May 2026 • PharmaTimes Magazine • 18-19
// PATIENTS //
Seize the way
From listening to action – turning medical insights into patient impact
Biopharma has never generated more data, more innovation or more scientific exchange.
Yet despite being one of the most valuable assets for improving patient outcomes, medical insights from the field remain underused.
The industry is facing a structural paradox. Breakthrough therapies are becoming more complex and targeted, but bringing them to market is slower, more expensive and more uncertain. Up to 90% of medicines that enter clinical development never reach the market.
In this environment, being able to understand real-world clinical need early and continuously is more than a competitive advantage, it is a necessity.
Medical affairs are at the centre of this opportunity. Through scientific exchange with key opinion leaders (KOLs), medical science liaisons (MSLs) capture frontline clinical insights that inform medical strategy, ensuring a therapy meets real-world patient needs.
“As you prepare for launch, medical insights become especially valuable – helping to shape medical strategy, refine scientific communications and guide overall impact in the field,” says Kristina Kipp, regional medical director at BridgeBio.
But today, there is a clear gap between what the field hears and what the organisation acts on.
The cost of not listening
KOLs are not reluctant to engage. On the contrary, Veeva research shows they are highly willing to contribute.
Almost all are open to sharing their perspectives and most are comfortable being associated with the insights they provide.
Yet they believe only 30% of their input is ever used.
That gap represents far more than process inefficiency. It is lost intelligence on unmet medical need, evidence gaps, education requirements, trial recruitment barriers and access challenges, all of which directly influence patient care and therapy adoption.
At the same time, biopharma leaders recognise the strategic importance of insights but despite significant investment in digital initiatives, rate their own insight maturity as only average.
Technology has accelerated insight identification, but execution has not kept pace. Insight capture remains inconsistent; analysis is often slow and fragmented across systems and many organisations still struggle to identify and act on meaningful patterns at scale.
What should be a continuous flow of intelligence is frequently reduced to isolated data points, making it difficult to prioritise what matters or respond in time.
For many field teams, this creates a growing sense of frustration.
As one executive director of global field medical excellence at a large biopharma explains, “We hear from the field all the time: it’s like a dark hole.
“I’m throwing my insights into the CRM, and does anyone even look at them? Is anyone doing anything with them?”
‘As you prepare for launch, medical insights become especially valuable – helping to shape medical strategy and refine scientific communications’
From insight to impact
For years, the industry has focused on scaling insight capture. The next phase is about operationalising insight to impact.
Three structural barriers consistently prevent this:
- Unclear ownership once insights are shared
- Limited cross-functional flow beyond medical affairs
- No systematic way to track outcomes.
When accountability is diffused, even the most important medical themes arrive too late, lack follow-through or fail to influence decision-making.
Field teams feel this acutely; they contribute intelligence without visibility into whether it changes anything.
Closing the listening gap therefore requires a new operating model that enables biopharma to act on what they learn.
Scaling insight into action with AI and medical themes
Artificial intelligence is transforming what is possible in the insight life cycle. Many organisations have taken the first step with homegrown tools to support insight capture and basic summarisation.
While these reduce manual effort, they are often difficult to scale, fragmented across systems and struggle to keep pace with rapid AI innovation. As the volume and complexity of field intelligence grow, static models and periodic analysis quickly become a bottleneck.
The next phase is the continuous analysis of large volumes of interactions and real-time detection of emerging medical themes. This is the shift from processing individual insights to understanding the patterns that sit behind them.
Medical themes are what turn data into direction. By aggregating insights into clear, evidence-based signals, they enable teams to separate signal from noise, prioritise what is urgent and present a coherent strategic narrative to leadership.
They make it possible to identify risks and act on opportunities earlier. Advanced solutions already combine AI with human oversight to proactively identify medical themes across thousands of insights in real time.
This changes organisational speed.
But fast insight identification alone does not create impact. As the ability to detect themes improves, the constraint shifts to decision-making, governance and cross-functional execution.
The companies that lead are those that embed these insights into how strategy is set and acted upon, connecting what they hear directly to what they do.
A company-wide framework for insight activation
Leading organisations are moving towards a standardised, enterprise-wide approach built on four principles:
1. Define a single, shared insights process
Start by aligning on what constitutes an insight, how it is prioritised and how it moves from the field to decision-makers. This must involve the teams that collect insights and those that act on them
2. Assign clear accountability for action
Insights create value only when someone is responsible for activating them. Medical affairs is uniquely positioned to lead this follow-through and ensure scientific intelligence informs strategy across functions
3. Enable global visibility and learning
A unified source of truth allows organisations to detect cross-regional patterns, apply learnings at scale and respond consistently to emerging medical need
4. Close the loop with KOLs
Scientific exchange is a dialogue, not a transaction. Providing feedback on how insights are used strengthens trust, improves future engagements and raises the quality of intelligence captured.
Demonstrating the value of medical affairs
Linking insights to measurable outcomes is becoming the defining leadership challenge for medical affairs.
When organisations can show how field intelligence accelerates patient access, improves evidence generation, optimises launches and shapes clinical practice, medical affairs moves from a supporting function to a strategic driver of patient impact.
This is the real significance of closing the insights gap. It is about elevating the role of medical affairs in the enterprise and ensuring that the voice of the clinician directly influences how therapies are developed, launched and used.
Path forward
Success depends on access to the right data, connected and activated through a faster, clearer path from insight to decision to outcome.
That requires a company-wide commitment to standardise processes, scale AI-enabled analysis with industry solutions, empower cross-functional accountability and establish an impact-tracking framework.
Biopharmas that make this shift will not only improve internal alignment, they will shorten the distance between scientific innovation and the patients who need it.
And in a world where most medicines never reach the market, the ability to listen and act may be the most important capability biopharma can build.
Manuel Möller is Vice President, Veeva Insights Strategy at Veeva Systems
PharmaTimes
PharmaTimes is the UK’s leading pharmaceutical magazine, tracking the trends and issues that affect the industry here in the UK, in Europe and across the world. We deliver independent, authoritative and trustworthy content through impartial, balanced and informed opinion and analysis.