The SCP Problem: Everyone Has One, Nobody Uses It

A scientific narrative. It is telling the story. It is starting with what the unmet need is, how certain patients are suffering from a given illness, what the current treatments are, and then ultimately, what this means for not just the company, but what this means for patients, outcomes and the future. You're taking the complex data and distilling it down to so what for the patients. Welcome to Transforming Medical Communications, a podcast by Medcom's experts. We share medical communications insights and advice from the best and brightest in the industry to find out what they're doing to push our industry forward. Here's your host, Wesley Portegheese. Welcome to Transforming Medical Communications, the podcast where we discuss bold ideas that shape the future of medical affairs. Today, I'm here with my colleagues, Ennio and Al. Guys, would you like to quickly introduce yourself? Thanks, Wesley. Thanks for having us on the podcast. I'm Enya Polena. I'm an associate director of Medcom Strategy at Medcom's Experts. Part of my job includes providing strategic support to our deliverables to our clients, ensuring that anything that we deliver for them maximizes the value that they get from the project. Pleasure to be here. How about you, Al? Thanks, Wesley. Thanks for having me. I'm Albert Balkevich. As with neo, I'm the director of Medical Communication Strategy here at mce. And along with the responsibilities that NEO had described, we also really do a lot of work in identifying and addressing innovations and solutions for challenges that the clients have that may be either outside of the box or something that needs extra enhancement in terms of its value and its execution. Amazing. Well, that's the fun part of being in a METCOMS agency, right? Coming up with new solutions to old problems. I liked it a lot. And today we're going to talk about something that is very close to our hearts, which is narratives and in particular, scientific communication platforms, AKA scps. So where shall we start? Gosh, there's so much to talk about with SCPs. It comes across as a very plain document. Sometimes in the eyes of many people, it's daunting. But I think there is a lot of value. It can be an exciting platform to use. It's certainly a valuable platform. So there are a number of things we can talk to. I think one of the things is kind of taking a look at what's the real practical application for an sep, and how can we communicate that to all of the stakeholders that are involved, because the more it's utilized and utilized in a practical sense, the more it serves its purpose of consistently communicating the data to the HCPs. I think like one of the interesting thing about SCPs is that we all know we need one, right? It's kind of a mandatory step. But at the same time we also always hear they're often not being utilized as much as they would like to. But then we have people asking us for narratives. Enjo, what's your view on that? Like an SEP and a narrative, are those one and the same thing, two different things or how do they relate? In my view a narrative is much more succinct, has certain number of categories that it provides data across or statements across. It's something that is usually 1 pager, 2 pager, whereas scientific platform is much more in depth. It provides a lot of clinical data, competitor data in addition to the value add of the drug. So when would you use what? Well, I think it goes hand in hand. One of the ways that I look at an SEP is I think a lot of the times it's just looked as a resource. It's a collection of scientific statements and you refer back and forth to it when needed. But you know, you do have those kind of top level elements of the sep, the objectives and you know, there is usually an overarching narrative associated with each of the pillars that we have, whether it's burden of disease or efficacy or value propositions. So the way I look at it is that the communications platform is, isn't just that collection of statements, but it's the foundation to organize those narratives. Right? And it brings about those elements to formulate that narrative. So I think they go hand in hand. Now what would happen if you don't have an scp? What would be the symptoms? Right? Like if someone would come to us and say, hey listen, what I'm observing is these and these problems. How would you know that is because of the lack of, of an SEP or the lack of an SEP that is well developed. Usually there's disjointed communication coming from that brand or pharma company to their target audience, whether it's HCPs, patients, organizations and so on. One example I'd like to bring up is imagining an HCP oncologist. From their perspective, there's not much difference between an MSL and a salesperson. For example, if two of them are visiting this HCP within the span of a week, they don't differentiate their roles, they differentiate what they're bringing to them, how they're helping them, how they're educating the hcp, how they're helping them, their patient. So Imagining where there is no concise narrative or SCP in place. These two folks from the pharma company come in and their messaging doesn't quite align. That might raise a flag to the HCP and also might make him or her question the scientific credibility of the company or the brand. I agree. That's a classic example that I think many people have come across. Certainly an argument that's used in support of the SEO. I think there's internal issues as well. Potentially, you know, as you're putting together these elements, whether they're manuscripts or Congress presentations or other types of materials, there's a lot of time that's wasted in terms of harmonizing those items, rewriting or redrafting, tweaking text things