Manufacturing, commercial, market access, and regulatory are established launch priorities.
They have clear owners, defined workstreams, and budget conversations that start well before approval. Medical information and scientific publications infrastructure often doesn’t get the same level of attention.
The blind spot is how work actually gets managed inside medical information and scientific publications. “We have time,” people think, “we’ll figure it out later.”
Then it sneaks up on them.
Medical Information And Publications Planning Fall Behind
HCP inquiries start increasing. Field teams escalate more often. The shared inbox and spreadsheet that worked fine for six months starts missing things. Someone asks who approved a specific medical information response, and nobody can find the trail.
This isn’t a staffing problem or a skill problem. Medical information teams are usually doing everything right with what they were given.
It’s a systems problem: the process was built for a lower volume than the one it’s now handling.
On the scientific publications side, the pressure shows up differently but hits just as hard. More stakeholders need to weigh in as the research moves through review. The coordination that used to happen over email stops scaling. Reviews stall. Deadlines slip. Inboxes are full of ‘reset password’ requests for external authors.
Like medical information, this isn’t a talent gap. It’s what happens when publications planning tools and processes were never built to handle this many contributors, this much data, or this level of scrutiny.
How Do We Know If We’ll Actually Get Volume?
A few signals do point toward higher medical information inquiry volume and heavier scientific publications coordination load:
- Broad label or multiple approved indications
- Novel mechanism of action, with less prescriber familiarity
- Complex dosing, monitoring, or safety profile
- Crowded, competitive therapeutic area
- Heavy pre-launch publication plan or high-profile trial data
But even experienced medical affairs teams underestimate volume, because it’s driven by real prescriber behavior after launch.
And here’s the part people don’t want to hear: waiting for volume before investing in medical information and scientific publications systems is the mistake itself. If you’re only building capacity once you can prove you need it, you’ve already decided to find out the hard way.
Won’t Implementing Now Cost Money We Might Not Need to Spend?
This is the real objection, and it deserves a real answer.
- It’s an asymmetric bet, not a blind one. Get a system in place and get lower volume than expected, and you have a system that’s slightly oversized. Mildly inefficient. Easy to right-size later. Skip the system and get higher volume than expected, and you have a compliance gap, a poor first impression with prescribers during the exact window they’re paying the most attention, and a rebuild done under pressure. Those two outcomes aren’t the same size.
- It’s not new spend. It’s spend now, or spend later at a worse price. The medical information and scientific publications systems get built eventually, one way or another. Either proactively, with time to choose well, or reactively, mid-crisis, with rushed vendor selection and shortcuts that get redone within a year. The real choice isn’t spend versus don’t spend. It’s spend on your terms, or spend on the crisis’s terms.
- Uncertainty is the argument for a flexible system, not against any system. If volume is genuinely hard to predict, that’s a reason to choose a system built to flex, one that costs little at low volume and absorbs a spike without a re-platform. A good system is what makes it cheap to be wrong about volume. The absence of one is what makes being wrong expensive. The real cost comparison usually never happens.
Nobody puts “cost of a missing audit trail during an inspection” or “cost of a poor first HCP interaction” on the same spreadsheet as “cost of the software.” But that’s the real comparison.
The technology line item is visible and easy to challenge in a budget meeting. The cost of not having medical information and scientific publications infrastructure in place is invisible, right up until it isn’t.
The Case Medical Affairs Teams Need to Make Earlier
Medical information and scientific publications usually get planned last, and staffed thinnest, in pharmaceutical launch planning.
Not because anyone decided they don’t matter. Because the case for investing before you can prove the need is harder to make in a budget meeting than the case for investing after.
So ask yourself: is medical information and scientific publications actually part of the launch plan? Or is it the thing you’re hoping works itself out?
Investing in these systems pre-launch can avoid headaches in the future. Mavens can help you with the right approach at the right time for medical affairs work management technology.
