Michael Schaffer, senior district manager, virology, at Abbott admitted a few “I wish we did that the first time around” actions with his company’s integrated, Web-based application for internally tracking KOLs.

Here are a few ways to hit (not miss) when assessing opinion leader utilization and outcomes:

— Decide what a KOL is to your organization. Schaffer says that clearly defining these terms up front will improve your success. Clinical, marketing, and legal/ethics departments should be included in the discussion. “Sales and clinical teams have very different definitions of a KOL,” he said, while reinforcing that KOL data should be completely separated from sales.

— Peer influence mapping, although intricate and expensive, is vital to understanding how peer influence impacts a provider and his/her connections. You always want to make sure this information is current or else “you might as well throw out your KOL database,” says Schaffer.

— Who’s in your sandbox? Recognize the key players or departments involved and ensure that proper training occurs. You wouldn’t want something to be recorded in a way that would “look bad if subpoenaed,” Schaffer said. The Golden Rule at Abbott remains: “How would you feel if our database was exposed on the nightly news?”

With better understanding of KOL outcomes through interactions with their respective industry counterparts, pharmas can avoid underutilizing key information that is vital to their organizations.

Over the next five years, if not much sooner, the evolution of sales, marketing, and medical affairs will dramatically shift. Speaking from a global prospective, Andreas Tsukada, associate director, sales operations, at UCB Pharma, said that a lot more coordination will be necessary. He noted that if leveraging KOL via the Internet works abroad, it might also be extended to the US as well.

Michael Schaffer, senior district manager, virology, at Abbott, believes that there will be fewer, more important KOLs (especially in the specialty marketplace) and less funding. As a result, pharma will be forced to do more with less, engaging MSLs instead of sales reps. However, it will be important to determine necessary roles for each organization, and go with that strategy. “The key is communication internally within an organization,” said Deb Kientop, president of MSL360.

Meanwhile, Dale Hagemeyer, research vice president of Gartner, cautioned that risks still apply with MSLs. “If it walks like a duck, it talks like a duck” was the analogy he used to describe the comparison of sales rep vs. MSL. In order to separate the two, organizations need to understand what is and what is not permissible in terms of on- and off-label discussions. Until then, credibility and value will continue to be the driving forces behind sales.

Last but certainly not least, pharma will need to keep abreast of the MSL’s changing role. Sivakumar Nadarajah, director of global CRM solutions at Cegedim Dendrite, points out the various roles of a MSL. He or she spends most of the time managing KOL relationships, performing research on KOLs, responding to medical inquiries, providing the commercial side of the company with knowledge, and collaborating internally (see above) with sales teams.

“All these activities are done either manually or using multiple applications,” says Nadarajah. “Providing a unified software platform so that all these activities can be tracked and co-coordinated in a reportable manner will not only help MSLs become efficient, but also help them provide management visibility into their activities.”