, we have a place online where they can go find information on what tools are available, and then also our legal team has training and resources available, too. So we try to train, train, train.
What role does technology play in assisting medical affairs teams with streamlining access to content, promoting collaboration, or solving the challenges they face?
Cassie Singleton:
If I go back 20 years to when I first started at BD, I remember we would get inquiries, and I’d have to walk to my file cabinet and sort through hard copies of articles to find what was requested. That’s how much has changed in 20 years, how much the process is now streamlined, how we search for content, identify what we need, and the way we purchase copyright permissions. Not to mention having a tool to help us identify any copyright permissions we have for content and how we might be able to share content and organize and store it.
As AI and other new technologies become more prevalent and play a larger and larger role in our work, our process will continue to become more streamlined. We will become more time efficient and really more effective, able to work smarter and to collaborate more easily. That’s why it’s so important for everyone to understand that resources and tools available to them, and how to use them most effectively. This all ties back to making everything as simply as possible, which makes it easier to train people, to collaborate, and even save money.
Sarah Guadagno:
Technology is moving really fast, and I think the key thing is adoption and getting people accustomed to changing the way they work, which takes time and effort. Some people are early adopters, and some people are never adopters. So it’s really important to do continuous training with the super user I mentioned earlier.
AI tools can really be incredibly helpful for search and management, especially if you set them up right and you know how to train them, which is different than setting up a Boolean search. But once you get AI trained and you’re prepared to overcome challenges with it like hallucinations, you can quickly screen through things that meet your search criteria. And the more you use it, and the more feedback you give it, usually the better it gets, and it can be kind of an extension of your team, I’ll call it a smart assistant.
One of the newest things is using AI to extract data points and text and figures and things like that, summarizing results. Of course, you need to manually check these, because AI can hallucinate, it can make mistakes and it can make things up. So it does need some oversight, and it’s not going to replace your judgment, but it can help you work smarter, which can be very valuable for both big companies and those with smaller teams.
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