UCB: Transforming KOL Engagement Planning for Greater Medical Impact
“Link Workflow to help us coordinate between local and global colleagues so we are better prepared for KOL conversations. This improves the quality of our engagements.”
Lynn Mertens, global medical impact lead at UCB, sat down with Tatiana Panzeri, senior director of Link Workflow, to discuss the benefits of closer collaboration to prepare KOL engagements and congresses, and ultimately increase medical impact.


Tatiana Panzeri: What are the biggest challenges in KOL engagement planning?
Lynn Mertens: Siloed data and systems can lead to a lack of transparency across the organization. For example, an office-based colleague and a local field representative could be talking to the same KOL and not be aware about these multiple engagements.
TP: How is Link Workflow helping to solve this challenge?
LM: Now that everyone has visibility into KOL activities and engagements, it increases coordination between, for instance, local and global colleagues. It also helps us make better strategic decisions for future engagements. With better coordination and preparation across all stakeholders, we have a unified approach which translates into a better experience for the customer.
“Engagement activities are now visible across stakeholder groups, which really helps strategic decision making and a better KOL experience.” -Lynn Mertens, Global Medical Impact Lead, UCB
TP: What benefits have you seen when it comes to congresses?
LM: It’s simplifying our congress planning process and, while we are there, we can immediately access and share insights. Also, all of the data we gathered is available on one platform for everyone to access post-congress. Analyzing this data helps us optimize future engagements, events, and congresses.

TP: How does connected data help to measure and improve medical impact?
LM: We need to optimize our engagements so ultimately we can increase our impact on patients’ lives. This means prioritizing engagements that are very impactful, not only for the patient, but also for our external stakeholders. With all the data in one place, we can link medical impact KPIs to these data sources so we can make better decisions about future engagements and ensure they are more aligned with the overall UCB strategy.
See how other leading biopharmas are using the Veeva Link Suite to drive high-value interactions with their customers.