Announcing Contact Profiles

As you may know, we develop kernel with the participation of our Medical Affairs customers. One customer request is to view the historical feedback of a thought leader. Today, we released Contact Profiles to help MSLs and managers answer this question:

What is the historical feedback from a thought leader?

Starting now, Contact Profiles will display the number of interactions, interaction history and field insights from a thought leader, in real-time.

For MSLs, this helps you prepare for an upcoming interaction by reviewing the historical feedback and related details from a thought leader. For managers, this helps you assess the longitudinal feedback from your thought leaders, so you can effectively onboard new MSLs and guide current MSLs in their upcoming interactions.

Collectively, Contact Profiles help you drive the right strategies for your organization and demonstrate the value of Medical Affairs. To access a profile, simply visit kernel and view results on your laptop, iPad or smartphone.

If you'd like a demo of Contact Profiles, just let us know.

Announcing support for offline access

Since we launched kernel for Medical Affairs, a recurring request from our customers is the ability to enter thought leader feedback without Internet access (for example, on an airplane returning from a medical congress).
 
Today, we are delighted to announce support for offline access. Our new apps for Android, iPhone and iPad let your field medical colleagues:

  1. Record insights from thought leaders and medical congresses
  2. View their historical customer feedback and field insights

No Internet access is necessary. kernel will save your data and upload once your Internet connection is restored. Once your data is uploaded, your colleagues can view your feedback and insights immediately.
 
If you'd like a demo of our new apps, just let us know.

Announcing Institution Profiles

As you may know, we develop kernel with the participation of our Medical Affairs customers. One customer request is to view the collective feedback of thought leaders at a specific institution. We're glad to announce that on July 10, we released Institution Profiles to help MSL leaders and teams answer these questions:

1. What is the collective feedback from Stanford Medical Center?

Starting now, Institution Profiles will display the number of interactions, field insights and trending topics at your institutions, in real-time.

For MSL leaders, this profile helps you compare the collective feedback from one institution with another institution, so you can better assess your scientific objectives and strategies. For MSLs, this information helps you understand recent feedback from thought leaders at an institution, so you can effectively prepare for upcoming meetings.

2. Do we have the optimal coverage at Stanford Medical Center?

Institution Profiles will also display the number of thought leaders, number of MSLs, time spent and other valuable data at your institutions, in real-time.

For MSL leaders, this profile enables you compare your MSL coverage at one institution with others, so you can optimize coverage across institutions. It also allows you to view your team's activity in comparison with a previous time period, so you can assess whether your field activity is on track.

Collectively, Institution Profiles help you drive the right strategies for your organization and demonstrate the value of Medical Affairs. To access a profile, simply visit kernel and view results on your laptop, iPad or smartphone. 

If you'd like to see a live demo, just let us know.

Providing Medical Affairs with real-time insights and trends

Our friends at Belatrix just shared an interesting white paper on providing Medical Affairs with real time insights and trends. An excerpt: "Medical Affairs has a key role in bringing patient advocacy organizations into the drug development and approval process, which is critical in ensuring patient insights..."

A link to the complete paper is here: http://www.belatrixsf.com/whitepapers/providing-medical-affairs-real-time-insights-trends-overcome-2016-challenges

Thanks to Alex, Luis and the Belatrix team!

How to collect Medical Congress Insights

A few weeks ago, one of our customers asked if kernel could collect insights at a medical congress. They were preparing for the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) annual meeting in Vancouver, B.C. and needed a better way to identify and share insights with stakeholders.

Our customer had these objectives: a) identify new studies and presentations that were relevant to their medical strategy and therapeutic areas, b) present company research and ask for audience feedback, and c) assess unmet needs, partnership opportunities and emerging science.

We gladly explained that kernel can analyze insights across external sources:

  1. Healthcare practitioners
  2. IDNs and payers
  3. Patient advocates
  4. Medical congresses

To address the needs of our Medical Affairs customers, we designed kernel to be flexible so you can add or edit topics and questions in minutes. For example, you can create a topic for "AAN 2016" and any scientific sessions with no IT resources necessary. For each session, you may also specify your questions:

  • Is the session relevant to our medical strategy?
  • What are your top three takeaways?
  • What are the implications for the company?

During the session, your MSLs can answer these questions on a laptop, iPad or iPhone. Since their feedback is available instantly, your teams can view medical congress insights and trends in real-time, whether traveling or in the office.

"For each scientific session, our team captured the impact to our medical strategy together with the presentation data. The same day, we were able to analyze the data and identify regional issues and trends involving the clinical environment, patient pathways and treatment approaches."

