Accelerating KOL Reach and Impact at Thermo Fisher Scientific
As research volumes and channels expand, aligning commercial and medical strategies around Key Opinion Leader (KOL) engagement becomes increasingly complex. Without a central data foundation, tracking KOL activity and driving timely, strategic conversations quickly falls apart.
Gary Falcetano, senior manager, global medical and scientific affairs at Thermo Fisher Scientific knows this all too well. “Trying to keep up with our KOLs via Google searches and anecdotally keeping our current connections engaged was unsustainable and ineffective,” Falcetano says.
To drive commercial and medical success, Thermo Fisher Scientific transitioned from fragmented, point-solutions to Veeva Link Key People – establishing a single, unified view of key experts. Falcetano shares how Link Key People eliminates manual work enabling medical affairs to focus on strategic priorities.
“By eliminating manual KOL research, our team can focus on core strategic initiatives. When you add up the labor savings and our sharper strategic focus, the cost of Link Key People is miniscule in comparison.” Gary Falcetano, Senior Manager, Global Medical and Scientific Affairs, Thermo Fisher Scientific
Consequences of fragmented data
Thermo Fisher’s medical affairs teams struggled to keep pace with expert activity. Relying on disconnected systems and manual processes slowed down engagement, stalled scientific exchange, and delayed overall market readiness.
“It wasn’t that the data didn’t exist; it just lived in disparate systems and was inconsistently accessible to our teams. This created a lot of process-friction and just decreased our overall effectiveness.” Gary Falcetano, Senior Manager, Global Medical and Scientific Affairs, Thermo Fisher Scientific
Switching administrative burden for strategic initiatives
To resolve these inefficiencies, Thermo Fisher Scientific partnered with Veeva MedTech to implement Link Key People – which Falcetano describes as “a curated KOL intelligence platform that aggregates global, scientific, clinical, and digital data in one dashboard.” Link provided Thermo Fisher with in-depth KOL profiles including relevant publications, clinical trials, associations, and past and upcoming conferences – all activities and attributes Thermo Fisher used to manually consolidate through various informal searches and sources.
This data unification allows the medtech to deepen the impact of their KOL engagements and accelerate evidence generation – while still prioritizing high-impact medical responsibilities. Falcetano says, “The hours we spent searching before are now allocated to further deepening KOL relationships and accomplishing more impactful work.”
Translating unified data into real-time insights
In addition to relieving administrative burden, Link Key People’s comprehensive search tools uncover key insights and opportunities to influence the market. When a regional team suggested there was no market demand for a new diagnostic assay, medical affairs used Link to find more than 100 researchers actively publishing on that exact topic, enabling the team to successfully engage those experts at international congresses and expand into this market.
Link Key People’s dynamic feed also surfaces unexpected engagement opportunities by tracking professional activities automatically. In one instance, it revealed that a leading KOL published a paper on a highly specific topic outside of her usual scope, which allowed the medical affairs team to reach out to this expert with targeted, timely engagement based on this expansion in her focus.
Falcetano explains, “Link Key People helps us identify, prioritize, and engage the HCPs and KOLs that move the business forward. It balances their activities and influence in a standardized way. That was previously based on anecdotal PubMed searches, on dated CVs, and other things that just weren’t comprehensive.”
Continuing to drive results with integrated data
Unifying its KOL data strategy allowed the medical affairs team at Thermo Fisher Scientific to maximize its impact where it matters most and cut down on operational spend.
This success, Falcetano explains, is only the beginning. By prioritizing clean data governance, a platform-first architecture, and cross-functional partnerships, the organization is continuing to secure significant time savings and strengthen strategic execution.
“Our team relies on Link as our default for research, and it’s done a lot for how we function as a medical affairs organization. Our next priorities center on further integrating our cross-functional communication, measuring the impact of medical functions, and deepening our data foundations,” Falcetano says.