In healthcare, effective medical communication plays an important role in disseminating vital information, fostering collaboration, and driving innovation. If you work in pharma and are seeking to navigate medical communications, understanding its three distinct functions is essential.
What is Medical Communications?
Let’s start with the basics - what is medical communications? We have a whole blog post dedicated to answering this question, which you can read here. To describe it quickly, medical communications is the creation and exchange of medical information about medical treatments, drugs, devices or programs. It has three different functions: medical education, medical affairs, and commercial.
Medical Education
Medical education involves developing and delivering educational content tailored to healthcare professionals, such as physicians, trainees, and students. At its core, its goal is to develop and administer learning experiences so that HCPs can continue their education journeys and provide excellent patient care. Medical education often includes continuing medical education (CME) courses, conferences and practical skill workshops. By providing medical education, medcomms agencies help HCPs remain updated on the latest information in their medical field.
Medical Affairs
Medical affairs focuses on the engagement, advocacy and strategic collaboration of healthcare professionals. It aims to drive forward healthcare advancements and engage the medical community. This type of medical communications includes advisory boards, data collection and post-congress updates. Key Opinion Leaders, or KOLs, are important in medical affairs as they are often responsible for disseminating new data, supporting research and providing medical expertise. Medical affairs often engage KOLs, healthcare professionals, regulatory agencies and other healthcare-based organizations in an effort to facilitate change.
Commercial
The commercial function of medical communications is about promoting and communicating healthcare brands, pharmaceutical products and medical devices, or medical services. This type of work must be compliant with regulatory guidelines and ethical standards, something which must be carefully considered in medical communications work. This function of medical communications has commercial goals and is targeted towards a very specific audience to ensure commercial success. Needs assessments, data collection and advisory boards are useful to commercial medical communications as they help identify the need for a commercial product and the best way to distribute it into the medical market.
By recognizing the pivotal roles of medical education, medical affairs, and commercial communications, you can develop comprehensive and impactful projects that keep healthcare professionals well-educated and qualified. Want to learn more about medical communications? Sign up for CTC's newsletter. Just for doing so, we'll plant 10 trees on your behalf as part of our environmental protection efforts.
