Pharma companies have wrestled with a question that seems simple, but is inherently difficult to answer: How do you know if Medical Affairs – and MSLs, in particular – are doing a good job? Historically, Pharma has tried to answer this question by quantifying activities. How many KOL interactions? How many advisory boards facilitated? How many insights entered into CRM? How many presentations given? How many investigators contacted? While easy to measure and report on a dashboard, these activity metrics are a weak proxy for value.
The Medical Affairs Professional Society (MAPS) stated this plainly: Medical Affairs has historically focused on measures of activity—numbers of MSL interactions and publications, for example—rather than measures of impact. We believe the emerging model will blend quantitative and qualitative measures to assess whether Medical Affairs is advancing strategic priorities and improving outcomes. Once we begin to measure impact rather than activity, it will revolutionize how pharma benchmarks Medical Affairs.
The Fundamental Problem: Activity Isn’t Impact
Imagine two MSLs.
MSL A completes 350 HCP interactions during the year.
MSL B completes 220.
Under a traditional productivity dashboard, MSL A looks like the superior performer. But suppose MSL B’s interactions uncover three major evidence gaps, identify two potential clinical investigators, reveal a recurring barrier to appropriate treatment, help Medical Affairs redesign its evidence-generation strategy, and establish the MSL as a trusted scientific resource among influential specialists.
Who created more value?
Almost certainly MSL B.
That’s why evaluating MSLs primarily through call volume can produce exactly the wrong behavior. McKinsey research examining KOL perceptions found that satisfaction and perceived impact were more strongly associated with the quality of MSL interactions—including scientific knowledge, communication, and process-management capabilities—than with quantitative measures such as visit frequency or duration. (McKinsey & Company)
In other words:
Stop asking how much Medical Affairs did. Start asking what changed because Medical Affairs did it.
1ne. Measure the Quality of Scientific Engagement
The first measurement should be obvious but is surprisingly difficult to find on many Medical Affairs dashboards:
Was the scientific interaction valuable to the HCP?
Medical Affairs should periodically measure external stakeholder perceptions around factors such as scientific credibility, objectivity, relevance, responsiveness, understanding of the therapeutic area and usefulness of information provided. One particularly revealing question is:
“Would you seek out this MSL when you have an important scientific or clinical question?”
That tells management far more about the strength of the relationship than whether an MSL completed six interactions with that physician. An MSL viewed as another pharma company representative isn’t creating the same value as an MSL viewed as a legitimate scientific resource.
2wo. Evaluate the Quality of Insights—Not the Number Entered
“Number of insights captured” may be one of the most abused Medical Affairs metrics. An MSL can enter dozens of observations into a CRM without generating a single strategically useful insight. A genuine medical insight should potentially change something.
For example, it might reveal an evidence gap, an unexpected treatment barrier, a misconception about the data, an emerging change in clinical practice, an unmet educational need, a patient-management problem or an opportunity for additional research. The evaluation shouldn’t stop at:
How many insights did we collect? Management should ask: How many insights resulted in action?
Track insights from observation → validation → prioritization → action → outcome. That’s an entirely different standard.
MSL conversations are potentially an extraordinarily rich source of external intelligence. McKinsey has similarly described systematic capture and analysis of MSL-generated insights as an important opportunity for Medical Affairs organizations. (McKinsey & Company)
3hree. Measure Whether Medical Strategy Changes
One of the strongest indications of an effective Medical Affairs organization is whether external scientific intelligence actually influences internal decisions.
Ask: What decisions changed because of Medical Affairs?
Examples could include changes to evidence-generation plans, publication strategy, medical education, congress strategy, investigator engagement, Phase IV research, real-world evidence programs or lifecycle strategy.
If hundreds or thousands of MSL interactions occur every year but virtually nothing inside the organization changes as a result, leadership should question whether the organization has built a scientific engagement engine—or simply an expensive activity engine.
4our. Evaluate Evidence Generation
Medical Affairs increasingly has responsibility for identifying and helping close evidence gaps. That makes evidence generation another important performance dimension.
Organizations can evaluate the identification and prioritization of meaningful evidence gaps, investigator-sponsored research, real-world evidence programs, Phase IIIb/IV studies, publication strategy, and the degree to which new evidence addresses important unanswered clinical questions.
The objective shouldn’t simply be: How many studies did Medical Affairs support? It should be: Did we generate evidence that clinicians, payers, patients, or healthcare systems actually needed?
McKinsey’s Medical Affairs 2030 framework similarly places integrated evidence generation and addressing unmet patient needs among the function’s core priorities. (McKinsey & Company)
5ive. Measure Scientific Share of Voice and Understanding
Medical Affairs should also know whether key scientific information is reaching the medical community and making an impact. This does NOT mean tracking recall of promotional messages. It means measuring scientific awareness. Does the medical community know about the disease state? Do physicians know about the supporting data? Are key data being misunderstood? Are new misconceptions arising? Is important evidence missing that would allow for better clinical decisions? Periodically measuring these factors will allow Medical Affairs to see if scientific awareness is changing over time. Now you have something more useful than a call-frequency metric: a scientific impact metric.
6ix. Measure the Strength of the Scientific Network
An MSL’s territory should not be judged solely on coverage. Assess the quality/relevance of the scientific network. Does the MSL have relationships with key opinion leaders, investigators, emerging scientific thought leaders, community physicians, pharmacists, nurses, payers and other key stakeholders? More importantly, are those relationships strong enough that stakeholders will voluntarily call, email or contact the MSL? Inbound engagement can be very telling.
