Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. My guest today is Kent Christofferson. He's senior director of medical affairs at Orchard Therapeutics, and we talk about the art of mastering the medical affairs professional role inside and out. It's an awesome conversation. Kent has some really good stuff to share. I think you guys are gonna like this.
Don't forget to, connect with me on LinkedIn and follow us on LinkedIn, on YouTube, and Instagram, and check us out on MSL Talk Live, which is on Clubhouse, the 1st Tuesday of every month at 1:30 PM EST. Thank you guys for joining me. Thank you for liking and sharing this on social media. I really appreciate it. Welcome to MSL Talk with Tom Caravella, a podcast specifically designed for MSL and all things field medical. Hey, Kent. Welcome. Thanks for joining me. I'm so glad you're here. Thanks.
It's great to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Yeah. Yeah. So, first quick shout out before we get started. I have to welcome some new listeners. We actually have a new audience in the Czech Republic. We're actually ranked in Czech Republic right now pretty high. So wanna welcome everybody. And thanks again, Ken. I know we talked about this. We met at a meeting. This idea came up, and we're finally getting to it. And this is probably gonna be the last podcast I think I do for this year.
So before we get into it, if you could, maybe give a quick introduction as to, who you are, where you're from, and and where you work in these days, that'd be great. Thanks. Kent Kristofferson, born and raised in the Midwest in the United States. I spent about a dozen years in academics, meaning that I ran a lab. I'm a biochemist, a PhD by degree, had NIH funds, had other fundings, had contracted work with various industry partners.
And then after about about a dozen years or so, then I transitioned into industry, and that transition for me was into an MSL role. And so I closed a lab, and moved into the field for for hemophilia, worked for a medium large sized biotech. And then also after having been in MSL for a while and then became a senior MSL, switched over to spinal muscular atrophy, so also another rare disease, then, switched into an even smaller company.
At that point, then I also started some leadership positions, for field teams. And then now I work for for a quite small company, within the stem cell gene therapy space and have switched from not just leading field teams, but now leading medical affairs. And my most current role is a senior director for global medical affairs, at Orchard Therapeutics. And so now I'm in a global role. Yeah. So you've done it all. I mean, you started out. I've done quite a bit. Yeah. Yeah. You've done a lot.
So was that your plan? I'm just curious. Was that your plan? Did you decide that, well, I'm gonna get into industry, and I'm just gonna keep climbing up the ladder and get into leadership? And That's a very fair question, and I've I've gotten that question. Actually, the most frequent time I got that question is when I made the transition from academics into industry. Mhmm. And and I'll be honest. I'll say, no. That was not the original plan.
I was one of those individuals that thought that I would probably stay within academics, working in university setting, in a hospital setting, most of my life, if not all of my life. And, at the time, I just made a conscious decision that that's not what I wanted to do anymore, so I look at this as a second career. My first career was an academic career, and my second career was an industry career. And, no, that was not the original plan.
It was something that I decided along the way that I wanted to make a change, and do something different. Awesome. Well, it's, it's it's quite a run, and and your progression is really, impressive. And I think that you're the perfect guy to talk about this topic. So we're gonna talk about mastering the medical affairs professional role inside and out. And what inside and out means, it means both internally and externally.
So I guess the first question I have is and just to start, you know, where like, how does this originate? I mean, is this something that originates through the individual? Is this something that is really set forth through strategy from leadership? What's your feeling on that? Sure. My perspective, of course, is that within when I was in academics, I had medical science liaisons come to me. Mhmm. And so I look at it sort of from that perspective as well.
And so I think the answer to your question in in sort of the short term, if we're thinking about it, is it's a mixture of leadership, but it's also the individual MSL. Mhmm. And we can kinda talk about that a little bit if you'd like. So from a from a leadership perspective, the leadership team really needs to give the tools to the field team. Then the field leadership team needs to sort of facilitate the use of those tools by the MSLs.
And so that sort of is a leadership responsibility to advocate for what the field team needs. Now having said that, there's also strategy and tactics. That's probably only about half of the puzzle, I think. I think the other half of the puzzle is the individual. So I mentioned that I used to be, a thought leader in in academics.
