CASE STUDY: Business Strategy

It’s How You Ask
TOP-20 BIOPHARMACEUTICAL COMPANY | USA

A top-20
pharmaceuticalcompany’s Field
Medical teamworked with ZS todevelop bettersurveys, gathering
insights that wereused in an FDA
negotiation
process

Throughout the process of bringing a new
drug to market, a pharmaceuticalcompany’s medical affairs group will play
an instrumental role in providing education
to physicians, as well as capturing medical
insights on developing therapies and unmet
needs. At the forefront of medical affairs
are field teams of medical science liaisons(MSLs), which serve as the externalscientific face of the company. MSLs will
inform healthcare providers (HCPs) oflandscape changes and provide them within-depth understanding of new therapies,
while also sharing with their company theperspectives of the medical community that
impact product strategy and help in clinical
trial design.
Assessing the value MSLs bring to acompany increasingly relies on surveying
these HCPs to understand how effective
their engagements with the MSLs havebeen. For one top-20 pharma company, adecision to design comprehensive market
research studies produced not only
feedback on their MSLs, but also data on key
opinion leader (KOL) awareness andunderstanding of scientific concepts. Thisdata would ultimately prove crucial for thecompany as they entered the drug approval
process with the FDA.

The Problem
Measuring the effectiveness of MSLs isnotoriously difficult. Unlike their fieldcounterparts in sales, impact cannot— andshould not—be measured in prescriptions orother measures of ROI. While many

companies assess customer satisfaction
with MSLs, an executive director of one of
the company’s regional liaison teams wanted
to push far beyond satisfaction.

The Solution
The company’s MSL team lead partneredwith ZS to develop a series of tests, designed
to assess the true knowledge level of theKOLs across scientific content important tothe team.
To bring a high level of sophistication to themarket research study design, the director
turned to ZS Medical Affairs. ZS’s expertiseand refined strategies ensured that thesurveys were streamlined, easy tounderstand, and engaging for therespondents. The team’s surveys wereprimarily focused on two topics:++ Assessing how well their MSLs wereeducating the community++ Tracking KOL awareness and perception ofkey scientific issues
Questions were asked in a variety of ways
which allowed the MSL team to study
concepts from several different angles in amore conclusive manner.
Importantly, as the team was designing themarket research study, they invested thetime to seek input from cross-functional
stakeholders throughout the organization to
gain an in-depth understanding of the key
scientific concepts to test. This allowed ZS to
ask more challenging questions that dug
deeper into what the physicians and KOLsLearn more atwww.zs.com“Having a good
partner is key. ZS
does their
homework, reallyguiding us with
their expertise inmarket researchand deep level ofunderstanding ofour issues.”

truly knew and understood. ZS was then able
to help design innovative approaches such as
mini-quizzes that helped the MSL team
identify where there were educational gaps
and misperceptions.
“Usually, these kinds of surveys show trends
rather than more conclusive evidence,” thedirector said. “It’s just the nature of market
research. But we think that our approachprovides better, more conclusive data.”

The Impact
Besides providing a more thorough base of
medical field information used to addresseducational gaps in field in the future, thesurveys managed to capture insights thatproved beneficial to the high-stakes
process of gaining FDA approval. Duringnegotiations on a potential new product, theFDA had raised concerns about awarenessin the scientific community regarding acertain end point. One of the company’s
double-blind surveys, conducted by ZS,
showed a different interpretation.

We had prioritized this topic in our market
research because we knew the awarenessof this endpoint would be important tomultiple stakeholders,” the director noted.
When a pharma company submits a package
for consideration to the FDA, it is crucial thatthey are prepared with solid evidence anddata to answer the questions that comeduring the negotiation. Due to the quality ofthe surveys the company had conducted,
they had the insights on hand to strengthen
their argument and change the FDA’s
perception of the scientific community’sawareness and understanding.
“Having a good partner is key,” thedirector said. “ZS does their homework,
really guiding us with their expertise inmarket research and deep level ofunderstanding of our issues. We guide ZS
in terms of what it is we really want toknow, so if we’re specific on that front,
then it’s about having a partner adding
their expertise to optimize the questions.”

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companies improve overall perfrormance—from customer insights and strategy,
to analytics, to operations and technology. More than 5,500 ZS professionals in 22offices worldwide draw on deep industry and domain expertise to deliver impact forclients across multiple industries. To learn more, visit www.zs.com or follow us on
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05-18