Customer Centricity in Medical Affairs Needs Human-centric Artificial Intelligence.

The evolution of healthcare, together with the changing behaviour of healthcare professionals, means that medical affairs functions of pharmaceutical organisations are constantly reinventing themselves. The emergence of digital ways of working, expedited by the COVID-19 pandemic, means that pharmaceutical-healthcare relationships are evolving to operate in an increasingly virtual world. The value of the pharmaceutical medical affairs function is dependent on understanding customers' needs and providing the right knowledge at the right time to physicians. This requires a human-centric artificial intelligence (AI) approach for medical affairs, which allows the function to query internal and external data sets in a conversational format and receive timely, accurate and concise intelligence on their customers.

Developing Medical Affairs Leaders Who Create the Future.

Medical affairs has evolved over recent years from a support, to a partner, to a strategic leadership function. In the future, there will be significant changes in healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, and many of these will be due to technological advances and digitalisation. Medical affairs will be largely influenced by these developments in terms of partnerships with key stakeholders, embracing innovation and patient-centric healthcare, and demonstrating value for novel treatment options. In order to secure future success within their roles, medical affairs professionals will have to demonstrate specific capabilities founded on communications and behavioural change, business leadership acumen, knowledge acquisition and self-development, and the ability to generate real-world evidence from insights and expertise within data science and analytics. It will be our responsibility as medical affairs leaders to create this foundation for the leaders of tomorrow.