And so my perspective on this is even for those people that weren't in academics and maybe have been in industry their whole life or are starting as an MSL brand new without a background, I think where the MSL comes into this and being effective is to you have to start thinking like the KOLs. You have to start thinking about whether they're physicians or otherwise. You have to start thinking about what they value.
And to be effective in this role, essentially, what I'm saying is this leadership's responsibility is to give the right tools to the field teams and the MSLs so that they can do their job. And then the MSLs' responsibilities is to get into the shoes and think like the thought leader. You know, think about what they need. Think about what they want. Think about what their role is in their organization. And if you begin to do that, then that's your responsibility as an MSL.
And that sort of is where you start to make the transition from just being an effective MSL to truly mastering the role as a as a piece of the medical affairs organization. Got you. And that's, I think, really what we're going to talk about today. Yeah, for sure. And and let's go back to you. You mentioned tools and the importance of leadership setting the tone and and strategy for that. So let's talk about those tools. You're talking about, you know, training and, direction and and metrics.
And what are what are some of the tools that you would say are mandatory for for this piece? Certainly. And I think when I'm thinking about tools right now, I'm thinking about tools handed from the field team. So, I think of onboarding. I think of training. I think of mentorship mentorship. And I think of development, and we're talking about MSLs here and the field teams in general, as distinct components.
So if I think about onboarding, onboarding really is is just not just the company, but the technology, the pipeline, the internal team dynamics, as well as the internal and external expectations. So most companies will have some form of onboarding platform that probably represents what's needed for the whole company. But if you really dive into the MSL team, that's where those tools, the technology platform, the pipeline, and the dynamics, I think, is important.
And some people forget about the dynamics of a particular team. I'm very much into diversity. I think teams should be very diverse, I think, both in terms of their background, what their experiences are, but as well as, their education, biochemists, pharmacists, clinicians like nurse practitioners, etc. Training, I think of training as distinctly different than onboarding. Training is really a never ending process.
And for those of you that may not like training, sorry, that's the reality of life. Training never ends. And so I think one of the things that MSL hopefully have in terms of if you're trying to decide to be an MSL or become an MSL is you really have to have this desire to learn all the time. And that's what I mean by training. It could be new technology, new products, new skill sets, really. So training really needs to include new skill sets either for the individual or the team.
I mentioned mentorship. I think mentorship is actually very keyed for implementation. So whatever the tactics are for the team, implementation of those really requires mentorship because that's about the team culture, the day to day activities, as well as the expectations of that team. The mentorship provides that link to the team culture. Development. So I think development might be the most important.
And and I know that some people forget this piece whether they're leadership or whether they're the individual. The individual MSO kinda owns their own development plan. That's very common across companies. But when I'm speaking about development here, I mean, not just your individual development plan that you may have written out or hopefully you've written out. Even if you weren't asked to, you really should have your own development plan.
And I don't mean the path from an MSL to a senior MSL to a principal. What I'm really thinking about is that diverse skill set that I just alluded to a minute ago. If that diverse skill set is brought to the team, so how does leadership really leverage those skills but then also develop the individual MSL so that they can achieve their long term goals beyond just becoming an MSL, a senior MSL, and a principal MSL.
It could be project focused, it could be external stakeholder focused like the different types of external stakeholders And so I encourage all MSOs regardless of where they are in their personal professional development path to write out their own development plan and then talk to their leadership individually, as well as just do skip level meetings. Right?
So if you have a field director, encourage you to do a skip level meeting with the field director's manager in terms of the line and really think about your development but also encourage leadership to do something very specific to help you on your developmental path. And so that's really making an MSL individually and and also as a team very effective in my mind. Sure. I encourage everybody else to do it. Well, there's a lot of great advice there. There's there's advice there for leadership.
Obviously, it starts with onboarding. It starts with hiring because you had mentioned the importance of having a diverse team. It starts with training. Obviously, training, you mentioned from the beginning, and ongoing training. You also mentioned how important it is for MSLs to be lifelong learners, which we just actually had a podcast episode about that. Yeah. I saw that. Yep. Really consistent. But one of the things I wanna go back to is you mentioned the importance of thinking like a KOL.
