Scientific Communication Platforms

Scientific Communication Platforms define the scientific position, narrative, objectives, and core medical messages for products, therapeutic areas, indications, or a combination thereof. These objectives and messages serve as the foundation for future medical communication activities. Stakeholders leverage these communications platforms to source their messaging and data points used to substantiate medical content.

You can link these objectives and messages to content in MedComms using Scientific Statement linking for tracking and reporting.

Scientific Communication Platforms Objects

MedComms offers the following objects to manage Scientific Communication Platforms data:

• The Communication Platform object defines the scientific narrative to be used in future medical communications.
• The Pillar object is a child of the Communication Platform object that allows you to organize Communication Objectives and statements within a Scientific Communication Platform into themes that support the overall communication strategy.
• The Communication Objective object allows you to describe any desired strategic outcome.
• The Scientific Statement object, with the Primary Statement, Secondary Statement, and Aspirational Statement object types, stores scientific statements and links to scientific literature to be used as references.

Configuring Scientific Communication Platforms

Before using the Scientific Communication Platforms functionality, you must perform the following configuration tasks in your Vault.

Configuring Objects

The Communication Platform, Pillar, Communication Objective, and Scientific Statement objects are active by default. However, you must activate and configure the object types and page layouts:

• Inactivate the Base Communication Objective type of the Communication Objective object.
• Inactivate the Base Statement type of the Scientific Statement object.
  • Scientific Statements may be called Claims in your Vault. The API name for this object is annotation\_keywords\_\_sys. We suggest that you label this object Scientific Statement.
  • If your Vault has existing Scientific Statement records, we suggest that you update their object type from Base to Scientific Statement or another object type. For example, if the statement is part of a Communication Platform, we suggest updating the object type to Primary Statement.
• Activate the Scientific Statement, Primary Statement, Secondary Statement, and Aspirational Statement types of the Scientific Statement object. 
• Set the Scientific Statement type of the Scientific Statement object as the default.
• Copy and activate the Action Layouts for the following objects:
  • Communication Platform
  • Pillar
  • Communication Objective (for the Medical and Commercial object types)
  • Scientific Statement (for all active object types)
• Set the Scientific Statement Action Layout as the default layout.
• Activate the following fields on the Scientific Statement object:
  • Communication Objective
  • Primary Statement
  • Therapeutic Area
• Assign the following fields to the relevant Scientific Statement object types:
  • Communication Objective: Primary Statement, Secondary Statement, Aspirational Statement
  • Primary Statement: Secondary Statement
  • Therapeutic Area: all object types
  • If you have custom fields on the Scientific Statement object, you may want to add these fields where applicable.

Configuring Tabs

We recommend that you create custom tabs for the Communication Platform and Communication Objective objects. Then, you should create a tab collection with the two new tabs and the standard Scientific Statements tab. We recommend that you name the tab collection Scientific Communications. 

Configuring User Permissions

We also recommend adding the following permissions to the MedComms Full User Actions permission set:

• Object: Communication Objective: Medical Objective: Read, Create, Edit, Delete
• Object: Communication Objective: Commercial Objective: Read, Create, Edit, Delete
• Object: Communication Platform: Read, Create, Edit, Delete
• Object: Scientific Statement: Primary Statement: Read, Create, Edit, Delete
• Object: Scientific Statement: Secondary Statement: Read, Create, Edit, Delete
• Object: Scientific Statement: Scientific Statement: Read, Create, Edit, Delete
• Object: Scientific Statement: Aspirational Statement: Read, Create, Edit, Delete

Configuring Object Lifecycles & Workflows

You can also add entry criteria and entry and user actions to the standard Communication Objective, Communication Platform, and Scientific Statement lifecycles to better manage the review and approval of object records within the messaging hierarchy. For example, if approving a Communication Objective automatically approves related Primary Statements, you can add an entry action that updates the inbound Primary Statements to approved in the Communication Objective lifecycle.