AI in Medical Affairs: Revolutionizing Life Sciences with AI-Powered Tools

Despite the initial hype settling down, AI remains a hot topic. And it’s not just GenAI in the spotlight, as much of the conversation now focuses on how AI’s broader capabilities can transform the pharmaceutical industry, especially within medical affairs. How will AI reshape this field? What are the risks and challenges? How can AI agents like eVa change medical affairs? Let’s explore this topic.

What is AI in Medical Affairs? 

AI in medical affairs refers to the use of artificial intelligence by medical affairs teams to support their function within such industries as pharmaceuticals, biotech, and life sciences. Medical affairs is an important function that bridges the gap between scientific research and broader public. In other words, medical affairs professionals work closely with both companies that produce new technology and the medical community, helping the latter understand more about the latest innovations and research.

Role and Responsibilities 

The role of Medical Science Liaisons (MSLs) is continuously evolving as artificial intelligence (AI) advances. However, one thing is certain: AI will not replace MSLs but augment their capabilities. Below are some key roles and responsibilities of Medical Affairs teams, now complemented by AI:

• Insights generation and management: Aggregation and analysis of data from publications, congresses, and HCP interactions, faster identification of emerging therapeutic trends and evidence gaps, gathering of real-time field evidence for informed decisions.
• Scientific communication: Drafting slide decks, scientific responses, medical information letters, and training content using generative models, ensuring scientific accuracy and compliance in messaging and content.
• KOLs & stakeholders engagement: Mapping influence networks, segmenting KOLs by therapeutic interest and reach, personalizing communication based on past interactions and other data, identifying rising key opinion leaders for early engagement.
• Evidence generation strategy: Analyzing real-world data, registry data, and clinical trial results to find evidence-generation opportunities, identifying gaps in evidence, and researching high-impact study topics.
• Medical information & field team enablement: Providing accurate responses to medical inquiries, supporting field teams with training and resources.
• Compliance & documentation: Ensuring scientific interactions, data sharing, and materials comply with regulatory and ethical standards, monitoring for compliance risks.
• Performance measurement & strategic reporting: Tracking the impact of medical affairs activities, creating real-time dashboards, identifying trends, and forecasting future needs.

Current State of AI in Medical Affairs

According to recent research, most medical affairs teams still rely on basic digital tools and are limited in their adoption of advanced technologies. Over half don’t use automated chatbots for HCP engagement, and only 50% use social media for patient interaction. Regulatory processes remain largely manual.

Additionally, many MA organizations have yet to adopt tools for MLR automation, data privacy, or security. In evidence generation and education, only ~10% use generative AI.

The role of AI is still unclear

Many medical affairs professionals are just becoming acquainted with the potential of AI and how it can be applied to their field. Although artificial intelligence has been used in research for several years prior to its recent popularization, its importance has grown significantly. As a result, there’s a growing realization that it’s not enough to understand how AI works in research or clinical trials; they also need to learn more about how it can be integrated into their day-to-day work.

New tools are emerging on the market

Although adoption has been slow, a growing number of innovative tools and applications are already making their way into the workflows of medical affairs professionals. Many are starting to use ChatGPT to plan their work, brainstorm new ideas, and enhance their productivity. Some companies are even employing their own AI-powered tools to help medical affairs workers with their daily activities. Moreover, many businesses are now embracing integrated AI, with tools like eVa AI agent becoming a part of workflows at pharmaceutical and life sciences companies.

From experimentation to implementation

As digital transformation of the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries accelerates, more and more physicians, healthcare professionals, medical science liaisons, and other experts in the medical and pharma fields are leveraging the capabilities AI offers. Previously, many organizations, including healthcare companies and facilities, were merely testing the waters. But by 2025, many have moved beyond experimentation and are actively integrating various tools and software into their workflows.”

How AI Will Revolutionize Medical Affairs

Pharmaceutical companies are actively leveraging artificial intelligence and its capabilities, encouraging their medical affairs teams to make AI a critical part of their workflows. As the world adapts to AI’s rapid rise, it’s important to recognize the areas it’s already transforming across the pharmaceutical industry and medical affairs.

Clinical trials 

One reason clinical trials fail is choosing the wrong patients. Even though there are many tools for identifying eligible patients based on EHRs, genomic data, and other information, it’s not always enough, especially since sometimes it takes a lot of time to find the right patients.

With AI, clinical trials are far more likely to succeed. AI can analyze vast amounts of data in a much shorter time, which makes the process of identifying patients most suited for clinical trials much faster. Moreover, thanks to AI’s analytical capabilities, it is now possible to predict clinical trial outcomes, minimize potential risks, and ensure that selected patients are truly the most suitable for participation.

AI-powered agents

One of the main responsibilities of medical affairs teams is working with different content types, from writing engaging emails to key opinion leaders to creating scientific papers based on research, clinical trials, or other materials. Creating any kind of copy can be a time-consuming and difficult process, especially when there are many other tasks on the shoulders of medical affairs experts.