of that nature. So there's a lot of inefficiencies that come through that an SCP should be fixing or should be helping with. I couldn't agree more Al. Like, I think that's a very good insight and I happen to be part of a group at Maps that put together some guidance on how to create SCPs. And one thing we really stressed is that you need a cross functional team to work together in kind of a workshop setting to create these. And that is not just to generate good output, right? That is also because an SAP, I think a big part of the function of an SAP is to have internal agreement, internal agreement on what those different elements are for each pillar in the sep. Because like if you don't agree on that internally, how could you ever communicate consistently externally? Right. So I think creating an SEP I think is pretty much under control. But I can't just help but still think about all these times that I've been talking with people about SCPS just being underutilized where part is of course the awareness, like do people know it exists? But I actually think there's a bigger underlying reason and I'm not entirely sure what it is, but I think if it was a simple like, oh, if I knew where to find it on SharePoint, people would actually just use it. But there must be some other things that somehow makes people not grab for it, right? And when we spoke about this topic before I said like, listen, I think if something is useful, people will use it, right? It's automatic. Like think about AI and ChatGPT. People are using it all the time now because obviously it gives you a lot of value and efficiency. We haven't really seen that with SCPs. I've never had anyone coming to me as I'm being so excited that like, well luckily enough, we had an scp. So I took the SCP and then created my deck, you know, guided by the scp. You never hear that. Right. So what do we think is going on there? I think that's part of what Al and I are on a mission to change here. I think. Just going back to one of your earlier comments, Wesley, usually an SAP is developed as part of workshop cross functional. And I think the most important aspect of that is ensuring the people from different functions are brought in early because that will allow them to have ownership of the scp. So it's not just seen as a simple, just another medical affairs deck that we all need to sign off on and provide a little bit of comments on. So I think inviting, you know, commercial market access, patient engagement, whoever it is, to the table earlier allows them to have proper input into it. And they're not just reviewing the document, they're actually developing, co developing the document with the medical team. And by being part of the process, it allows them to have more ownership of it and it gives them the chance and encouragement to apply to their daily work. Yeah, a hundred percent. I think that early involvement provides exposure to the sep. It allows for all the stakeholders to understand right from the beginning what the SEP is supposed to be doing for you in support of the rest of your downstream activities. So it's certainly critical to have that exposure. And we talk about this a lot in terms of having those different layers. You have the planning layer, you have the execution layer, but then you have that implementation layer in the middle. And that's the thing that gets lost in translation in a lot of the different activities that go through. So I think that by having that exposure, having everyone on board and committed to putting it together, then they can go ahead and move that in the way it's supposed to be going. Right? So Ennio and I are trying very hard to really cheerlead for the scp. One other thing, Wesley, that I wanted to touch on too, and kind of falls into this is that I'm dating myself here, But I remember SCPs being on paper, right? You put them in a binder and they were on a shelf in some product manager's office and it just sat there. Right. I do not. So I remember working on those many, many years ago. Then we kind of moved into, okay, we'll put it into a PowerPoint format. But it's still. It's a very, very daunting document. So a lot of people may be intimidated seeing it the first time. They don't know how to navigate it appropriately. I think we're making strides in being able to make it a bit more user friendly and functional, even for somebody just going in there at the first glance. But, but I still think there's some work that can be done there to make it a little bit more exciting. Absolutely. And you know, recently we created this SCP where we put it into a system called Polarix, right, Which is like a digital SCP system. And I definitely think that's a step forward. I think the part that is still missing though is like how that links out to resources or still like the practical application of looking into an SCP when you develop materials. It just is not like a second nature, it seems like. So what could we do about that? What else can be done in an organization to make sure that the SAP is actually being utilized, that is used as the underlying resource when creating new resources? I think there needs to be a mandate to all the different functions within an organization that whatever is being developed, whether it's internal or external, whoever is responsible for it, whether it's a lead or an agency, to ensure that the SCP is referenced at every step or at least earlier in the development, somewhere in the middle. And then during finalization. It shouldn't just be like an optional step that, oh, it's nice to have, but it should be part of, just like MLR review, for example, is a mandated step checking. Referencing versus an SCP should also be the same in my opinion. Obviously this has resource considerations here, but I think the