When well-respected clinicians pick up the phone and call an MSL to discuss an upcoming presentation or to just shoot the breeze about new research, the MSL has earned the right to be considered a trusted scientific resource, not just an extension of corporate outreach.
7even. Measure Speed and Responsiveness
Medical Affairs also creates value through responsiveness. Useful measures can include response time to unsolicited medical questions, time from field insight to internal distribution, time from identification of an evidence gap to strategic review, and the speed with which emerging scientific developments are incorporated into medical strategy.
In fast-moving therapeutic areas, scientific intelligence that reaches headquarters six months later isn’t intelligence. It’s history.
8ight. Evaluate MSL Capabilities Directly
Some performance dimensions should evaluate the MSL, not the activity. A strong competency model should examine scientific knowledge, therapeutic-area expertise, clinical acumen, communication ability, critical appraisal of evidence, insight generation, stakeholder engagement, and strategic thinking.
Role-playing assessments, scientific certification, and structured external feedback can provide additional evidence of capability. McKinsey’s research has specifically suggested assessing capabilities through approaches such as training evaluations and role-playing examinations rather than relying on visit counts as the primary performance indicator. (McKinsey & Company)
9ine. Ask HCPs What They Think
This might be the easiest – and least utilized – measurement tool. Simply ask customers. Blinded research with HCPs can evaluate whether an MSL is perceived as scientifically credible, objective, knowledgeable, responsive, relevant, and valuable. Pharma and device companies routinely spend millions of dollars assessing customer perceptions of their sales force and marketing organizations. Why shouldn’t Medical Affairs receive such vigorous external evaluation? Another reason to keep the research independent: Managers assessing their own employees will be biased. Ideally, customers (the scientific stakeholders MSLs are meant to serve) should have a say in evaluating MSL value.
10en. Connect Medical Affairs to Patient-Level Impact—Carefully
This is where measurement becomes more sophisticated. Medical Affairs ultimately exists to improve medical decision-making and, indirectly, patient outcomes.
Advanced organizations should therefore investigate whether Medical Affairs activities are associated with changes in appropriate treatment, diagnostic behavior, guideline implementation, evidence-based decision-making, or other measurable gaps in care. That doesn’t mean claiming that an MSL interaction caused a prescription. That would blur an important boundary between Medical Affairs and commercial measurement.
Instead, organizations can use claims, real-world data, and other datasets to identify deviations from optimal care and examine whether medical strategies are addressing them. McKinsey has described this type of data-and-analytics feedback loop as an opportunity to quantify Medical Affairs’ impact on gaps in care. (McKinsey & Company)
A Better Medical Affairs Scorecard
Rather than one giant KPI dashboard, I would evaluate Medical Affairs across five dimensions:
Scientific Engagement Quality — 25%
Stakeholder satisfaction, scientific credibility, relevance, responsiveness, and relationship quality.
Insight Impact — 25%
Quality of insights, percentage validated, percentage acted upon, and examples of strategic decisions influenced.
Evidence Impact — 20%
Evidence gaps identified and closed, research initiated, publications generated, and clinical relevance of the resulting evidence.
Strategic Impact — 20%
Influence on medical strategy, clinical development, lifecycle planning, medical education and organizational decision-making.
Operational Excellence — 10%
Coverage, responsiveness, CRM quality, compliance, execution against the medical plan and appropriate activity metrics.
Notice something?
Call volume isn’t gone.
It’s simply been put in its proper place. Activity metrics are useful operational diagnostics. They should not be confused with evidence of impact.
And Please Don’t Turn MSLs Into Sales Representatives
Another reason pharma should reconsider how it measures MSL success: You get what you measure. Tell MSLs they need to aggressively meet interaction quotas and pretty soon people schedule their days around completing those interactions. Incentivize volume of insights and suddenly your CRM is exploding with “insights.” Incentivize KOL coverage and watch people chase coverage percentages. The risk is Medical Affairs starts to act like a commercial field force while simultaneously denying they are one. That would seriously undermine one of Medical Affairs’ greatest strengths: scientific credibility. Maximizing conversations is not the purpose of an MSL. Maximizing value of the right scientific conversations is.
The Question Every Head of Medical Affairs Should Ask
At the end of the year, don’t show senior management a slide saying:
“Our MSLs completed 12,438 scientific interactions.”
Nobody can determine from that number whether Medical Affairs was successful.
Show them what those interactions produced.
We identified these evidence gaps.
These insights changed our strategy.
These studies were initiated.
These scientific misconceptions were addressed.
These external stakeholders now view us as a trusted scientific partner.
These gaps in patient care are narrowing.
That’s impact.
And if Medical Affairs wants a larger strategic voice within pharmaceutical companies, it has to become much better at demonstrating it.
The future of Medical Affairs measurement isn’t about proving that teams are busy.
It’s about proving that they matter.
Sources
Medical Affairs Professional Society (MAPS), Measuring Value and Impact in Medical Affairs (2025). (Medical Affairs)
Medical Affairs Professional Society (MAPS), Measuring the Impact of Medical Affairs. (Medical Affairs)
McKinsey & Company, Elevating the Impact of Medical Affairs in Japan. (McKinsey & Company)
McKinsey & Company, A Vision for Medical Affairs 2030: Five Priorities for Patient Impact. (McKinsey & Company)
McKinsey & Company, Generative AI in the Pharmaceutical Industry: Moving from Hype to Reality. (McKinsey & Company)
