Four Key Themes Shaping Medical Affairs: MAPS Americas 2025

MAPS Americas, the largest gathering of Medical Affairs professionals, recently took place in New Orleans, Louisiana where new partnerships were formed with industry leaders and latest trends in Medical Affairs were explored.  We highlight four key themes from MAPS Americas below.

Advancing Health Equity Through Medical Affairs

Medical Affairs plays a central role in driving health equity by addressing gaps in awareness, education, evidence, healthcare access, and quality, in close collaboration with other functions and healthcare stakeholders. Through its unique position, Medical Affairs is poised to lead initiatives that bridge these gaps, ensuring that underserved populations receive the care they need. By leveraging medical insights, fostering partnerships, and driving educational initiatives, Medical Affairs can elevate awareness around health disparities and support the implementation of equitable healthcare practices. Moreover, the function’s capacity to integrate scientific evidence with real-world health needs defines its crucial role in addressing and reducing health equity disparities.

At MAPS, conversations on health equity aimed to equip Medical Affairs professionals with the knowledge and tools needed to address health disparities, to demonstrate their impact on health equity, and to advocate for health equity within the broader pharmaceutical industry. Examples of key topics discussed include:

• Defining health equity, examples of organizations that promote health equity, and the promise of attaining full potential for health and well-being
• Examples of US and global health equity frameworks
• Health equity advances including growing awareness of disparities and greater diversity in clinical trials
• Barriers to health equity across the patient journey
• Opportunities and strategies for Medical Affairs to advance health equity

Collaborative Efforts Between Medical Affairs and Commercial Teams

The traditional boundaries between Medical Affairs and Commercial teams have often been guarded due to concerns over compliance, disparate stakeholder focus, and alignment of messaging. However, the evolving landscape of pharmaceutical development and commercialization necessitates a shift towards a more integrated approach. At MAPS, the potential for collaboration between Medical Affairs and Commercial was explored, including key reasons on why it is critical:

• New mechanisms of action and precision medicines, involving specific patient populations, biomarkers, and companion diagnostics require sophisticated scientific exchange with providers, payers, and patients
• Payer coverage requires comprehensive value dossiers. Medical Affairs must articulate a drug’s clinical differentiation and demonstrate improved healthcare resource utilization
• Sales rep reach and frequency, previously focused on prescribers, are no longer sufficient for drug uptake. Engaging various stakeholders, including patients, providers, policymakers, and payors, through cross-functional hospital/account-based plans is essential, especially for complex drug modalities like cell and gene therapies
• Medical Affairs/ Commercial collaboration can optimize design, implementation, and approval of digital health tools and initiatives with applications across the organization, e.g., real-world data generation and patient identification
• Medical Affairs can generate and analyze medical insights from shared data sources with Commercial, e.g., claims data, informing cross-functional strategies and assessing impact

Refining Use Cases for AI in Medical Affairs

Similar to 2024, AI applicability in Medical Affairs was a key topic of interest. There was a palpable buzz throughout the conference, with nearly every booth and poster session highlighting the theme of leveraging AI across a range of Medical Affairs use cases.  While some healthy skepticism remains regarding how best to leverage AI tools in Medical Affairs—particularly in comparison to commercial functions—there was robust discussion not only within formal sessions but also in conversations throughout the conference hall. Compared to last year, there was a notable increase in tangible examples of how to deploy and scale AI, including:

• How to best use medical insights and human in the loop to build optimal GenAI models for medical content development across a variety of domains efficiently
• Leveraging AI tools to efficiently mine and determine key insights from the team to summarize interactions, conferences summaries, and evidence generation amongst others
• How to operationalize headquarter Medical Affairs teams and external customer-facing Medical Affairs activities efficiently
• The ability to integrate diverse data sources—including patient insights—earlier in clinical development
• Helping to empower Medical Affairs insights into the product journey continuum from early phase clinical trial testing through LOE

The Central Role of Medical Affairs

Medical Affairs has firmly established itself as a core pillar alongside R&D and Commercial within life sciences companies, with its strategic importance continuing to expand. Key trends and findings included:

• Best in class launch case studies show the role of involving Medical Affairs early in the development lifecycle led to optimal initial uptake
• Compliant collaboration between commercial and Medical Affairs team early in the development lifecycle is critical for commercialization and uptake of new therapeutics by developing evidence not just for approval but that will ensure driving evidence to support commercial and access needs
• Additionally, enabling a seamless, 360-degree view of HCP interactions—across both Medical and Commercial touchpoints—is becoming increasingly important for companies looking to optimize the overall HCP experience
• Even in resource-restrained environments, companies must be creative and find ways to leverage Medical Affairs
• Greater acceptance of measuring the impact of Medical Affairs activities via various metrics further elevating the role of Medical Affairs teams
• AI and various technologies continue to grow and empower the role of Medical Affairs teams across product development and commercialization

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