alternative is that your communication could potentially be disjointed and fall apart in the field. And internal. Yeah, absolutely. I agree again, a hundred percent. I think, you know, we're both on the same page with these. But I think the other thing too is, you know, when you're putting a medical affairs plan together and you're updating those, you're bringing all of the different functions in there for updates. Right. And you're working through those and you're kind of workshopping together. You know, it should be similar with SCP development and updates as well. You know, particularly if there's milestones that are coming through, if there's a big trial read and there's a lot of data that's going to be put into the SCP as an update. It shouldn't just be the sole, you know, the primary owner of the SCP to go ahead and put that in there. I think that's where you bring that initial group back together and kind of reiterate, okay, you know, here's the SCP again. Remember, it's an important thing. We were all excited about it when we were putting it together. It's time to update it. So, you know, if we're doing that with medical affairs plans and other types of, you know, evidence generation workshops and we're doing it on a serial basis, we should be doing that as well with the sep when the timing is right. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think this happens often in our industry. We confuse deliverables and documents with strategies and more conceptual topics. Right. And if you think about it, your SCP is kind of your strategy. It's not just a document. I see you're frowning, Al. Tell me more. No, I'm not frowning. It got me thinking because I think from the narrative perspective there is that strategic component to it and it's an interesting perspective to that because you know, the strategy is always being updated based on new items that come in, whether it's competitor, whether it's internal, with data. So it does make sense. Yeah, I guess maybe to restate that it is not the strategy, but it is the conduit between your strategy and how you communicate to the outside world. It's not the final product for sure. It's an in between, as you mentioned, from, you know, taking the complicated data from a clinical trial or a series of clinical trials and distilling it down to education, training and so on for messaging for the HCP so that they can take that into their clinical practice and eventually make decisions based on that. Yeah, absolutely. Is medcoms evolving faster than your team can keep up? You're not alone and you don't have to navigate it alone. Wesley Portiges, host of Transforming Medical Communications, is offering a limited Number of free 30 minute consultancy sessions for medical affairs professionals. Whether it's medical communications, field medical or medical affairs training, these sessions provide an opportunity to address your real world challenges, pressure test ideas and walk away with practical strategic insight for your team. No fluff, just strategy. Follow the on screen link or in the show notes to book your free session now. Now. Something we talk about a lot in our agency, of course, is also the concept of storytelling. And the main reason that we talk about storytelling is because it brings data from this, I guess abstract systematic level to a more like human and humanized application of what this data actually means to human beings. How does this relate to seps? A scientific narrative, at least in and of itself, it is telling a story. It is starting with what the unmet need is, how certain patients are suffering from a given illness. What the current treatments are, how can it be better, what's still missing after the current treatments, what the new drug that company is offering, how is that helping improve and how is it helping address these needs? And then ultimately, what this means for not just the company, but what this means for patients, outcomes and the future in that regard, it is telling a story. So are you saying that on top of your SCP, you need that narrative in order to kind of translate what is in the SCP to a more humanized message? Absolutely. Because at the end of the day, the main customers of any Pharma organization are HCPs. They're the ones who are making the decisions. So to them, the only thing that matters is how is this going to help their patients, how is this going to help them live longer, how is it going to help them live with a better quality of life, potentially cure them and so on. So that just goes back to what I was saying earlier, that you're taking the complex data and distilling it down to so what? For the patients, I think that's the end of the road. Yeah. And I think we talked about it earlier. It's that you have so much evidence coming in out of clinical trials and you have your graphs, you have your figures, you have your tables, you have all this information and we have to interpret those data. We interpret that data, we organize the narratives based on the data. That's great. But then ultimately it has to be communicated to the clinician in a fashion that they understand and that resonates with them in the context of treating their patients. So it's not just showing them graphs and saying, you know, these are the efficacy points versus placebo or versus this competitor. What does that mean for the patient that they're going to see? And I think that's where the SCP comes into play because it helps to organize, because we have all the supporting scientific statements right as part of the scp. And then from an SEP perspective, it's top down, right? You have the narrative or you have the pillars, you have the objectives and the narratives, and then you have the supporting statements behind that. Essentially what we're doing is