Simplifying to Scale: How
Horizon Therapeutics Increased
Efficiency in Medical Affairs

Developing therapies for rare disease is difficult work that requires innovation, collaboration, and precision across the organization. Horizon Therapeutics, a company that has grown exponentially in a short period of time, recognized its medical affairs team needed a way to support a growing number of internal and external stakeholders. But to scale, they first needed the right tools to streamline and standardize processes to help them work more efficiently across their teams and the organization.

Improving efficiency for a team with increasing workload

Over the past 15 years, Horizon has grown to 2,000 global employees. The company has evolved significantly during this time, expanding therapeutic areas and establishing a global footprint in new geographies, each with different rules and regulations. All of this has translated into an increasing and more complex workload for the medical affairs teams.

Each new therapeutic area required specialized medical content for multiple audiences that needed to be continuously monitored and updated with information from new research and findings. This made it difficult to standardize document types, workflows, and approvals.

Centralizing content to accelerate production and approval times

When looking for new technology, the medical affairs teams wanted to ensure that their collaborative way of working would not be lost. “It’s about building community, not just pushing out information,” said Angela Whitehill, senior director, global medical affairs operations and analytics at Horizon. “We want to have a deeper dialogue – whether that be with HCPs, patients, or advocates – so we can better understand what the patient community needs. We needed a system that helped cultivate these relationships, but also made it easy and efficient for our team members with different responsibilities.”

Horizon moved forward to implement Veeva Vault Medical to manage both their scientific content used across multiple medical affairs teams (Veeva Vault MedComms) and medical inquiries (Veeva Vault MedInquiry) in one integrated ecosystem. The company adopted Veeva Medical CRM to make it easy for a regional medical director (RMD) in the field to document interactions, share consistent approved content, as well as submit inquiries and track responses.

With Vault MedComms, Horizon has one centralized place where teams create, manage, and distribute content. With cross-functional medical team members working in the same system, the medical affairs organization has been able to increase production and better manage approval times, ensure content accuracy, and control the content lifecycle. Content is centrally located, allowing for easy access approved materials. These materials are leveraged for internal training, reference purposes, and external use throughout the medical affairs organization.

They can also easily adapt content for different stakeholders and make updates as needed. For example, content owners can quickly get the most up-to-date content to a RMD by pushing approved documents out from Vault MedComms to Medical CRM through Veeva CLM. With CLM’s offline capabilities, a RMD can manage and display content offline and record the content used in an interaction or call record. This helps perform back-end reporting and assess content use.

Increasing efficiency for medical inquiries

The medical information team now triages inquiries and assigns them to the appropriate person all within Vault MedInquiry. Using a library of approved and easily available documents – FAQs, publications, prescribing information, and standard response letters – allows team members to handle increased volume while providing timely responses. Even inquiries that require different workflows and custom responses can be handled within the system. “We can identify and perform quality checks on responses because everything goes through Vault MedInquiry,” said Teresa Kok, director, medical information. “This helps us pinpoint gaps in content and identify areas in the process where we may be more efficient.”

The same applies to product quality complaints. Once this information is captured, it’s passed quickly to Veeva Vault Quality and Horizon’s quality team via the open API and interconnectivity of Vault MedInquiry.

A RMD can now enter medical information requests and review their statuses directly in Medical CRM. This has eliminated manual tasks like follow-up emails. Being able to monitor the status of inquiries can help a RMD better prepare for HCP visits by arming them with the necessary information, including visibility to previously asked off-label questions and responses.

Looking to the future

For Horizon, the next big push is to take things global using Vault Medical’s framework to expand and adapt for local markets. This will help Horizon create consistency in content messaging, efficiency in content creation, and uniformity in approval across the globe.

The team is eager to take advantage of the full functionality of Vault Medical. Some of the key areas of interest include:

• reporting capabilities that allow them to review metrics by document type, identify bottlenecks in approvals, and assess workflows to make them more efficient
• the addition of Vault MedInquiry Network Connection for OpenData HCP Search
• scientific communication platform/scientific statement features
• leveraging approved scientific contents across digital channels to optimize communication.

“Choosing a system requires you to think about how it will evolve for the future without interfering with your current needs,” said Whitehill. “Veeva is a strong partner that has listened to and supported our unique business requirements from the get-go and continues to work together with us as we grow and expand.”

Learn more about efficiently managing medical content and inquiry requests with Veeva Vault Medical.