Author: Jeff Gorski, Senior Director, Commercial Content Strategy, MedTech
This year’s Veeva MedTech Summit hosted a diverse group of medical device and diagnostics professionals across the industry to share best practices, address challenges, and collectively think about how to make our industry more productive.
During Summit we hosted an executive roundtable with leaders in regulatory and content marketing across seven global organizations. All executives are focused on a singular goal – getting the right marketing content to patients and HCPs compliantly and quickly. These thought leaders have plenty of wisdom to share, below is a summary of key insights.
When it comes to compliant commercial content, it’s critical for marketing and regulatory teams to work together efficiently. However, friction can occur when their mandates appear to be in opposition. Oftentimes, regulatory affairs doesn’t have visibility into the upstream marketing process, creating an environment of reaction. Marketing needs to move nimbly to compete, and the review process can feel like it slows things down.
The reality is that this tension is necessary and good for patients and physicians. The better an organization gets in communicating and formalizing the relationship between these two functions, the better they’ll be at achieving both goals… speed to market and regulatory compliance.
Technology can help but it also requires the right process and effective change management. Taken holistically, instituting new ways of working is not easy. One approach that has worked well according to these leaders is to identify the teams doing it well and have them act as champions across the organization. Consider working in a controlled environment with the team most open to change. Once proven, you’ll have a stronger platform to influence your peers and executive team.
AI will be transformative to how marketers develop content. According to one report by McKinsey, 90% of commercial leaders expect to use generative AI often over the next couple of years. (1) In the future, technology, and especially generative AI, may increase the volume, throughput, and adaptability of regulated marketing content. The promise of this future is that patients and physicians will receive relevant messages in the right channel, at the right time. Making medtech marketing similar to the experience we all have as consumers in less regulated industries like retail, all while adhering to the strict guidelines required in medtech.
However, the industry is split on how to best execute. About half of our participant organizations have started funding internal AI incubator groups and are actively building POCs, while the other half are adopting a more conservative approach.
As it relates to commercial content development, hallucinations in AI will continue to create regulatory roadblocks in the near term as the outputs aren’t consistent enough to meet compliance expectations. Given this concern, more organizations are turning to focused use cases that are more consistent and rely on a simplified set of data.
AI also often gets conflated with general automation, or generative AI may be seen as a more advanced form of AI rather than another iteration suited for a different set of use cases. When evaluating your approach, start by thinking through the problem you’re trying to solve, then determine if a solution can be managed through automation or if it requires some form of AI.
Content personalization in a regulated industry is challenging but necessary for medtech companies to stay competitive. However, according to a Deloitte study companies who embrace personalization are twice as likely to exceed revenue goals.(2) This means the volume of content will continue to increase, and the need for omnichannel will expand. At some point in the not too distant future, personalized, omnichannel marketing will become commonplace in medtech.
Data is also becoming more critical and, over time, AI will help. Already industry standard data models are being developed that will make it easier for review solutions to share content and data upstream and downstream through sales channels. A modular content approach provides the framework to fuel automation, increase the pace of creation, and speed approval. Harnessing new approaches like these to inform content strategy will become a requirement to compete rather than an aspiration.
The end goal will take time, but organizations can take steps today to build a foundation. Organizing data critical to marketing is key. Claims is an ideal starting point that can pay dividends both in the near and long term. Once in place, organizations can begin to adopt more advanced marketing techniques and leverage technology in new ways.
These medtech trends are not going away, if anything, they’ll be amplified in the years ahead. It’s important to start planning and laying the groundwork now to be prepared for the new marketing normal of tomorrow. As you consider your approach it’s good to focus on the three areas above. Technology will inevitably play a role, as will the development of new roles and ways of working.
To learn how to ensure medtech compliance with an effective claims management approach read Philips customer story.
Veeva MedTech Summit will bring the medtech community together in Austin, Texas.
(1) – McKinsey Report
(2) – Deloitte Study findings