we're working in reverse. We're taking the data and then we're interpreting it. We're kind of formulating the narrative that resonates and that makes credible scientific sense that can then be communicated to a clinician who's communicating to their patients and treating their patients. So that's the kind of humanization aspect that we're looking at. So let's pivot. And one thing while we are discussing here that came to mind is of course the kind of changing nature of this, right? And SAP can be really, really extensive. But like, it's like the pace of science has increased so much that a lot is changing, like the market is changing. New results come out, new data readouts. How can an organization possibly keep this up to date in a timely fashion? It's certainly a resource intensive undertaking and it's only getting more resource intensive. I think as you mentioned, the pace of science is increasing. I think the main thing is whenever a team gets together to develop an scp, the update cadence needs to be set from the beginning so that everyone involved can expect when there will be updates, when their input will be required again, and of course when the new updated SCP is rolled out so that they can then integrate it within their functions and deliverables. Obviously it doesn't need to happen every single time that there's new data out there. It can be once a year, twice yearly at most. I think anything more than that, it would be extremely difficult to keep pace with making sure that all the different materials you're developing are still referencing. I mean, I'll disagree a little bit with that. I think more frequent updates may work. And again, it's just looking at the trend of the amount of data and material that comes through. I think it depends on the product, the competitive area, the therapeutic area. I think when you're looking at rare disease, it may be a little bit different in terms of the amount of updates that would be needed versus something that's a really fluid therapeutic area or treatment area. So it can go back and forth, I think more than quarterly, maybe a little bit too much. I think there's certainly an argument for quarterly updates when necessary. I think, you know, spot updates, depending on key milestone events that may happen, whether it's internally or whether it's externally. And then going back to just synthesizing all of this data and keeping on top of all of this data. Certainly something that is necessary. It's a matter of who does it and how it's done. Because, you know, obviously, you know, medical affairs teams have a number of different responsibilities in hand. Agencies like ourselves can certainly assist with that. I think there's an opportunity for AI to come into the mix as well in terms of, you know, just scraping the news, scraping data, you know, keeping an eye out. I think automatic updates would be problematic, but you know, having AI provide suggested updates or alerts to, hey, you know, this may impact this element of your scp, check it out and then keep a log of that. That way when it's time for an update they can all be considered. So there are certainly opportunities there to keep it manageable in different ways. Yeah, absolutely. Talking about that, I think like for instance, field medical insights, you know, is something that should be a feedback loop towards your sep as well. And perhaps, and this is probably a little bit far out there for now, but like things like social listening and other things, you know, I think like especially now with AI, it became so much easier to deal with large quantities of information and make sense out of it. Right. So I'm thinking that some of those uncommon channels or streams of information and feedback should be incorporated too. And likely we should be able to do this faster than we have ever done. And just going back to you mentioned thought from like Polyrix, Wesley, it's not just a, you know, a management tool but something as simple as a reminder to the team that hey, there's been a change in the landscape that's significant. How should we approach this? How should we update our materials? How should we update our communications? Something even that simple could prove to be useful. Yeah, absolutely. So what should we discuss that we didn't discuss yet since we're on the AI subject, A bit about using AI to ensure appropriate implementation? Maybe as the very last point, the future direction that we had brought up. Cool. So now we're on the topic of AI. How else can we use AI to help us with developing, deploying and utilizing SCPs? So going back to proper implementation, AI has now made it extremely easy to not have to manually ensure that your materials are aligning with the core messaging of a scientific narrative or an scp. So something as simple as you've developed an educational material or you develop a slide deck for scientific exchange meeting, it's really straightforward to just go and ask, is this aligned with our messaging? Is our messaging falling apart somewhere? If so, can you make a suggestion on how to approve this? And obviously that would just provide the initial draft or the initial suggestion and you would need a human, of course, to make sure that that's addressed properly. So you're saying like resource has been created. Upload both the resource and the SCP to your model of choice and basically ask it to make sure that these are aligned and point out where they're not. Right? Exactly. With a very strong prompt, I think you could get some really good insights from something as simple as that. I think you can do it broad based as well in terms of multiple assets that are coming through maybe at a congress and you have 10, 15 different data points that you're presenting. Again, comparing that with the