Can you elaborate on that? Because I think that that's that's really important piece. Thanks. I think that when we're transitioning from being an effective MSL or be let's make it more broad, an effective field medical team member. If you're transitioning from just being effective to truly mastering the skill sets in the professional area of medical affairs, I think that's that's basically what I'm talking about.
So I mentioned earlier that the medical affairs leadership makes decisions and that affects the structure, the strategy, the tactical planning. So if we go a little further and we go down into the individual field team member, you know, some people are think of these in in a larger company. For example, you might have a stakeholder. This could be a physician, a payer, a patient, or it could be internal, actually. Right?
Could be the clinical development team, could be the commercial team, it could be the operations team, it could be supply chain depending on what company you work in. So if you think of those external stakeholders and internal stakeholders and then you look at the structure and so where I'm going to start this is really with the structure.
So some companies will have medical science liaisons, they'll have clinical trial liaisons, they might have a medical value liaison or an outcome science liaison, or they might even have a patient advocacy liaison. And so, of course, the idea of having all of those different types of medical affairs field facing components is that they can actually engage those external stakeholders.
When I think about my own personal thoughts, and and sort of thinking about integrating this team, I think about an integrated team effectiveness model. That's not my own word. That's actually, you know, you could find that if you googled it on the Internet. It's actually doesn't come from medical affairs. It actually comes from the clinical side, meaning it comes from academic medical centers thinking about how they take care of patients, this integrated team effectiveness model.
If I integrate my thoughts onto that model, and and this is why I think it's important is, it's really the impact of the individual team member, with multiple roles or having separate team members. And in the hospital, this would be the nurses and the doctors and the pharmacists. On our team, what I'm really referring to is you can either think about it as the different medical affairs components or you can think about it how medical affairs work with their cross functional partners.
That's another way to think of it. But that's where this team effectiveness model starts to come into place. Actually, if you're looking for the reference, I don't know, maybe we can put it on the on the blog later, but I do have the reference for this model if you want it. But it really brings separate roles, within the company to be effective. And by effective, I mean external communication, external value proposition, as well as internal, communication and internal value proposition.
So, I don't know if that exactly answered your question the way that you worded it, but we can pull apart some of those pieces if you want, a little further. Yeah. Well, first thing, I definitely would love to put a link up. When we do the announcement and we announce this podcast on LinkedIn, I'd love to put that link in the announcement so that people can can know where to get it.
But, I mean, if you can drill down into that, obviously, there's there's 2 pieces of this that that we're we're looking at. There's how do MSLs bring value to their internal stakeholders? How do they bring value to external stakeholders? But then the other piece, which we're talking a little bit about too, is how do leaders, do you know, direct and strategize for the MSLs to be successful. So there's Sure. There's 2.
There's the leadership piece to it, which we've talked about, but then there's the the MSL piece. So let's talk about that a little bit and and how MSLs could bring value internally and externally through this, you know, this effectiveness model? Yeah. So I think when we think of value proposition and actually have seen on some of your other podcasts, value proposition is a topic that comes up fairly regularly. Some people think about it in terms of KPIs.
Other people think about it in terms of, sort of the value that you bring to your organization. MSLs, I think, where you have to start is the medical science liaison function or other field facing functions within medical affairs that I just mentioned a minute ago. They're integral in terms of the value proposition, the value proposition both externally and the value proposition internally. So if we dive into that a little bit, what it really means is clinical insights.
And I think other people have said this and it'll be a repeat. I'm sure for some people who have listened to your other podcasts, clinical insights are really the currency that we think about for the value proposition. And right now, I'm actually thinking internally. So if we think about the currency, the clinical insights that the field medical affairs team brings into the company internally, that is the value proposition.
So we have to recognize, I think, that insights can come from any number of external stakeholders. I actually started to allude to this a little earlier. It could be KOLs. It could be HCPs that are or are not a KOL. And by HCPs, I mean not just the physicians. I mean nurse practitioners, nurses, pharmacists, social workers, genetic counselors. There's a whole slew, of individuals that work within the hospital system with any any given disease. I happen to work within rare disease.
