Astellas, Bayer, Chiesi: Using Medical Insights to Drive Strategic Impact

Sep 15, 2026 | Ryan Caesar

Nearly all KOLs (98%) say they want to share feedback with biopharma, but only 30% feel like their insights are used to improve patient care. Current medical insights processes are slow and fragmented. When relying on legacy insight capture and generic AI, biopharmas miss critical, timely signals from the market that would help them make more informed decisions and move with speed.

Industry AI can bridge this gap by simplifying insight capture, scaling analysis, and quickly elevating emerging signals to the right people for action. Leaders from Astellas, Bayer, and Chiesi share five best practices for modernizing the medical insights process and using AI to drive strategic impact.

1. Simplify insight capture for field teams

Successful implementation of a modern medical insights system begins with a clear understanding of user needs. For example, removing friction at the insight capture stage helped build organizational buy-in for a new approach among field teams at Chiesi.

“The really sleek insight capture in Link Medical Insights helped us immensely when we rolled out the system. It’s a value-add across the entire medical function.”

Nick Armstrong

Head of U.S. Medical Affairs Operations, Chiesi

For Astellas, solving capture pain points was also key to driving global adoption of a new system. “With Link Medical Insights, the capture part was an easy sell for our field teams: ‘We’re going to make your life easier,’” says Mike Soper, director of global MA data capabilities, analytics, medical insights, and AI. “It went well, and we rolled out across 45 countries in one quarter.”

2. Decrease time-to-insight with an on-demand medical insights model

In the past, medical insights followed a linear path through a lengthy approval chain before reaching strategic leads. With Veeva Link Medical Insights, Astellas and Chiesi modernized that process, democratizing access to insights so teams across the organization can compliantly pull information as needed. Replacing slow approval chains with an open, self-serve model has transformed daily operations for Astellas.

“We’ve moved into a push-pull model. We can still push information to teams, as we did in the past. But crucially, they can go in at any point and pull rich information for themselves; everyone is empowered to do more than ever before.”

Mike Soper

Director of Global MA Data Capabilities, Analytics, Medical Insights and AI, Astellas

Giving teams direct access to medical insights increased the speed at which Chiesi can deliver strategic intelligence. “Everyone can do their own analysis; it’s not just a singular function anymore that’s doing the analytic work,” explains Nick Armstrong, head of U.S. medical affairs operations. “That allows the teams to be much more tactical.”

3. Identify emerging medical themes to drive medical strategy

Historically, insight analysis required medical teams to manually spot themes and create reports to inform strategy. Using specialized industry AI and medical context from the Link knowledge graph, Link Medical Insights continually analyzes data, applies medical intelligence, and proactively identifies medical themes.

For each company, the value of medical themes is twofold: to validate existing strategy and to uncover new signals for the team to act on. “You can’t undervalue confirmatory evidence,” explains Armstrong. “Medical directors need that data to support their strategy, and the confirmation provides peace of mind.”

At Astellas, a new medical theme identified a gap in HCP education that, when addressed, could potentially help keep patients on the right therapy and improve outcomes.

“New themes are nicely written and easily shareable, which is important because the teams don’t need to waste their time creating presentations and reports,” says Drew Rockett, senior director of medical affairs, insights, and analytics at Bayer. The team also uses saved search alerts to connect colleagues who log similar findings across territories. “It speeds up the strategy and speed of theme discovery.”

Chiesi uses medical themes to enable medical directors in strategic execution.

“Medical directors are ultimately the owner of the strategy, so we want to make sure they’re deeply involved. We assign the themes to the medical directors and make them a part of that feedback loop.”

Nick Armstrong

Head of U.S. Medical Affairs Operations, Chiesi

By being involved in the insights process, medical directors are better equipped with the information they need to make strategic decisions.

4. Interrogate data dynamically with conversational AI

In Link Medical Insights, dashboards present consolidated views of tagged insights across teams and geographies. With the recent addition of conversational AI, Astellas gains flexibility to query datasets directly based on specific strategic questions.

“With existing dashboards and reports, you have to interpret based on someone else’s thinking pattern,” Soper explains. “What I love about conversational AI is it allows you to be creative.” To ensure consistent quality across queries, Astellas is building an internal prompt library that helps teams request items like congress summaries or strategic reports.

“Using ‘Questions’ gives you creativity and power. With prompting, we can go beyond the general summarization to answer specific and detailed questions, as well as generate strategic insights, on demand.”

Mike Soper

Director of Global MA Data Capabilities, Analytics, Medical Insights and AI, Astellas

5. Operate with speed and demonstrate medical impact organization-wide

Modernizing insight management enables speed and transparency for medical affairs.

Bayer uses Link Medical Insights to give MSLs full visibility into how their field interactions drive decisions. “In the past, it was a bit of a black box,” Rockett explains. “Now MSLs all have transparency to their insights and how they’re contributing to the strategy.”

“Medical insights are one of the most important parts of medical affairs. We often struggle to articulate our value, so getting the insights process right was very important to us.”

Drew Rockett

Senior Director of Medical Affairs, Insights and Analytics, Bayer

At Chiesi, AI helps provide instant responses so medical affairs can be a strategic partner to commercial leadership. “When a question comes up in a brand meeting, we can quickly interrogate our data to find the answer,” says Armstrong. “We become much more of a strategic partner in those conversations, and that’s a massive help in driving medical value.”

For Astellas, transitioning to an enterprise solution empowered the team to operate with speed and flexibility. “We’re doing things we either couldn’t do before or were doing very inefficiently,” says Soper. “It’s increased agility, it’s empowering, and it’s supercharging the end-to-end process.”

By replacing slow workflows and generic LLMs with an industry AI solution for insights management, biopharmas can surface actionable market signals in real time. Modernizing this process helps medical affairs demonstrate value as a proactive, strategic advisor across the business.

Find out how Link Medical Insights eliminates blind spots and empowers biopharmas to act as soon as themes emerge.