-- a director of MSL operations, New York

In addition, you may easily download graphics as images, Adobe PDF, and Microsoft Word documents for creating presentations. This lets your teams compose daily reports to share with your stakeholders.

We designed kernel to help you identify insights and trends across external sources, including medical conferences. However, this is only the beginning as we continue to improve our application further. So when we share potential new features with you, it comes from a sincere desire for your feedback. Our goal is to build a valuable application that you love.

Defining the Value of MSL Teams

With our friend Dr. Alexander Tolmachev at MedAffairs.co, we wrote a PM360 article on Defining the Value of MSL Teams. An excerpt: 

"...medical value may include scientific data and insights related to the clinical environment, clinical studies, competitive landscape, new molecules, patient pathways or treatment approaches. Taken together, these insights can help identify key trends and issues across regions and may be filtered into medical and other discussions to assess and adapt scientific objectives, activity plans and future strategies."

A link to the complete article is here: https://www.pm360online.com/defining-the-value-of-msl-teams

Two Ways to Optimize Medical Affairs KPI Tracking

Natalie DeMasi at Cutting Edge Information kindly interviewed us on a few ways to improve Medical Affairs KPI tracking. An excerpt: "Bringing real-time medical insights back to the internal organization is a prime way to demonstrate medical affairs value."

A link to the complete post is here: http://www.cuttingedgeinfo.com/2015/two-ways-to-optimize-medical-affairs-kpi-tracking-my-conversation-with-the-ceo-of-kernel

Thanks, Natalie!

What’s new in kernel?

As you may know, we develop kernel with the participation of our Medical Affairs customers. For each customer, we schedule weekly calls to solicit their feedback and ideas to improve. Based on our customer preferences and product vision, we prioritize these ideas in our roadmap. Since launching our first version in December of last year, we’ve released 12 software updates to kernel.

A recurrent request is for reports: the ability to rapidly view MSL activity and trends across therapeutic areas, in real-time. On July 16, we released three reports to help MSL leaders and teams resolve these questions:

1.  What is each MSL’s current field activity?

The user activity report displays the number of interactions, time spent in the field, number of field insights and other valuable data for liaisons.

For MSLs, this report helps you assess your progress so you can adapt as necessary. For MSL leaders, this report helps you assess a liaison’s activity in comparison with the team, so you can optimize coverage across regions.

2.  What is our team’s current field activity?

The team activity report displays the number of interactions, time spent in the field, number of field insights and other valuable data for MSL teams.

For MSL leaders, this report enables you to view your team’s activity in comparison with a previous time period, so you can comprehend whether your field activity is on track.

3.  What are the top field insights from our team?

The team insights summary report displays top field insights based on your team’s votes and other attributes. It also conveys which thought leaders and institutions contributed the top insights to your team.

For MSL leaders, this report helps you identify and share field insights with other stakeholders so you can make better, faster decisions.

Collectively, these reports help you demonstrate the value of Medical Affairs and drive the right strategies for your organization. To access a report, simply visit kernel and view results on your laptop, iPad or smartphone in real-time. If you wish, you may also download reports as images, .PDF files or Word documents to easily create presentations.

How we developed kernel with our customers

“The defining qualities are about use: ease and simplicity. Caring beyond the functional imperative, we also acknowledge that products have a significance way beyond traditional views of function.”

-- Sir Jonathan Ive, SVP Design at Apple

In May of last year, we were introduced to the senior director of Medical Affairs at a global pharmaceutical company. Several weeks later, we had an initial teleconference followed by a meeting at an Italian restaurant in San Francisco.

Over capellini al pomodoro, we learned our customer had been seeking a software application for Medical Affairs for years. Specifically, he desired an application to identify and share medical insights and trends with the rest of the organization, in real time.

In light of our team’s experience from Google and LinkedIn, this request was uncomplicated. Our head of engineering studied artificial intelligence and predictive analytics at MIT and was eager to write an application for medical scientists. Our head of user experience studied human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon and was eager to develop designs for MSL teams. And our head of product management, Eric Kowalchyk, won a Scott Cook innovation award at Intuit and was determined to solve an unmet need for Medical Affairs organizations.

As a next step, we shared a set of draft designs with our customer. After soliciting his feedback and revising our designs through an iterative process, we started coding the application in September.

Concurrently, Eric interviewed every MSL on our customer’s US cardiometabolic team to appreciate their challenges and request their ideas:

  1. Which skills and characteristics are required to be a successful MSL?
  2. What are the best quantitative and qualitative metrics to assess MSL performance?
  3. If we could solve one key issue for MSLs, what would this be?

