Customer Centricity in Medical Affairs Needs Human-centric Artificial Intelligence

Bedenkov, Alexander; Moreno, Carmen; Agustin, Lyra; Jain, Nipun; Newman, Amy; Feng, Lana; Kostello, Greg

The evolution of healthcare, together with the changing behaviour of healthcare professionals, means that medical affairs functions of pharmaceutical organisations are constantly reinventing themselves. The emergence of digital ways of working, expedited by the COVID-19 pandemic, means that pharmaceutical–healthcare relationships are evolving to operate in an increasingly virtual world. The value of the pharmaceutical medical affairs function is dependent on understanding customers’ needs and providing the right knowledge at the right time to physicians. This requires a human-centric artificial intelligence (AI) approach for medical affairs, which allows the function to query internal and external data sets in a conversational format and receive timely, accurate and concise intelligence on their customers.