Medical Affairs Data Centricity: Advanced Data Analysis for Patient Outcomes
A Reuters webinar on real-world evidence and advanced analytics, recorded weeks after ChatGPT launched. My take-home message for the audience was simple: go and try ChatGPT today, then tell your frontline colleagues about it, because these tools will change how medicine learns.
What were the key learnings?
Alongside senior medical affairs leaders in oncology and diabetes, we worked through why real-world evidence matters from the earliest phase: registration trials exclude the very populations clinicians actually treat, and regulators are increasingly open to real-world data, from the FDA’s 2018 framework to a medicine licensed in the US on real-world evidence alone.
My contributions: the Blockbuster Video warning I gave in one of my first pharma interviews, because believing you are too big to fail is exactly how you fail; investing for “the day after tomorrow” instead of perpetually firefighting yesterday’s mess; and the ACT on Heart Failure example, where mapping the patient pathway surfaced patients sitting on general wards with unidentified heart attacks, and where we transferred business-case and boardroom skills to clinicians rather than renting the system a nurse for a year.
I also argued for building capability rather than perpetually outsourcing: reverse mentoring from the digital natives coming through our organisations, and pharma-funded digital literacy for clinicians on the model of Barclays’ Digital Eagles campaign. Nobody goes to work wanting to do a bad job; these tools help people do a better one inside a strained system.
