Why Practice Setting Matters When Engaging Key Opinion Leaders
As medical affairs professionals, we often seek out key opinion leaders (KOLs) to help shape our strategies, advise on clinical data, and advance medical practice. However, we can’t take a one-size-fits-all approach when engaging with KOLs. Where a KOL practices and the setting they work in has a major impact on their focus areas, audiences, and the types of insights they can provide.
Academia vs. Health Systems vs. Long-Term Care
Let’s look at three common practice settings for KOLs - academia, health systems, and long-term care facilities:
Academic KOLs are typically professors or researchers who are renowned experts in their therapeutic areas. Their priorities revolve around advancing scientific knowledge, publishing research, and training the next generation of clinicians and scientists. They influence fellow academics and students through teaching and scientific discourse.
Health system KOLs tend to be clinicians, administrators or policymakers focused on operational efficiencies, care pathways, quality improvement initiatives, and resource allocation within hospitals and clinics. Their expertise guides clinical practices and protocols to optimize patient care.
Long-term care KOLs concentrate on policies, guidelines and funding issues affecting elderly populations and caregiving challenges. They raise awareness and advocacy efforts around aging-related topics.
While all types of KOLs ultimately aim to improve patient care, their audiences, spheres of influence, and priorities differ based on their specific practice environments.
The Importance of Deliberate KOL Mapping
To maximize insights and engagement with KOLs, medical affairs teams need to carefully map and find the right KOL profiles based on their clinical area of interest, product life cycle stage, and which practice settings are most relevant in the patient journey.
For example, when launching a new therapy, you may want perspectives from academic KOLs who can interpret early data and educate peers. But for commercialized products, health system KOLs can offer valuable real-world insights on clinical use, barriers, and patient management approaches. And long-term care KOLs become critical stakeholders for therapies impacting elderly populations.
By taking a more deliberate approach to understand KOL practice settings, medical affairs can avoid a “square peg, round hole” situation. We can selectively engage with the right KOL profiles and extract specific perspectives to inform medical needs and strategy.
Understanding Settings to Provide Value to KOLs
Just as mapping KOLs by practice setting benefits medical affairs, this approach also allows us to tailor our engagement to bring value back to the KOLs themselves. By recognizing their priorities and audiences, we can:
Provide the right data and insights to further scientific convrsation.
Provide resources that aid in optimizing care pathways and addressing real-world barriers.
Identify ways to collaborate more effectively on challenges that impact patient support and outcomes.
When medial affairs demonstrates this type of “practice setting” awareness, it builds credibility and trust with KOLs. We position ourselves as partners who understand their worlds and can offer mutually beneficial collaboration – not just a one-sided agenda.
The Bottom Line
Key opinion leaders offer invaluable medical insights - but only if we recognize that their backgrounds, priorities, and audiences can differ greatly depending on where they practice. An academic KOL may not be able to fully advise on real-world patient care like a health system counterpart. Likewise, a hospital administrator may not have the same perspectives on elderly care as a long-term care expert.
By mapping the practice settings of KOLs compared to our strategic priorities, medical affairs teams can enhance external partnerships, gather more contextual and relevant insights, and ultimately optimize engagement with these vital medical experts across the healthcare ecosystem.
