Medical Affairs is a tough job. You’re not quite clinical, not quite commercial—but somehow expected to support both. You’re meant to bring scientific rigour and credibility to the organisation, while also enabling uptake and positioning products for success. You’re there before launch, during launch, and long after. And yet… you’re rarely the one credited with making the difference.
Sales gets credit for changing prescribing. Marketing gets credit for national campaigns and strategy. Clinical gets credit for generating the data in the first place. But what about Medical?
The Reality: Always On, Rarely Seen
Medical is involved from early development through to loss of exclusivity. Clinical colleagues look to you to help make the trialled medicine commercially viable. Marketing looks to you pre-licence to do the things they can’t do. Then post-licence, they still rely on Medical to keep laying the groundwork—but from a non-promotional, influence-based position.
It’s a big middle. Medical spans years of activity that are hard to measure, hard to fund, and hard to point to when results come in. Yet Medical Affairs is expected to change the evidence base, shift beliefs, and move mindsets—so that others can move prescribing.
The Problem: No Feedback Loop
Sales teams operate with data. Within months of an activity, they can see market share change—and whether an intervention worked. National marketing campaigns can often be correlated with uptake trends. But for Medical?
You’re expected to inform strategy, shape engagement, lead education, support evidence generation, and provide insight. Yet when it comes to evaluating success, you’re left with proxies: number of MSL interactions, advisory board outputs, publications, maybe an NPS score.
But here’s the thing: in science and in clinical practice, when hard data isn’t available, we turn to structured expert opinion. So why not apply the same logic to evaluating Medical Affairs?
The Solution: Structured Feedback from the Field
If you want to understand Medical’s impact, you have to ask the people Medical is meant to be influencing:
- Are clinicians thinking differently after the MSL engagement?
- Do payers understand the value proposition in a clearer way?
- Are internal stakeholders better aligned because of Medical insight?
These aren’t questions that can be answered with CRM metrics or activity logs. They require structured, thoughtful primary research. Interviews. Focus groups. Social listening. They require asking the right questions—and interpreting the answers with nuance.
Rather than relying on activity metrics alone, Medical Affairs professionals can gather meaningful feedback by engaging the stakeholders they aim to support—clinicians, payers, pharmacists, and cross-functional colleagues. This can be achieved through primary research techniques such as structured interviews, facilitated discussions, surveys, and even social listening, all designed to explore how perceptions, understanding, and behaviours may have shifted as a result of Medical activity.
Good practice involves interpreting this feedback through a rigorous, systematic lens—identifying themes, triangulating insights, and translating them into formats that support planning and decision-making. Increasingly, teams are also exploring how tools like natural language processing can assist in analysing qualitative data efficiently and at scale. While these technologies should not replace human judgement, they can enhance consistency and speed in identifying emerging signals and making sense of complex inputs.
The goal is not simply to justify the value of Medical Affairs, but to inform continuous improvement, sharpen strategic focus, and ensure that Medical teams remain aligned with the evolving needs of the system and the people they serve.
Closing Thoughts
Medical Affairs doesn’t need to wait for someone else to give it credit. It can—and should—create its own feedback loops. Insights gathering by relying on field teams does not work; it gets in the way of the job to be done and is confounded by conflicts of interest. Independent and objective primary research is the way forward. And it is something that Medical Affairs people are inherently suited to and good at.
So let’s start measuring impact in a way that reflects what Medical actually does. That means structured expert opinion. It means asking the right questions. And it means turning those insights into something that senior leaders can understand and act on.
Medical is strategic, scientific, and essential. It’s time we proved it.
Disclaimer: This article was created with the help of AI (ChatGPT). All concepts and topics were developed by the author.
About the author:
Paul Riley, MBA, PhD, CMgr
Paul Riley is the founder of Nexcea, a UK-based consultancy that helps pharma companies commercialise medicines in a clinically meaningful way. He leads projects that turn real-world insights into strategy, supporting Medical Affairs teams in the UK, Europe, US, and Japan. He also serves as adjunct faculty at Alliance Manchester Business School.
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