scp, making sure that they're all aligned with the SEP so that you're having that consistent message across the board, not only for the congress. And then you can again, you know, the world is your oyster in terms of AI. You can take all of your assets that you're delivering from a scientific communications perspective and have AI just make sure that you're looking at everything, do gap analyses of the different communications objectives that you have in the scp. So over the course of a quarter or six months, take your assets, find out, okay, are we, you know, really addressing the objectives that we set out? What are we missing? What do we need to focus on? Perhaps a little bit more. I think those are types of things where AI can be extremely helpful. Yeah, absolutely. And I think this, this is a very powerful concept in many different perspectives. And one that came to mind when you were just talking is like, so what we see in the markets as an output of our research that we do across the industry is that there's not really like a lack of ideas on how to communicate. Right? Like there's like a ton of different channels, especially now with Omni channel and all digital, being more mature than it ever was, I would say. But now that the challenge is how do you connect all of this, right? How do we have this more integrated communication approach? And I think a tool like an SCP is extremely useful to serve a model like that and to make sure there is this consistency. But it also means that people need to understand then how to actually do that. And one project that came to mind that we had in the past is we were trying to with a particular organization trying to get the SCP adopted better. And what we found is that what was previously done is to communicate more that there is an scp, right? So in terms of awareness, everyone was fully aware there is an scp. There was really no doubt about it still wasn't really utilized. So the problem wasn't that much that people knew it existed. The problem was that people didn't know what to do with it. I don't mean like the most senior layers of medical affairs and medical communications, but it was more like the people in the field that had trouble understanding, well, great, we have an scp. Oh, this looks interesting, what do I do now? And we actually ended up creating an animation, like a short, like five minute explainer. It's like, okay, there is an SCP and This is what you can do with it. This is how you can use it to your advantage. And it didn't change the rule, but it was definitely better than before. So I think there's also something to say for like, advocating how to actually use it in a very concrete and practical way. 100%. Yeah. I think a lot of the SCPs that I see have a little navigation guide as a slide and says these buttons do this and these symbols do this. But it's still not intuitive for a native user of the scp. And especially if you want broader access with msls, et cetera, which I think is super important, it's difficult. I think the animations help. I think fundamentally there's still improvements that can be made with the structure of an SEP and how we navigate it. I just saw an SCP recently and it was a very, very rudimentary design, rudimentary ui, so to speak. Very static slides, very heavy data slides. Again, if somebody's going to be intimidated by it, they'll look through it, but they won't go back, you know, or they'll go back for one, one thing or another, but they won't really use it. Because I think part of the idea here is you want the SCP also to guide some of the messaging or some of the narratives that you're going to communicate. So you want to kind of be able to naturally go through a document and say, oh, you know what? I didn't think about this aspect, or I didn't think about this particular set of data that supports this narrative. That's a great idea. You know, we haven't done that yet. Let's, you know, incorporate that into our next set of materials. So I think that structure of the SEP is a, is a big thing that still can be improved. Yeah, I agree. It just needs to become kind of second nature. Right. And I think one way to look at it, like, I'm now putting on the agency lens again here, but there are so many countless projects that we were requested to do where the industry would not proactively actually tell us, hey, and by the way, here's our scp. Please make sure to use that in your work. Right. We typically would need to ask, hey, listen, would you have an scp? That would be so great because then we can follow what is in there. Right. And I think that is very telling about, like, the utilization of SCPs, unfortunately. So everyone knows it makes sense, yet we somehow have trouble adopting it. And hopefully your efforts to drive awareness of this and help organizations adopt this is going to help to change that because we need it more than ever. Especially with, you know, all the different channels we have available now, all the different functions and ways how we communicate to the outside world. It's definitely needed to pull it all together. I had a lot of fun talking about this, guys. Thank you so much for being here today. Thanks. Appreciate it. My pleasure. Thanks for having us. Transforming Medical Communications is brought to you by Medcom's Experts. To find out more about Medcom's Experts and how we create some of the most cutting edge medical communications programs anywhere in the world, visit www.medcoms-experts.com and then make sure to search for Transforming Medical Communications in Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts or anywhere else podcasts are found. Make sure to click subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes. On behalf of the team here at Medcoms Experts, thanks for listening.