Medical: The Sales Prevention Unit?
A fireside chat named after what commercial teams once quietly called Medical Affairs. My answer from the stage: if preventing the wrong patient getting the wrong medicine is sales prevention, guilty as charged. The real question is how Medical and Commercial both get to do their jobs well.
What were the key learnings?
We traced where the label came from: the trust deficit of earlier decades, when incentives crossed lines and Medical earned a reputation for saying no, and the “no free lunch, no free pens” era I was trained in as a medical student.
My reframe: everything the industry publishes has to be balanced, accurate, referenced and substantiated, while my university lectures go through no peer review at all. I could tell students the sky is purple and some would write it down. That level of regulation is a strength to build on, not a brake.
The practical material: how I unblocked sign-off logjams by putting job-bag reviews into diaries, so the medical, commercial and regulatory reviewers all work at the same time instead of asynchronously over weeks; why strong medical leadership must own a consensus risk position rather than leaving sign-off to individual temperament; and the blue ocean where the Code does not prescribe, provided you stick to its principles. Two examples from my AstraZeneca days: a national pharmacy chain asked to use our content to teach its own pharmacists, and a primary care network played our patient films during the fifteen-minute observation window after COVID vaccinations, reaching some of the most vulnerable patients in the system.
