Roche, Amgen and J&J MedTech leaders talk the transition of Medical Affairs from an executional to strategic function

The Executive Consortium of the Medical Affairs Professional Society (MAPS) published the white paper “The Future of Medical Affairs 2030” offering the first consensus position by senior global Medical Affairs leaders of the function’s evolving roles, activities, and value in society, industry, teams and as individuals. 

By 2030, Medical Affairs will solidify its transition from executional to strategic, and the function will come to represent the voice of the patient within industry.

In a panel discussion at the APPA-MAPS conference – led by AbbVie’s Lauren Passfield, VP of APPA (now MAPA*) – leaders from Roche, Amgen and J&J MedTech reflected on the key themes from the consensus paper.

Cae Tolman, Country Medical Director at Amgen said “Patients’ needs are changing. No longer do they believe that the doctor knows everything. In fact, Dr Google knows everything and I think we’re in an age of misinformation, and that applies to all of us. We see patients attending scientific congresses, and therefore their needs and their knowledge are changing. At the same time, we see decision making moving from the physician to broader stakeholder groups. There’s a lot of pieces involved in this. We have the patients, physicians, pharmacists, payers, policymakers, providers, and all of these stakeholders are increasingly important. So while we focus a little on patients, I think it also speaks to the need to broaden our stakeholder base.

“We live in a world of increasingly complex data and diverse stakeholder population. We need to understand the breadth of this scientific data and also understand the needs of each individual stakeholder and be able to translate it to them in a language that they understand. The more dialogue we have, the more insights we bring back to inform strategy throughout the whole product lifecycle.

“What we don’t see here [in the consensus paper] is definitions of success. How would we know we’re doing it right and where is the endpoint? That’s something that either version two will have to address or something we’ll have to find on our own.”

Simon Fisher, Director of Medical Affairs at Johnson & Johnson MedTech acknowledged that medical experts and key opinion leaders primarily source medical information on their own terms and via digital sources.

“So we have to be absolutely digitally available. I’ve already heard today about the Netflix concept – where the information needs to be available when we want it, where we want it and for how long we want it at the time. The average concentration span of a medical expert is somewhere between 15 seconds and 15 minutes, but it’s certainly not an hour. We need to adjust our messaging and how we approach the market.

“From a scientific data perspective, we need to understand the importance of health economics data. There are new trial methodologies and I implore you to learn about time and motion studies. These studies analyse the cost effectiveness of certain therapies in hospital, length of stay and the intrinsic costs,” he said.

Dan Thurley, APAC Informatics Network Head at Roche pointed to the elephant in the room. He said “It was a little bit of a surprise to not see making a profit for a company anywhere in the consensus paper. I think all of us apart from a couple of companies like Lundbeck and others are for profit organisations on the stock exchange and to ignore that in any conversation undermines people’s trust in the conversations that they’re having. It’s important at some point that we do talk about the benefit to society in us making a fair return on the investment to invest back again in healthcare.”

By 2030, Medical Affairs sets to empower societal decision-making by communicating the value of emerging treatments and being at the centre of societal issues such as access, health equity, outcomes and patient centricity. The teams will engage much broader stakeholder groups including patient groups, academia, governments, and health economics bodies “to ensure that our science and technologies benefit patients”.

*Medical Affairs Professionals of Australasia

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