Inside MAPS Americas 2025 annual meeting

AI integration in Medical Affairs: opportunities and challenges

AI was definitely THE topic of MAPS, with several sessions focusing on how AI is changing our approach to Medical Affairs. Our Med Comms team was delighted to host a roundtable discussion to explore generative AI’s role in life sciences alongside pharma representatives. Participants shared their experiences with tools such as Copilot and ChatGPT, and highlighted their use for insight generation, field engagement and strategic planning. If used successfully, AI can speed up MLR reviews, improve input quality and save research time. However, legal and compliance issues (especially in content creation) remain significant barriers. Ensuring accuracy, obtaining approvals and addressing ethical considerations (copyright, human oversight) are ongoing challenges.

Looking ahead, participants envisioned AI improving efficiency, supporting field communications and reducing administrative burdens. Participants were keen for AI to become a partner in ideation and content development, rather than just a tool.

At IPG Health, AI is integrated in our daily ways of working, supporting development of scientific content, content tagging, reference rearrangement and HCP segmentation, as well as providing wider training and adoption strategies.

Health equity demands accessible scientific solutions

Health equity demands accessible scientific solutions, overcoming geographic, economic and systemic barriers. Kalahn Taylor-Clark, Vice President and Head of Social Impact and Sustainability at Merck, delivered this impassioned message in her keynote speech, emphasizing the pharma sector’s role in improving lives. Despite progress in education and social status, health inequities persist. For example, college-educated Black women still experience substantially higher infant mortality rates than white women with only a high school education.

Work towards health equity is built upon three pillars: sustainability strategies and engagement, global impact investing and giving and mission-aligned initiatives. Pharma companies must meet the needs of underserved communities to improve patient outcomes, gain regulatory and market access advantages, enhance brand reputation and build trust with stakeholders. Ultimately, this is not just about fulfilling ethical or moral imperatives, but also about acknowledging the crucial responsibility to do more in the pursuit of health equity.

Intentional patient engagement to inform strategic planning: The value in getting it right

Intentional patient engagement has increasingly become a strategic goal for many organizations, aiming to include patients, families and caregivers as key stakeholders in activities and decision-making processes, with much discussion around how best to approach this at MAPS. This session explained how organizations that excel in patient centricity in an end-to-end approach from pre-launch to maturation are more successful in enrolling patients into clinical trials faster, have a greater likelihood of reaching market launch and have increased acceptance by formularies.

Key themes from MAPS on how to involve patient stakeholders included:

Medical Affairs is instrumental in integrating patient engagement early in the strategic planning process and fostering collaboration with cross-functional partners.

Building an omni-centric mindset and capability in Medical Affairs

Engaging the right HCP audience is increasingly challenging due to diverse stakeholder preferences, information overload and competitive pressures. Transitioning from broad to targeted communications is essential, as personalized communication aligns with modern HCP information-seeking habits.

The importance of omnichannel strategies in Medical Affairs was emphasized across several sessions at MAPS. Despite only a quarter of pharma companies having a defined omnichannel strategy in 2021, attendees were encouraged to adopt insights-driven, personalized communication strategies and utilize advanced technologies to optimize their channel frameworks.

• Strategic channel selection: Identifying the right channel mix is critical, even with compliance restrictions and limited funds
• AI-powered insights: AI technology can uncover rich audience insights (personas, preferences, journeys) to optimize channel selection
• Quantifiable measurement: Measuring the effectiveness of personalized channel mixes beyond vanity metrics is crucial for ensuring tailored and effective communications

At IPG Health, our booth at MAPS featured our tech-enabled EPICC platform. This transforms healthcare and audience data into actionable insights, enabling us to integrate strategy, creativity and production to deliver cohesive omnichannel experiences.

Measuring the impact of medical affairs… finally!

In this well-attended session, chaired by Danie Du Plessis from MAPS, the value of Medical Affairs was defined as "impact at scale," where the impact supports both business and societal needs. To truly measure impact, it is imperative that we focus on measuring the desired impact rather than activity alone. Barriers to measuring effectiveness include compliance/legal boundaries, inadequate data, imprecise methods and complacency. Medical teams must define and track impact-focused measures, or others will impose unfit metrics.

Key strategies to successfully measure impact include:

• Strategic partnerships: Engage compliance/legal colleagues early
• Data integration: Combine market research, HCP/patient-level claims and other data sources
• Target population outputs (TPOs): Measure short-term health system impact (e.g., referral rates, screening rates)
• Patient outcomes impact (POI): Link medical activities to changes in patient outcomes and provider knowledge/behavior

While outputs and measures of belief and behavior are imperfect, capturing actionable impact measures is vital to improving patient outcomes.