At Reuters Events: Pharma USA, a panel moderated by Beghou Partner Marcos Mendell on "From silos to synergy: Evolve field team models for measurable impact" arrived at an uncomfortable diagnosis: the infrastructure built to dissolve silos may be the very thing reproducing them.
Medical affairs leaders can often describe how field integration is supposed to look — aligned scientific narratives, digital and field working in sequence, compliance and analytics as partners. What's harder to explain is why, after all that investment, the gap between the vision and reality persists.
The culprit is usually not the strategy. It's the systems, budget structures, and workflows meant to connect teams. Three issues keep showing up.
1. Insight systems are built for headquarters, not for the field
Field teams have ample access to dashboards and other ways of tracking what’s happening. But when it comes time to act, those systems fall short. Most were designed to give headquarters a snapshot of business activity. But that’s not the data needed to support decisions driving impact in the field.
As Marcos Mendell, Partner at Beghou, put it: “What you provide the field needs to function as an input to their day-to-day decisions. Too often, what gets built is reporting — an output for headquarters users. The same system can’t effectively serve both.”
Most systems are built by asking: What data do we have, and how did we perform?
Field teams need the opposite: What decision am I trying to make, and what do I need to know to make it?
What to do
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Start with a short list of decisions the field makes every week (who to engage, when, and why).
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Build insights around those priorities.
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Use AI to support decisions, such as surfacing the right moments to engage.
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Cut reporting that doesn't clearly connect to an action.
2. Budget puts digital and field in competition, even when the strategy does not
Digital engagement is intended to extend medical affairs’ reach by enabling field teams to focus on qualified leads. A culmination of signals, such as attending a webinar or downloading a podcast, indicate which HCPs are ready for deeper scientific conversations. That enables targeted, high-value follow-up by MSLs.
It shifts planning from channel-by-channel execution to a sequenced workflow. Here’s how Marie-Ange Noué, scientific communications lead at EMD Serono, described it: “When digital platforms, analytics, and the field are working together end to end, it’s really powerful.”
However, when digital and field share the same medical affairs P&L, budget decisions force tradeoffs. Investment in one comes at the expense of the other. What should be a coordinated workflow becomes a series of compromises.
Separating investment in digital reach from field depth, rather than running both through a single budget center, tends to unlock progress better than any platform change.
What to do
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Fund digital engagement and field activity as complementary investments, not competing line items.
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Evaluate performance across digital and field together, not as separate channels.
3. Compliance comes in at the review stage rather than the decision stage
Compliance often sits at the end of a workflow, by which point decisions are locked, limiting its role to risk evaluation. Involving compliance earlier changes this. The question shifts from whether a tactic can proceed to figuring out how it can.
Perhaps Florin Drăcea, VP of US Medical Affairs at Shionogi, explained, “Compliance works best when it’s embedded in the process of developing that collaboration and keeping them up to date.”
Earlier involvement allows compliance to shape how work proceeds within guardrails, so it’s designed to move forward with less rework and fewer delays.
What to do
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Involve compliance in strategic planning before tactics are formed.
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Embed compliance in the decision workflow, not just end-stage review.
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Keep compliance connected throughout execution, not just at approval.
One question worth asking
Here’s a quick way to gauge field integration: when your MSL opens their laptop on Monday morning, does the system tell them what headquarters wants to know — or what is needed to impact scientific exchange?