Real-world evidence: the importance of effective collaboration with healthcare professionals 

Written by Mariam Bibi

“Engagement with healthcare professionals is crucial for generating real-world evidence,” says Mariam Bibi, Senior Director, Global RWE, in her published article “Maximizing the value of your asset by leveraging real-world evidence”.

In this excerpt, Mariam explains how to strengthen your collaborative approach to generating real-word evidence (RWE) with healthcare professionals and other stakeholders.

Why engaging healthcare professionals adds value to a real-world evidence study  

Most healthcare professionals, payers, providers, and individuals with a scientific background are familiar with the hierarchy of scientific evidence, in which randomized controlled trials and systematic reviews are seen as the gold standard. Meanwhile, epidemiological data and RWE are ranked lower and are therefore viewed as a weaker source for decision-making. However, increasingly healthcare professionals are seeing that RWE may better reflect the population they are treating and the way they are being treated in clinical practice. 

As a result, engaging with healthcare professionals is highly important. Gaining their input into study design and key endpoints adds value to an RWE study and increases the value of RWE as a supplementary source for plugging data gaps and generating further vital information on patients, the therapy, and the disease. 

The value of RWE is immense, and it is applicable to multiple stakeholders, but it does come back to really understanding your objectives, data source, audience, and communication. In order to maximize the applicability of RWE, it is important that the data are accurate, consistent, and verifiable. Data sources are inherently diverse, which makes it challenging to have set frameworks for data acquisition, analysis, and communication. 

A collaborative approach to generating real-word evidence and a deeper understanding of stakeholder needs 

Market access teams are increasingly collaborating with medical affairs colleagues earlier in the planning process, leaning on their deep insights and knowledge of the target clinical customers to help define the evidence needed to demonstrate the value of a product for all relevant stakeholders. This is especially pertinent in cell therapies for rare diseases, as healthcare professionals often struggle to navigate the complexity of both the disease area and the novel products, which involve intricate and multifaceted manufacturing processes. 

By taking a collaborative approach, biopharmaceutical companies can generate a deeper understanding of stakeholder needs via ongoing insight generation and develop scientific narratives and platforms that tell a clear scientific story. The scientific narrative then provides the foundation for rich tactical plans that provide medical education and engagement for healthcare professionals in a variety of ways at the moments that matter to them, including through symposia, scientific workshops, and publications of study data. 

Workshops are a great tool for engaging and sharing RWE with healthcare professionals, highlighting how to access and interpret the data, which can help drive adoption. Publishing RWE studies in peer-reviewed journals can also alleviate the concerns of stakeholders. 

Maximizing the value of your asset by leveraging real-world evidence 

This excerpt was taken from the free article “Maximizing the value of your asset by leveraging real-world evidence”. The full article explains how manufacturers can use RWE strategies to better leverage data on the effectiveness and safety of novel therapies over time, and develop iterative evidence generation strategies to meet payer requirements. 

Download the article now to discover: 

• why global regulatory authorities are placing increasing importance on RWD and RWE 
• how manufacturers can leverage RWE to highlight the value of high-cost and low-volume therapies and highly targeted novel therapeutic approaches such as CAR-Ts 
• why engagement with healthcare professionals is crucial for generating RWE and some recommendations for effective partnerships.