Part of being a medical affairs strategic thinker is understanding what is impactful or not. But how do we know if something is working? Is what we are doing helping achieve objectives/goals/missions? This is where metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) come in.

Metrics and KPIs help us measure our progress towards goals and execution of strategy. In other words, they help determine if something is having an impact and inform strategic direction. However, beware of falling into the trap of focusing on vanity metrics.

Vanity Metrics in Medical Affairs

According to the Tableau blog: “Vanity metrics are metrics that make you look good to others but do not help you understand your own performance in a way that informs future strategies.”

Vanity metrics are easy to measure and sound great (such as number of HCP visits per quarter, number of insights, or having 30k instagram followers) but don’t help you make a decision. Metrics in general are tricky and what is a vanity metric for one medical affairs team may not be one for another team.

The secret sauce is to think about what you will measure in context of the medical strategy. Always think back to what you want to achieve and go from there. When planning for an upcoming initiative, pick a metric, imagine different scenarios, and then ask yourself what you would learn. Will it help you make a decision?

Here’s an example for you. Let’s say the MSL team identified an educational gap among medical oncologists. To close the gap, the med comms team started a series of initiatives, including a free virtual event on this topic. How can we determine if this event helps close the educational gap?

The number of attendees is a common metric measured for virtual events but tends to be a vanity metric. It’s easy to measure and can feel good (1000 people logged in, wowza!) but it doesn’t actually tell us the impact on the educational gap. What if all the attendees were MSLs from competing companies?

Imagine different scenarios to check if the metric will help you inform strategy. If 100 or 1000 people attend, what does that tell us? Can we make a better decision?

A better metric could be to look into the role or specialty of the attendees to determine if medical oncologists attended. Another option is to assess the impact on medical information requests on this topic as an indicator of knowledge uptake.

Avoiding vanity metrics allows medical affairs teams to determine if what they are doing makes sense. Setting and monitoring good metrics is a sign of strategic thinking. It means you are thinking long-term and understanding how the dots connect.

Setting good metrics is tough and requires a lot of thought. Ping me if you want to talk more. Happy to help :)

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