In 2022, inPhronesis surveyed senior Medical Affairs leaders across small, medium, and large pharma and biotech companies to understand how well their teams were gathering, analyzing, and sharing scientific intelligence. The findings pointed to a gap that most organizations recognize but few have systematically addressed: the distance between having data and knowing what to do with it.
One of the clearest signals from the survey was the near-universal experience of information overload. Every single respondent agreed that, at some point, their team faces more incoming data than they have the time or bandwidth to properly analyze and translate into meaningful insights. This is not a resourcing problem in the conventional sense. Medical Affairs teams are staffed with highly trained scientific professionals. The issue is that those professionals are spending a disproportionate share of their time on administrative and organizational tasks rather than on the scientific thinking that drives value. The whitepaper explores where that time goes and why the problem tends to persist even in well-resourced organizations.
A related theme that runs throughout the survey is the challenge of appropriate knowledge sharing. Respondents described a recurring tension between the need to move information quickly across functions and the compliance obligations that govern what can be shared, with whom, and in what form. Within Medical Affairs itself, the data revealed that siloed structures are common, even where teams believe they are communicating effectively. Senior leadership, Field Medical, Medical Communications, and Medical Information often operate with different versions of the same picture, and the mechanisms for reconciling those versions are frequently informal, inconsistent, or dependent on a few key individuals.
Conference coverage emerged as one of the most instructive use cases in the paper. Managing a major medical congress involves coordinating schedules across multiple attendees, capturing real-time intelligence from presentations, posters, and KOL interactions, and then synthesizing those inputs into something useful for leadership and cross-functional stakeholders. Respondents were candid about how time-consuming this process is and how much room for improvement exists in their current workflows. The whitepaper details how these challenges play out in practice and what a more structured approach to conference intelligence management can look like.
The second half of the paper turns to solutions. inPhronesis presents its inVision Knowledge Management System as a purpose-built response to the specific needs of Medical Affairs teams, designed to centralize information, enforce appropriate access controls, and reduce the administrative burden that currently absorbs so much of the function’s capacity. The platform addresses knowledge management across three core areas: the ongoing organization of clinical and therapeutic landscape data, the management of conference and congress intelligence, and the visualization of competitive and pipeline information in formats that are immediately useful to decision-makers. The whitepaper walks through how each of these capabilities is designed to fit into existing workflows rather than replace them.
For Medical Affairs leaders thinking seriously about where their teams’ time and attention are going, this paper offers a grounded starting point, backed by the perspectives of peers who are navigating the same challenges. Download the full whitepaper for the complete survey findings, a deeper look at the inVision solution, and a practical framework for thinking about knowledge management as a strategic capability within Medical Affairs.
