A Costly After-Thought: The Impact of Technical Debt for Medical Affairs

Published: 24 july 2026

Author(s): Sam Dixey

What is technical debt and why does it matter to Medical Affairs?

Technical debt. Even if you don't know the name you are likely aware of its manifestations. It's a phrase derived from the software world but that has applications everywhere, including in Medical Affairs.

It can be thought of like financial debt: When you take out a loan, you get something useful today in exchange for paying interest later. Technical debt works the same way, except in return for the up-front benefit, you also get a whole host of non-financial repayments: time, resource wastage, lost value, opportunity cost, and a whole host of other things. Often the quicker, the dirtier the loan, the higher the repayments.

In the software world, the cause is often code. A development team may write some sub-par code now quickly in order to release a new feature. The feature gets released, great, however it doesn't end there. That sub-par code is now part of the ecosystem. It must require maintenance, time to be trained on it, resources to attend to it. It also forms dependencies, meaning in order to improve other features, this sub-par code must first be attended to. It slows the whole thing down.