Managing and Tracking Cross-functional KOL Collaborations
It’s often the case that different functions within your organisation are working with the same KOLs – whether it’s across indications, franchise, or even R&D.
While essential to brand success, cross-functional collaboration also poses several challenges when it comes to managing and tracking your interactions with KOLs. And we often hear a similar set of pains from our clients.
For example, how can teams ensure that all cross-functional colleagues are aware of your KOL interactions, while staying in line with compliance and firewall requirements? It’s important that Medical knows Commercial have had significant contact with a particular KOL in the past month, but without needing to know anything about the nature or context of that contact – an essential compliance requirement.
And the same applies to Commercial teams who need to know whether the KOL they want to reach out to is already collaborating heavily with their Medical Affairs colleagues to ensure appropriate logistics, and to keep their Medical Affairs colleagues informed. After all, it’s not very pleasant for either you or the KOL when they have to tell you “your colleagues have already contacted me about participation at the same Congress. Do you not speak to each other?!”.
This situation where multiple people from an organisation, usually across the same cross-functional team, contact a KOL with opportunities for engagement and collaboration happens too often – we hear this pain from clients and from KOLs all the time.
Creating and maintaining a central repository of KOL engagements and activities, both planned and actual, is a solution to alleviate such pains. But the challenge lies in ensuring that such a system has all the necessary compliance and firewall provisioning in place, built into the genome of the system itself. So not only is it ready to go, straight out-of-the-box, but it’s also flexible and capable enough to accommodate the ever-changing compliance landscape, especially on a national level with countries implementing new requirements on a weekly basis.
Costantino Ciotti
Services & Innovations
+44 (0)20 8191 9823