So these so these teams essentially take care of an individual patient. You may have surgeons. You may have orthopedics. You may have cardiology. So you have to recognize that insights from health care providers are not just insights from your top tier KOLs.
I think there is always a natural tendency to bring in insights from the field into the company and that value proposition in the company is skewed If you only get insights from your top tier KOLs, you really need the insights from everyone and you bring those into the company. In addition, though, we're really also talking about insights that can come from other places other than health care providers. And I'm not saying just MSLs. These are also field medical affairs functions.
So diagnostic labs, patient advocacy, public affairs, payers in particular. If you're if you're not part of an MSL team or if you're not part of a value outcomes science liaison type team and you're not bringing in insights from payers, you're really doing a disservice to your own company. Those insights are the currency. So why are they the currency by which, information comes into the company? The insights are the currency because those insights drive strategy.
They should be driving strategy within the medical affairs organization, but more importantly, they should be driving strategy across the company. So this is where leadership now comes back into the conversation, especially as the internal value of insights are communicated within the company. It's really leadership's responsibility to help make sure that the insights are heard within the company. They might be heard on program teams. They might be heard on launch teams.
They might be heard on clinical development teams. And and so when I think of the leadership role and insights and bringing those into the company, that leadership is really taking insights that come in through the field from different thought leaders or different targets, payers, physicians, etcetera, and they filter those insights into the company and then redistribute them appropriately. And that's really it has to happen.
If it doesn't happen like that, then the insights that the field team collects have no value inside the company because they're not making their way to where they can affect strategic decision making processes and then the downstream tactics, and not just for medical affairs, for the entire organization. So I have a personal opinion about this and then actually is going to get to this.
Some companies, as I mentioned, divide up all these external facing functions, the payers, the physicians, patient advocacy, etcetera. I'm actually an advocate for having the same medical science liaison within a geography actually perform all the roles. So if it is a clinical trial liaison, a traditional MSL role, or MOSL speaking to payers on behalf of the market access team.
My personal opinion is is I'm an advocate to have one person within a particular geography actually having the multiple conversations. It ties back to where we started this conversation because it onboarding, and everything.
It really is more complicated for the individual MSL but what it does for you, from a leadership perspective and also from a medical affairs value perspective, or we're talking about it, is mastering the medical affairs function as an MSL also in this case means being able to speak to payers, being able to speak to physicians and other health care providers, being able to speak to diagnostic labs, we haven't even really touched on that
yet, but also support the patient advocacy and public affairs function, which means that you're actually also speaking to patient advocacy groups. The value in having one person have all the conversations is you have continuity of the message across everybody. What the challenge is for the MSL in this role, really, you have to understand the compliance framework. You have to be trained on the compliance framework to tailor the message appropriately for the audience. Yeah. It's quite difficult.
I was going to say When it works, it's quite effective. Yeah. I it it makes sense. I think the challenge is it puts a lot of stress on the system because now MSLs have to be trained in all those different things. They have to be dynamic enough to be able to wear a lot of hats and communicate across all those different areas and be an expert across all those different areas.
But the other thing too is from a strategic standpoint, the company now has to I would imagine, if you have one MSL that's responsible for all of those, let's call them thought leaders in a specific area, the territories probably have to shift dramatically. I would imagine that the territories are much smaller because you're calling on a lot more people in a defined territory. Does that mean There are two basic impacts of this. Now I have a bias because I work within rare disease.
Our rare disease geographies tend to be large to begin with. Right. So so this model is is maybe not possible in some therapeutic areas where the geographies are already relatively small. Right. So you can't make them even smaller than they already are. Right. If you are, you know, if you already are on a team with 30 or 40 medical science liaisons, this model may not work. Right? Because you've already got 1 MSL per state essentially in that model.
Yeah. But in rare disease in particular and in some of the newer models with advanced therapies, whether they're gene therapy or RNAi or some of these very complicated therapies, you already have to have all these functions understand the therapy that is extremely complex. Right. And so it actually is easier, I would argue, to teach the compliance roles, whereas the more complicated aspect to learn is the technology platform and the therapy itself.
