Current economic theories point to financial and human capital as the basis of a company’s success. The first is connected to effective returns on investment (ROI), and the second is related to employee knowledge and skills; in this light, human capital can be understood as the number of knowledgeable collaborators a company employs to contribute their expertise to help build innovation, support knowledge construction, and find and develop new opportunities. A corporation’s human (or intellectual/networking) capital is, in this sense, one of its most powerful resources. By leveraging this capital, companies can take the lead in their industry as innovators and open themselves to new opportunities ahead of their competitors.
Medical Affairs (MA) teams are a vital part of the human capital available to pharmaceutical companies—these teams intersect the healthcare sphere and their fundamental role can be described as information “shareholders.” This significant role, to inform and promote discussion around improvements, transformation, and innovations in healthcare, make them vehicles for the creation and development of key opportunities to make rapid progress in developing new models of promoting wellbeing and patient care.
Additionally, a team’s constant interaction with physicians makes MA a rich environment of information received from these connections. MA teams operate as knowledge builders and information sharers, and this pivotal position can be reinforced when supported with resources not traditionally provided to them that enhance the value of the potential intellectual/networking capital they contribute to their companies. These resources should allow MA teams to function as a tightly coordinated group that can stay ahead of the evolving environment in which they operate.
To stay ahead of their changing environment, MA teams must be empowered to perform three central working practices: searching for, analysing, and sharing information, the latter both externally with physicians and internally with their peers. To succeed in these practices, MA teams should be guided by a concise information management policy for enhancing knowledge development and its application, which can introduce a virtuous learning loop to their role.
The Virtuous Learning Loop and Returns on Knowledge Investments (ROKI)
Information gathering is a core function of MA teams, and this essential practice can serve as a starting point from which members of these teams can be encouraged to increase and strengthen their knowledge sharing practices. Preparing and providing their personal insights with internal teams is as important to the MA team’s role as preparing and providing information for sessions and meetings with physicians, because the output resulting from this internal sharing can create a unique, exclusive body of knowledge that has the potential to generate new content for different goals.
When centralized, organized, and administered through a strong information management process, this MA knowledge can be shared, replicated, and adjusted much more easily over the long term, independently from potential employee turnover—just as financial capital should not fluctuate with employee turnover, so too should intellectual capital remain unaffected by any staff changes.
Further, intellectual capital should be managed with the aim of assuring growth in a progressive and sustainable way. The same perspective that a company applies to its return on investment (ROI) should also be applied to its return on knowledge investment (ROKI), which is related to the rate of generation and use/reuse of content versus its subsequent value. Value should be understood as the weight of interactions (“in-in”, “in-to-out,” and “out-to-in”) in producing information/knowledge and increasing the quality of the company’s intellectual capital, reflected in faster, but sustainable, development and growth.
Through their core functions, MA teams are a key player for growing intellectual capital in this way, but to maximize their contribution, a company must create an environment that fosters a virtuous learning loop method for its MA team. This environment must encourage these steps: creation, discussion, and application of knowledge, and the evaluation of its returns, considering also its reusage.
Building a Working Technological Environment That Fosters Collaboration
The development and application of the virtuous learning loop method is one of the basic conditions that enhances the value of creating and sharing knowledge inside the team. To make it possible, a company should be organized to facilitate and encourage “prosumer” behavior. This means users should be able to easily access information they require and encouraged to share their insights with others.
However, in any information/knowledge environment designated for capturing insights, a dashboard should be available to users that showcases a diverse set of analytics derived from information and knowledge sharing activities. In this way, the architecture of these environments would contain a hierarchy of fields, starting with one that allows for adding new content, followed by one for indexing content, plus rating impact and scale of application fields, among others that could enrich the outputs resulting from ROKI. The interdependency between the hierarchy spaces is crucial for visualization and making more accurate decisions with fewer associated risks.
Company Recognition of the Value MA Provides as a Knowledge Creator
To complete the process, it is mandatory that companies consider in their schema of evaluating the performance of members of their MA team their role/value as information sharers and knowledge contributors. Information and knowledge are assets. Like other assets, they can and should be measured by not only the value they provide, but also the costs they carry. This means quantifying the economic benefits, including the consequent savings, resulting from knowledge creation and sharing behaviors. In practice, this requires the definition of the ideal, expected information/knowledge behavior from an MA team, as well as the definition of indicators and metrics that show the impact of personal and networking information/knowledge behaviors for the company itself. These rates, resulting from an analysis of ROKI and its impact on ROI, should be reflected in the career performance evaluation of all MA teams, which should underscore the vital role that MA teams play in information creation and sharing and encourage the continued improvement of MA teams in these areas by setting appropriate individual and group goals.
Rewarding the Unique Knowledge of MA Teams
I believe that intellectual capital and its oversight via information management expertise is already recognized by MA teams as fundamental to achieve success. However, I also believe that MA teams can only reach their full potential in this arena when it is linked directly to personal career development and growth. Being acknowledged and rewarded by their companies when they actively network and produce valuable knowledge from their insights is a powerful incentive that encourages members of MA teams to actively contribute to their company’s intellectual capital and overall success, and by success in MA means to do more and better for health and wellbeing for patients.
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