Building a Successful KOL Network - ACMA Webinar for Medical Affairs Professionals

Welcome to today's webinar, "Building a Successful KOL Network." Our speaker, Jim Holmes, will discuss how putting the right strategies and tools into place from the beginning of your product's lifecycle will produce stronger and more valuable relationships with Key Opinion Leaders. From theory to practical experience, you'll get insight into more effective KOL relationships.

Most of you are familiar with the ACMA through our work in building the world's only globally accredited certification for medical affairs professionals, the BCMAS program (https://www.medicalaffairsspecialist..... Since 2015, we have worked with thousands of professionals in more than 50 countries to test and certify their proficiency in medical affairs skills. We've worked to set the global standard for medical affairs business practices and professional ethics. 

From that work, we came to understand that medical affairs teams need their own tools, dedicated to medical affairs work, and not just adapted and cobbled together from other groups' tools. ACMA Engage is our new medical affairs CRM platform (https://www.medicalaffairsspecialist..... Engage was built from the ground up for medical affairs by medical affairs. It's easy to use, easy to administer and truly reflects the workflows of field medical, medical information, medical communications and medical affairs management.

ACMA Predict is our predictive analytics platform (https://www.medicalaffairsspecialist..... Predict uses our proprietary machine learning system to go beyond sentiment analysis and instead gives you actionable insights and predictions of your Key Opinion Leaders' future needs and preferences.

Engage and Predict are two parts of our growing suite of medical affairs services. We also offer services in prior authorization certification, medication safety and regulatory affairs, medical information call center outsourcing and medical affairs strategic consulting.

Our speaker today is Jim Holmes, Senior Director of Global Medical Affairs Training at Alexion Pharmaceuticals. Jim is a highly experienced life sciences professional specializing in Medical Affairs, KOL Development, Strategic Planning and Medical Communications. His experience spans both the Commercial and Medical sides of the pharmaceutical world. He also brings experience from the medical device industry. 

Jim has excelled in sales, training, communication, clinical, medical and managerial roles in both the US and global markets.  Jim has led commercial and medical teams to grow and develop both business success and personnel. His specialty is in the strategic visioning, aligning and executing of collaborative partnerships to build networks that support both development and commercial visions.

Jim is a graduate of Albany College of Pharmacy and currently lives in the greater Boston Area.

Our discussion includes setting a KOL network strategy, KOL identification, expert qualification, matching interests and needs and measuring success. Some of the questions raised by participants before and during the webinar include:

What criteria do you use to identify and prioritize your KOL network?
How do you manage global aspects of complying with Sunshine Act mandates?
How does working with rare disease or ultrarare disease key opinion leaders differ?
How do you identify non-HCP key opinion leaders (patient advocates, nurse educators) in your project?
How much does phase of development impact how you weigh different segments of KOLs at different points?
What role do new digital tools play in key opinion leader communication?
How do you balance personalized and standardized approaches to key opinion leader communication?
What advice do you have for building and maintaining relationships in the Covid era?
What are ways you can use professional development and training resources to keep MSLs motivated during quarantine?
How do you build more cross-functionality into your teams to support KOL networking building and maintenance?