Creating a global medical affairs governance roadmap

The challenge

A global pharmaceutical company based in Europe was challenged in creating a consistent approach and practical steps to enabling multiple countries’ medical affairs teams to support launches. With a need to create greater efficiency across the teams, the client partnered with Vynamic to develop a roadmap to ensure that there was a consistent and repeatable process. From a business culture perspective, another important goal was for Vynamic to identify existing best practices within the medical affairs teams in Europe, and sharing them more broadly across teams.

The approach

The client had upcoming launches in one of their key therapeutic areas. It was critically important for the company to ensure that each of the medical affairs teams and their respective colleagues were able to prepare for and execute the launches effectively. Vynamic took a very agile approach through our methodology, and designed this project in a way that enabled us to identify the critical team members who we needed to speak with. From there, we brought our expertise to design and draft a roadmap that would be socialized with the critical team members in order to receive buy in.  

The key expected benefits that we identified for affiliates were to ensure: 

• Clear strategic positioning 
• Visibility and voice for the affiliates
• An enjoyable working experience 
• Local focus that could flex irrespective of country and market size 

The result

There were two key deliverables that resulted in the final completion of the project. The first was a maturity model that stretched across the domains of where the different markets were from a medical perspective, regarding key things such as KOL engagement, their generation of data, and their preparedness for launch. The second deliverable was a one page overview that laid out the key activities and milestones from a medical affairs perspective that spanned from -4 years to launch to +1 year. It covered some of the critical business activities that the medical affairs function should undertake with key recommendations on when they should start and when they should be completed by for success.  

From Vynamic’s follow-on engagement and discussion with clients, we know that the governance roadmap, in particular the recommendations and framework around launch timings, has helped the client become more efficient and confident in their launch planning. Recent launches have been very successful. 

An enduring impact of the project is a commitment to have an earlier engagement with medical affairs in activities such as data generation and launch planning, and that there be a tighter connection from global to local.  

These results can also be achieved in other companies, irrespective of size and portfolio or franchise makeup.

For more on Medical Affairs in Product Launch planning, see Six Key Elements for Medical Affairs in Product Launch Planning.