Medical Affairs and Drug Information Practices Within the Pharmaceutical Industry: Results of a Benchmarking Survey

Pharma or biotech companies that are looking to develop and implement a medical affairs department, or current directors who are looking for ways to assess the performance of their department, find a dearth of published information to assist them with their task. Although in the past a few individual drug and biotech companies have conducted benchmarking surveys in this area for their own in-house use, research reveals that the surveying company often cannot obtain the participation of its current and possible future competitors. This constraint dictates a small and/or nonrandomized participant pool, and means that, unfortunately, even these private, in-house, unpublished surveys can be inaccurate or misleading.