So I would argue that particularly in rare disease but also other diseases where the technology is very complicated and the therapy is very complicated in the advanced therapy space is basically what I'm talking about is that, it's a balance between teaching the therapeutics as well as teaching the compliance, but it raises the bar in the threshold for the MSLs, for sure. Yeah. Much a more complicated way to function, but when it functions, it's a very effective model.
Actually, going back to the effectiveness model that we were talking about earlier, if you read the article and you read the clinical side, it's really also talking about which health care providers do what aspects of what jobs, right, and specialists versus nonspecialists. What I'm arguing here is essentially you're creating a specialist, an MSL, that is even more specialized than a run of the mill MSL working in one particular area.
So for the MSL, and this connects back to the development of an MSL, for an MSL that wants to really develop themselves professionally and not become just an experienced functioning MSL, but truly master the medical affairs space. I would argue that actually an MSL that can do all of these aspects is now becoming a master not just of being an MSL, but truly mastering the medical affairs function as it integrates into the rest of the company.
And so it provides an opportunity for MSLs who like this, want this aspect of medical affairs. If individuals would prefer to just engage health care providers, then this is not the job for them. Well, I see this as one of the ways that medical affairs is heading in the future, especially in the advanced therapeutics space. It's an interesting concept. It it really is a bit of a paradigm shift to an extent. I think a lot of companies are kinda kinda going in that direction anyway.
But, you know, you hit the nail on the head. I mean, we're not talking about mastering the MS you know, the medical affairs professional role. So that's certainly one way to do it. You also mentioned I wanna just go back to, clinical insights and the importance of being an insights expert. That is so consistent. All the conversations that I've had recently I just did a podcast on on the value of MSLs, and, it just that's such a consistent piece of it.
Every single person that I've spoken to about value, they come back to the fact that if you can be an expert in, you know, insights, reporting, and gathering, you absolutely will be a top MSL and and, you know, create that value internally to the organization. But what I wanted to do is shift because we didn't talk about the how to create the value externally and what advice you have for MSLs in handling their KOLs.
Yeah. So, when we think about value coming out of the company, in some ways, if you already understand insights into the company, actually, this is also insights going out. We just don't document it quite in the same way. But when we think about value proposition for the external stakeholders, we already touched a little bit on understanding, who your audience is. Right? Is your audience a physician? Are they nurse practitioner? Are they geneticists? Are they a payer?
Are they you know, what is the what is the context? But in terms of bringing value outside, you have to go way beyond that. You have to actually think about whether, what motivates the individual. It's, I guess, usually where I begin the thought process or where I encourage other people to begin the thought process. And so motivation.
So if you're thinking about a health care provider, so let's focus on the health care provider because I think most of the people that are listening to this are really probably looking at health care providers but this could be applied to other audiences other than health care provider. I recommend people start with the type. We are just focused on that. But then next on the list is the motivation. Is, you know, what are the what is valued by that health particular health care provider?
Is it information? Is it more than that? This is where that soft skill set that I think you were referring to in terms of profiling the individual is very helpful because if you truly understand the physician, if we're going to talk about a physician or a nurse practitioner, and you really understand what their motivation is, it will be helpful. So if there's somebody who really values and are motivated in the context as a clinician, they want to bring good clinical care to their patient.
That's one possibility. They want the most advanced therapy. They need the information so that they can make their clinical treatment decisions in the most educated way possible. You are bringing value as an MSL to that individual by giving them the information that they need. I think most people will get that, so that's why I started there. Maybe they're a researcher. Maybe they're a physician that is a researcher. In which case in that case, it will go beyond the clinical aspects.
The value proposition that you bring to them has potentially to do with clinical trials. Maybe they're a trial site. Maybe they're of a referring physician for a trial, etcetera. I think most MSOs will get that piece as well. But then you have to keep diving deeper, and you need to understand what is their role within the department? Are they a recently hired up and coming KOL that is an assistant professor or, you know, just finished their fellowship? Are they departmental chair?
