Save Time on Medical Congress Reports
An important task for MSL teams is attending Medical Congresses and sharing impactful information with leadership. MSLs meet with key opinion leaders (KOLs), gain competitive intelligence, attend scientific sessions, and gather other insights relevant to the Medical Strategy (check out this post with 16 tips on how to get the most out of Medical Congresses).
Also checkout this article on quickly creating a congress report from automated social media monitoring using Medical.watch when HCPs mention your disease state during the conference.
After the Medical Congress, the team analyzes the insights and creates a report to present internally. Depending on how the insights are collected, creating this report can take days or even weeks! Keep reading to learn:
simple steps to make creating the report easier & faster
common challenges
how to overcome challenges
how a tool like Kernel can make creating reporting less time-consuming
Note on terminology: “insights” in this article is referring to the raw data. Your team may call it something different (data, observations, etc).
Did you know you can try Kernel for FREE at your next Medical Congress? Get in touch to learn more.
Creating a Medical Congress Strategy
Having a well thought out strategy ahead of time will help your team get the most out of the Medical Congress and save time on the reporting. Know what your organization is hoping to achieve by attending. Perhaps your company is presenting new data and wants to understand how it is perceived? Or maybe a competitor is presenting something new? Do you want MSLs to gather all the questions asked at their poster session?
While creating the Strategy, also plan what you will report on and to whom. What do you want your final end product to look like? Knowing this ahead of time will help you determine what is important to focus on and develop a tactical plan. Be sure the plan includes how the insights will be collected, collated, and analyzed. Keep reading for things to consider to help save time when developing your plan.
Sharing the Strategy with the team
Now that you have a Strategy, it’s time to share with those attending the Medical Congress. Be clear on who is doing what and what everyone should focus on. To help focus MSLs and gather insights, some teams use paper questionnaires. If using a tool like Kernel, you can create surveys to provide MSLs guidance on what is important for the Strategy and to serve as a central repository for insights.
Collecting insights at Medical Congresses
How will the MSL team collect insights at the Medical Congress? It depends on the team. Ideally, the collection step is easy and stores all the insights in one central repository. Having a single place where the data is stored saves a lot of time later on. Here are some ways MSL teams collect insights at Medical Congresses:
Email free-text insights to a team lead
Record insights in an Excel sheet on a shared drive (like SharePoint)
Fill out a paper questionnaire
Use an internal chat tool (like Slack)
Use a dedicated tool (like Kernel)
When deciding on a method keep in mind that the insights will need to be analyzed. Ensure that your collection method doesn’t add additional work in the collating and analysis steps.
Collating Medical Congress insights
A Medical Congress is a whirlwind of meetings, talks, and presentations. Sometimes, hundreds of insights can be collected in just a few days. After the Congress, the fun part of understanding what it all means begins. Someone has to analyze the data and to do this, it should be all in one location.
Imagine collating 100’s of insights from different emails. You would need to open each email to read the insight, then copy and paste into Excel to get the insights in one spot. If using a chat tool, you would have to read the chat log and collate the insights in Excel. This can mean hours of manual work just to collate the insights. Note this doesn’t include analyzing trends and patterns!
This is a major benefit of a dedicated tool that serves as a central repository. Your team can spend time thinking about what it all means instead of getting the data into one location.
Analyzing Medical Congress insights
The MSL team needs to analyze the insights and create a simple, convenient report so Medical leaders can plan appropriate actions. How you analyze your Medical Congress insights will depend on your Strategy.
A typical way to analyze the insights is to categorize them by topic (such as product, competitor intel, clinical trial, etc) and then identify the major trends for each category. This step can be time-consuming. Tools like Kernel can help by allowing the team to categorize the insights when they are entered. This way someone doesn’t have to categorize the insights to analyze them.
Some teams try to quantify insights from the Congress. Examples include how frequently competitor products were mentioned or topics that came up during booth interactions.
Keep your Strategy and stakeholder needs in mind when identifying patterns and recommended actions.
Creating the report
The report is your time to shine. It highlights all the valuable insights the MSLs gathered at the Medical Congress and what it means for your organization.
You already planned with the outcome in mind and know what you want the report to look like. Now it’s about getting this valuable information into a digestible format for your stakeholders.
Benefits of using Kernel for Medical Congress Reporting
The Medical Congress reporting feature in Kernel can help overcome challenges associated with creating insights reports. Here are features to help MSL teams save time collecting, collating, analyzing and reporting Medical Congress insights:
One tool to collect all insights
Insights are collected in one spot
Automatic graphing of multiple-choice questions
Email reminders to report insights
Download reports in editable Word .docx formats
Email congress summary reports
Archive the insights reports for future access
Video showing how to use Kernel for Medical Congress reports
Check out this video on how to use Kernel to collect information at Medical Congresses and create reports. It can be a valuable time saver! Download the Creating Medical Congress Reports in Kernel white paper.
Conclusion
Medical Congresses represent important opportunities for collecting insights that are relevant to a Medical Strategy. Reporting these insights internally is key. If they aren’t reported in a timely fashion, the organization can miss important opportunities to benefit HCPs and patients.
Take the time to really make a Strategy and plan. This will focus your team’s efforts and make creating the report faster easier. Using a dedicated tool may help your team save time creating the report. Here are some benefits to using a tool for Medical Congress reports:
Making it easy to collect insights at Congresses
Storing the insights in one place
Helping to identify patterns and trends
Easily creating congress reports in hours, not weeks
Save time on your next Medical Congress report! To try Kernel for free, get in touch.
Check out these other blog posts to help you get the most out of your Medical insights:
