Why We Stopped Trying to Make the Quarterly Report Faster

Author(s): Joe Turner

Medical affairs has a cadence problem. Here is how we set out to close the gap between evidence and action.

Spend enough time with medical affairs leaders and you hear a version of the same thing. The quarterly insights report arrives, the team gathers to read it, and somewhere in the room is the quiet understanding that the picture it describes is already weeks old. The work that went into it was real. The science it summarizes has simply moved on. Up to 5,000 biomedical papers publish every day, and no document assembled on a quarterly rhythm can keep pace with that. The report is not wrong. It is late.

For a long time the industry treated this as a data access problem, and so the answer was always more: more sources, more coverage, more volume. That was the wrong diagnosis. Medical affairs teams have access to plenty of evidence, but they are short on timely meaning. And life sciences organizations simply cannot commercialize a precision therapy on an evidence picture that is a quarter behind the conversation.

So we stopped asking how to make the quarterly report faster and started asking a different question: what would medical affairs use if the instrument itself were continuous?