Which means that in addition to treating patients and having research projects, they have administrative responsibilities. It it really is about the soft skill sets and in profiling the individual physician, in this case, if we're talking about physicians. Because once you understand their motivation, not just to speak to you, but to do what they do every day, day in, day out, I think that's where the value starts to come into play.
And so I always encourage people to go from what type of KOL or what type of thought leader or what type of physician or nurse practitioner are you talking to and understanding what their motivation is. Once you understand their motivation, you can really start to think about a deliverable. We're all familiar with deliverables. We all sit in meetings every day, and we get done with the meeting, and we think about what are the action items or what are the deliverables.
Of course, most MSLs will probably come and go, well, one of my action items or one of the deliverables is to make sure that there's another meeting after the meeting that I just had. I think many people have been trained, by however they came into the role as an MSL because of the KPIs. I discourage people from thinking of my goal in having a meeting is to have another meeting. That is definitely not productive use. That does not bring any value to the individual that you're talking to.
But there is a natural tendency when MSLs have KPIs, maybe unreasonable KPIs, I would even argue, put on them that in their mind, they're so focused on the next meeting that they're missing the value that they can bring to the KOL or the health care provider. So connecting the dots between their motivation and the deliverable. What can the MSL bring to the physician, in this case, even if they're not a KOL, whether it's at this meeting, the next meeting is whether it's information?
What can they bring? What is it their disposal in the context of their own company? What can they bring to the table? So this concept of the value that the MSO brings intersects, again, with leadership. Yeah. Really, medical affairs leadership, part of what they need to be doing every day is thinking about and providing opportunities that the MSLs can then bring to the KOLs. So I mentioned information. I mentioned trial sites. It goes way beyond that.
If you are an MSL and you are not actively profiling your health care providers, even the up and comers and the new ones in the field, in terms of what they would like and what is of interest to them, then you're not profiling them correctly. I'll give an example. You have an up and coming KOL. They maybe are an assistant professor. They're clinician. But you know that they're also at a research center and they've expressed to you that they need to do research as part of their career.
This is a very common phenomena. Right? So as an MSL, one of the values that you can bring to them is that you can bring to them things that will help them become a KOL someday, become a thought leader that's well respected across the country. It might be, potentially, having them as a junior investigator, a co PI on a trial at a site that's already going to do a trial. It could be you encouraging them to maybe, find out if they can do a speaker's bureau. People still do speakers bureau.
Maybe it's a medical affairs symposium, no, a non commercial disease state type educational symposium. This is a very nice opportunity and I've noticed that many new up and coming physicians really enjoy the activity of becoming an educator. But in order for you as an MSL to effectively, you know, pick the right value that you can bring to them as an opportunity, you really need to understand them and you need to understand their motivation. So back to the leadership piece of the puzzle.
So leadership may think about in any given calendar year as a list of things that they would like to do, strategies, tactics, etcetera. Leveraging the MSLs and leveraging their relationships and their understanding of what the health care providers within their geography would want or desire or value is helpful.
So I encourage leadership to listen to the MSLs as they go through the exercise, of profiling, And I also encourage leadership to ask them, what is the motivation for this particular physician or thought leader? How can they how can we help them achieve their career aspirations? It's often not money. Right? It's not let's pay them to speak at a particular symposium. That that's sort of a narrow sided view of value that you can bring to a health care provider. Yeah. It's often something else.
Yeah. That was awesome information and and a a lot to unpack. But so instead of me going back through, there's one topic that I still wanna cover before. We're almost there are a couple more minutes, but I can't let this conversation go. We're talking about effectiveness and mastering the medical affairs professional role. We have to talk about digital. We have to talk about, you know, the importance of being an expert in in virtual engagement and digital tools and technology.
So what are your thoughts on that as we look into this next year coming up? Certainly. Yeah. The experiences over the last couple of years, have sort of changed the way I think everybody thinks about digital. Yeah. Certainly, it's changed the way that industry thinks about digital. I think the perspective I have, again, going back to the beginning of where we thought is, we we started this conversation, is to really think about putting yourself in the shoes of the external stakeholder.