Thanks to artificial intelligence, it’s now possible to solve this problem by integrating AI-powered assistants like eVa into the workflows of medical affairs teams. An AI agent is not the same as ChatGPT or Midjourney; it’s a tool tailored to the specifics of the medical affairs domain that offers brand-safe, compliant content creation. Some of the important features include:

• End-to-end content creation that is natively embedded into a single workflow within the eWizard platform;
• Brand compliance engine that combines DAM-approved assets and AI generation for guaranteed consistency;
• Context-aware image and text recommendations and generation, with support for prompts of 10+ languages;
• AI-powered module suggestions based on historical data and DAM-approved modules, increasing the use of existing modules;
• Centralized content creation, with the eVa AI agent serving as the main hub for all AI-powered content processes.

With eVa, it takes only seconds to draft an email layout, find perfectly compliant images, or generate an on-brand copy. With AI agents, it will finally be possible to generate content that respects your brand guidelines, without constantly going back and forth with compliance teams.

Collaboration within teams

One of the main responsibilities of medical affairs professionals is collaborating with each other and sharing important insights collected through engaging KOLs, researching, attending events, and other ways. However, even just one meeting could take a lot of time, since everyone would need time to prepare all of the insights, form an outline, and then speak out and share valuable information.

With AI, medical affairs teams’ collaboration can become much more productive. Instead of spending hours organizing all the data and making sure that nothing is forgotten, MA professionals can use AI to write summaries, create meeting agendas, and even take notes during meetings with others.

KOL engagement

Medical affairs professionals can apply AI to improve engagement with KOLs in many areas. For example, AI-powered agents can help experts personalize interactions with key opinion leaders by analyzing behavioral data and providing important insights without taking a lot of time to perform the analysis.

Insight generation is not the only capability of AI that contributes to boosting KOL engagement. Artificial intelligence can analyze massive amounts of data, helping medical affairs professionals find the right key opinion leaders and the best ways to contact them. Manual research can take days, if not weeks, while with tools like AI agents, it can become much easier to find the right people to talk to, as well as learn more about them before approaching.

Drug development

Medical affairs experts provide ongoing support throughout the drug development cycle, from gathering insights from HCPs and patients to monitoring safety signals and therapeutic trends to identify new indications or label expansion opportunities. Equipped with the right AI tools, medical affairs professionals can completely change the process of drug discovery and development with the help of such capabilities as real-world data integration, sentiment mining, landscape analysis, clinical trial design, personalized scientific communication, automated compliance monitoring, and many others.

Label expansion 

Label expansion is an important but costly process of gaining regulatory approval for new indications, patient populations, or dosing regimens. With AI, label expansion can be transformed into an insight-driven process, powered by real-world data, which can easily be mined with AI’s capabilities. Moreover, machine learning is capable of uncovering subpopulations (by age, biomarkers, and other factors) that show better-than-expected outcomes, prompting new hypotheses for label expansion. AI can make label expansion more predictive and patient-centric, making it more accessible and increasing the chances of regulatory and market success.

Obstacles and Challenges in Adopting AI

According to an IBM report, around half of the experts across industries still hesitate to adopt AI due to multiple reasons, such as data accuracy, lack of AI expertise, bias, and many others. Medical affairs teams also face multiple challenges in integrating AI into their medical strategy, including the following:

Data safety

Despite numerous benefits, many common GenAI tools pose a serious safety risk when it comes to data privacy. Medical affairs professionals should be very cautious when working with such tools as ChatGPT, as entering sensitive information could put it at risk of data breaches or leaks. This problem highlights the need for tools tailored to the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries that consider all regulations, and not just some general standards. Tools like the eVa AI agent address this problem by fully incorporating brand and regulatory guidelines into content generation, reducing operational, compliance, and reputation risks.

Incorrect information

Language models, even the latest ones, are capable of “hallucinating,” which means that they can give you information that sounds correct but is actually just made-up facts presented in a nice way to make them sound more believable. This problem doesn’t stop there: many language models also fabricate citations or point to incorrect sources, sometimes linking to materials that don’t actually mention the research or statistics the user was looking for.

Lack of trust and transparency

Any AI technology developed outside of the healthcare and pharma sectors is likely to ignore all of the regulations and standards that are always considered within these industries. Moreover, this AI is sometimes proven to give biased opinions and one-sided viewpoints; it can be dangerous for medical professionals to rely on generic AI tools that are capable of producing results that cannot be trusted. And when it comes to transparency, it is often unclear where the language model gets certain conclusions from, as well as the data it claims to be true, which is why it is still so hard for medical affairs experts to rely on AI tools.

Over-reliance on AI

Despite many professionals still avoiding AI, many have already embraced its potential, partially due to their companies integrating AI into their workflows. Because of this, many experts rely on the capabilities of artificial intelligence instead of their own expertise, which could lead to the loss of skill. Even though artificial intelligence in medical affairs has many benefits and can help workers become more productive, delegating all the decision-making and research to AI tools could seriously impact not only the accuracy of information generated but also the skill level.

Closing Thoughts 

It’s true that every medical science liaison will eventually integrate AI into their workflows. But that doesn’t mean AI’ll replace them or their core responsibilities will disappear. Instead, AI will enhance their role, not redefine it. From measuring outcomes of their work to preparing reports for external stakeholders, artificial intelligence and tools like AI agents will be able to assist medical affairs teams in their daily tasks, removing the need to spend so much time on mundane work and allowing MSLs to focus on more strategic tasks instead.

If you are not sure how to start your journey to digital transformation and what you can do to incorporate AI into your processes, let us know. Our team of experts is ready to provide you with all the knowledge you need to start leveraging the eVa AI agent right now.

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