Medical Affairs Omnichannel and Commercial Omnichannel compared

When a company that has built Omnichannel engagement in its Commercial organization turns to Medical Affairs, the first proposal is usually to extend what exists. The platform is in place, the journeys have a template, the dashboards are built. The proposal is efficient, and it is the source of most of the difficulties Medical teams later describe. The two models look alike from the platform's point of view and differ in almost everything that matters to an HCP and to a Compliance officer.

This article compares the two on the dimensions where they differ, sets out what they can share, and describes what goes wrong when the difference is ignored. It draws on Medical Affairs engagements in US biopharma and global pharma, on the Medical Affairs Professional Society's guidance and on the industry codes.

How do the two models differ?

The EFPIA Code and the IFPMA Code of Practice draw the line between promotion and scientific exchange, and in the United States the FDA's guidance on unsolicited requests shapes how Medical responds to questions beyond the label. The table follows from those rules. It is the reason a Medical model cannot be a configuration of the Commercial one.

What can the two models share?

More than Medical teams sometimes assume. The engagement platform, the consent and preference records, the identity of the HCP and the channels themselves can be common infrastructure. Skills in journey design, content operations and analytics transfer well. A shared view of an HCP's channel preferences serves both functions and the HCP.

What cannot be shared is anything that would let commercial objectives shape scientific exchange. Journeys are designed separately. Content is produced and reviewed separately. Medical interaction records and insight are not visible to commercial teams. Measures of Medical engagement are not reported alongside commercial results. Where one platform serves both, access rules enforce the separation, and Medical, Legal and Compliance approve them.

What goes wrong when Medical inherits the Commercial model?

• Sequences appear in scientific exchange. HCPs who asked a question receive a planned series of follow-ups, and Medical begins to look like a second promotional channel.
• Commercial measures arrive with the dashboard. Medical teams are shown open rates and reach, and medical science liaisons are compared on activity.
• Review slows. Medical content enters a promotional review process designed for different material, and scientific answers take longer to approve than they should.
• The boundary is decided by the platform. Whatever the system permits becomes the rule, and nobody has written down what Commercial may see.
• HCPs stop distinguishing the two. The trust HCPs place in Medical as a scientific counterpart is the function's main asset, and it is spent.

Where do the two models meet?

At defined hand-offs, in both directions, with rules. A representative who receives a question beyond the label passes it to Medical and takes no further part. A liaison who learns that an HCP wants product information the liaison should not provide can, with the HCP's agreement, pass the request to the appropriate commercial contact. Each hand-off has an owner, a record and a rule about what information travels with it. Companies that write these hand-offs down find they are few, and that most of the friction between the functions came from handling them informally.

Which should a company build first?

Most companies build Commercial first because the investment case is easier to state. That order is workable provided Medical is involved in the platform and consent decisions from the beginning, so that the infrastructure can support a separate Medical model later. The costly path is to complete a Commercial build with no Medical input and then discover that access rules, record structures and review workflows have to be reworked. Companies whose medicines depend on scientific understanding, such as those in rare disease and specialty care, increasingly build the two in parallel.

Where should a Medical Affairs team begin?

By writing the boundary down before any platform discussion. One page that states what Medical and Commercial share, what they do not, who decides in a dispute and how hand-offs work gives the Medical model its own foundation. The scientific journeys, the measures and the content model follow from it. The article on building a compliant Medical Affairs Omnichannel model describes the next steps.