The Medical Affairs Excellence Canvas pack for (self-)assessment and continuous improvement

CapSys Group’s latest global research, Re-thinking Medical Affairs, identified six pivotal success requirements to uniquely position Medical Affairs as a strategic pillar within organizations and enable Medical Affairs Excellence. It also discovered, however, that Medical Affairs functions within pharmaceutical (pharma) and life sciences companies are often struggling to prioritize development needs and align the organization on the critical path to Medical Affairs Excellence. To overcome these challenges, experts at CapSys developed the CapSys Medical Affairs Excellence Canvas pack, a (self-)assessment tool and framework to enable Medical Affairs professionals to assess their organizations’ status, prioritize actions and drive continuous improvement.

As elaborated in detail in parts 2 and 3 of the Re-thinking Medical Affairs series, industry experts from CapSys and leading players in the industry have identified six requirements for success to enable Medical Affairs to respond to external challenges, achieve Medical Affairs Excellence, and become the pivotal strategic pillar that best serves their organizations.

Figure 1: Six success requirements for achieving Medical Affairs Excellence; CapSys Group

Four of these crucial success requirements are of a technical nature. They encompass the necessary activities that a Medical Affairs function needs to master to ensure sustainable success and achieve Medical Affairs Excellence:

These technical pre-requisites are supplemented by two organizational success requirements which form the fundamental basis for the success factors above:

Performing well on all six success requirements will enable pharma and life sciences organizations to deal with the intensifying pressure from external trends and rising internal expectations, and ultimately to achieve Medical Affairs Excellence. Failing to do so will further prevent Medical Affairs from becoming the lynch pin it could – and in fact ought to aspire to – be for an organization’s success.

In our experience, however, it is often not the lack of agreement on the six key success factors that is hindering excellence in Medical Affairs. It is usually the absence of alignment on the key priorities for development and a lack of a well-defined continuous improvement program that moves the organization ahead. This is why we created the CapSys Medical Affairs Excellence Canvas pack as a change management tool for Medical Affairs executives and their teams.

The Medical Affairs Excellence Canvas pack is a toolbox designed to help Medical Affairs executives assess their organization and to serve as a framework for developing a world-class Medical Affairs function and achieving Medical Affairs Excellence. The pack contains three components that build on each other.

Of course, achieving Medical Affairs Excellence is a process of continuous learning and development, not a mere exercise of filling in templates. But directing development in the right direction benefits from a solid thinking model and rigid management. This is what the canvas pack was designed to provide and support.

The first component of the canvas pack, the (self-)assessment canvas, is a list of guiding questions for (self-)assessment within your Medical Affairs team. It is based on output from the global Re-Thinking Medical Affairs study and is meant to structure your evaluation effort. For best practice, this assessment should be conducted as a team effort rather than as an individual exercise. To further strengthen the validity and to avoid bias, professional and neutral moderation as well as cross-functional input (e.g., from Market Access or Commercial teams) are highly advisable.

Figure 2: CapSys Medical Affairs Excellence (Self-)Assessment Canvas; CapSys Group

The Planning Canvas is a template designed for Medical Affairs executives and their teams to identify and prioritize development areas. It supports an open discussion on current strengths and weaknesses and the identification of improvement needs. As with the previous step, we recommend cross-functional participation both to overcome functional blind spots and to increase the chance of buy-in and support beyond the Medical Affairs function when Medical Affairs gradually assumes a more prominent role in the organization.

Figure 3: CapSys Medical Affairs Excellence Planning and Prioritization Canvas; CapSys Group

The final canvas is a template for Medical Affairs teams to define, assign and sequence concrete activities for addressing prioritized development areas. It supports both initial program planning and subsequent continuous performance auditing.

Figure 4: CapSys Medical Affairs Excellence Actions Canvas; CapSys Group

This is part four in a series of four insight articles based on CapSys’ global Re-thinking Medical Affairs study and focused on Medical Affairs Excellence in pharma and life sciences. The first article of the series (part 1) gave an overview of the external trends influencing Medical Affairs and the main challenges arising from them. Parts 2 and 3 provide key content and insights on the six success requirements for Medical Affairs Excellence. Part 4 provides a framework for a continuous improvement and self-assessment, the Medical Affairs Excellence Canvas.

For these Re-thinking Medical Affairs series of articles and other upcoming industry insights please visit the Capsys group website under https://capsysgroup.com/insights/.