And I think what we have to recognize is their perspective, physicians or otherwise, have changed on digital technology and virtual engagement, everything else. And so that's where I would begin this thought process and begin this conversation is thinking about the external stakeholders. So here's my perspective. From my perspective, external stakeholders appear to be more aware of the digital versus non digital options available to them.
I think prior to COVID and prior to sort of the the things that have happened over the last couple of years, industry was thinking about digital versus non digital options to engage external stakeholders. But I'm not sure if the external stakeholders were actively thinking about what their own preferences were. We were probably trying to make choices for them, I would argue.
So I think what has changed and I think the way that I would think about this is is that I believe the external stakeholders are now thinking about their personal preferences and more to the point, they actually have now opinions about what they want. And so what I've observed personally and where I think we are is I think we can divide the interaction itself into transactional interactions or relationship based interactions.
And And I'll give examples of those and then also, you know, put in a little bit of an opinion. So I think transactional inter interactions lend themselves very well to virtual engagement. This would be things that are binary. Things like yes, no, need, give type binary transactional relationships. You know, we might think about a feasibility assessment for a trial site. We might think about, you know, a particular confidentiality agreement you might need in place.
You might need somebody to be a speaker. I mentioned that earlier. You might need to engage somebody to get their input. And in order to engage somebody, you might need to do a contractual type situation. Those are I think those transactional transactional type engagements lend themselves very well to virtual. Even to the point where you could maybe even do a virtual ad board.
I know a lot of people have done virtual ad boards, asynchronous, synchronous virtual ad boards, these are all things we now use. My point is is that the health care providers actually now have their own opinions about what they do and don't want to do. So, of course, the MSLs, part of your normal dialogue, when you're engaging your health care providers is to figure out what they like and what they don't like.
But I would make an argument upfront that that it's a safe assumption that they would probably be willing to have these transactional virtual interactions as part of the norm. The relationship pace piece interaction, that's one where I think we would also focus on. So I often will hear people say, well, I just rather meet in person. If you dive into that a little deeper, why would they much rather meet in person?
And what I've observed personally and what I've heard across the board from from not people within my own company, but also other companies is really that I would argue the relationship based in person interactions are more appropriate for sort of raising awareness about something, influencing opinion, meaning they might wanna influence our opinion on something. It's not always us trying to influence the health care providers.
It's often the health care providers trying to influence our opinion, or in this insight collection thing that we've spent so much time talking about. I think insight collection on a virtual, platform, both directions, them getting the value from us and us getting the value from them as a health care provider when it comes to insights is quite challenging.
So I think there are definitely areas where virtual technology and virtual engagement, are appropriate and work very well, and I would argue they are the transactional interactions. And then I would argue there's still a very solid place for these in person interaction, and I would argue that it's really the relationship based type interactions where those seem to be the most appropriate.
Yeah. So I think it's here to stay, but I think we're gonna stay in sort of a hybrid engagement type for the foreseeable future. Yeah. And that's consistent with, you know, we just got back from I just back got back from a conference, and I know I saw you at that last conference, and and, it's consistent. I mean, that's pretty much across the board what everybody is is under the impression that it's going to happen.
I can't wait till we go back to more of a live engagement type of world just because I feel like in order to truly create and maintain relationships, it has to be live. But I know that there's a place for for virtual and for digital, so we'll embrace it and use it. And, hopefully, we'll get better. But we're just about out of time. So, Kent, awesome, you know, chatting with you, and I appreciate you taking the time you you you gave me.
I I got wanna go back and listen to this because there was so much going on. But I can't wait to go back and listen to it myself, and I thank you. Yeah. It's been great. And I think that as long as, the MSLs, understand the value, I think as long as they decide in their own mind from their own career development path that they truly wanna become one of those individuals that masters the whole medical affairs function. There are opportunities out there for them.
And then, of course, there will always be situations where that doesn't, isn't appropriate or industries or areas of of the, industry where that doesn't work quite as well as others. Awesome, man. Well, thank you again. I appreciate you coming on, and, all the best to you as we close out this year and start a new one. Have a great day. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to the show.
And if you enjoyed it, please subscribe so that you don't miss an episode in the future and feel free to leave a rating or a review or a comment. Thanks again, and we look forward to seeing you soon.