For our team, these interviews represented a moment of epiphany.

In November, we were invited to a scientific exchange with a thought leader at Stanford University School of Medicine. Our customer believed that attending this exchange would provide better insight into the role of MSLs. Needless to say, we found the conversation captivatingly educational. Our thought leader was warm and expansive, yet careful to distinguish his opinion from a citation. As a result of this exchange, we identified several opportunities to make our application simple and easy to use for MSLs.

In December, we released a pilot version of kernel to our customer’s US cardiometabolic team. After training each team member, we scheduled weekly calls to solicit their feedback and ideas to improve kernel further. Based on our customer’s preferences, we prioritized these ideas in our product roadmap.

Since then, we’ve released nine software updates to kernel. However, this is only the beginning as we continue to improve our application further. So when we share potential new features with you, it comes from a sincere desire for your feedback. Our goal is to build a valuable application that you love.

What we learned about IDSs at DIA

A few weeks ago, we attended the DIA Medical & Scientific Communications Forum in Arizona. It was our first industry conference and we enjoyed seeing our friends, colleagues and customers. We also attended sessions on topics such as the current compliance landscape and the role of medical-science liaisons in clinical trials. A particular highlight was a session that discussed the complexity of integrated healthcare systems.

The speaker recommended that our definition of thought leaders should include individuals at Integrated Delivery Systems (IDSs). In the US, there are over 970 IDSs which are collectively responsible for 85% of healthcare delivery. These IDSs may be influential on a local, regional or national level. As an example, large IDSs such as Ascension Health may influence smaller IDSs in regards to protocols for certain populations.

“The IDS sphere of influence is an emerging focal point of influence. MSLs should work with IDSs because that’s where the thought leaders,
key decision makers and lives are.”

— an executive director in Medical Affairs, Health Systems

IDS thought leaders believe treatment value propositions should incorporate safety, efficacy and effectiveness in terms of cost, comparative treatments and other criteria. These thought leaders may work in areas such as care coordination, outcomes research or quality management. They may also participate on protocol and formulary committees.

With access to considerable real-world evidence, IDSs frequently have valuable perspectives on treatment value propositions for disease states. Accordingly, it’s essential to understand their perspectives.

Coincidentally, several of our customers are using kernel to collect feedback from IDSs and payers on therapy value, market access and other topics. Our next product release will let you segment IDS and payer thought leaders by local, regional and national levels of recognition. As a result, you’ll be able to identify and share insights across all types of thought leaders and regions in real-time. We’re developing these enhancements so you can drive the right strategies for your organization.

What we learned from our first customers

“It never occurred to me that there was going to be any stumbling block. Not that I had the answer, but I had the joy of going at it. When you have that joy, you do the right experiments. You let the material tell you where to go, and it tells you at every step what the next has to be because you’re integrating with an overall brand new pattern in mind.”  

-- Dr. Barbara McClintock, 1983 Nobel laureate in medicine

In July of last year, we decided to develop an application for Medical Affairs. At the time, we had little experience in biopharmaceuticals so we interviewed 20 companies to research how Medical Affairs delivers value to the organization.

Five months later, we released our first version of kernel with customers in the US and Asia. Since we use a participatory design process — soliciting customer feedback to determine which product features to develop next — we conducted 25 sessions with Medical Affairs teams to answer these questions:

  • What do our customers like about using kernel?
  • How can we improve kernel further?

This feedback helped us learn which features our customers love, as well as which features we can improve. We learned that MSL teams are passionate about using kernel to showcase medical value, but seek enhanced functionality and usability. So while we’ve made considerable progress, we have more work to accomplish!

Here are the most popular requests from our customers:

  1. Attach meaningful context to insights. A director of Medical Affairs operations asked to see a thought leader’s feedback as well as the basis for this feedback. In response, we developed a feature which enables MSLs to add supporting details which provide valuable context for thought leader perspectives.
     
  2. View MSL team activity in real time. A senior director of scientific strategy and operations asked to view MSL activity and trends for each therapeutic area in real time. We’re building this functionality combined with clear, effective reports so our customers can readily share medical insights with the rest of the organization.
     
  3. Track and compare thought leader feedback. Five MSLs asked to track a thought leader’s feedback over time, as well as compare to feedback from other thought leaders. We’re presently designing this capability which will help MSLs prepare for interactions and enhance their relationships with thought leaders.

In addition to these requests, we’re also integrating with Salesforce and Veeva to synchronize data with kernel, which eliminates duplicate data entry and saves your MSLs' time.