Article • January 13, 2026
How Learning & Development Can Help Build a “Best Practice” Medical Affairs Organization (Part 1 – Introduction)
The Widening Gap
By now, it should be clear to anyone who’s paying attention: Medical Affairs (MA) teams are no longer just the keepers of scientific knowledge, they have become the strategic hub connecting R&D insights to commercial execution, translating complex science for diverse stakeholders, and generating evidence that shapes market access decisions. However, MA leaders know the challenge all too well: expectations for scientific and medical excellence have skyrocketed while the playbook for meeting them remains frustratingly unclear. The demands are obvious. The path forward? Less so.
That’s what prompted our parent company, Blue Matter Consulting, to ask a fundamental question: What separates best-practice Medical Affairs organizations from everyone else?
Their 2025 report, Key Success Factors (KSFs) to Building a Best Practice Medical Affairs Organization, synthesized insights from MA leaders across the biopharma landscape and identified five KSFs that consistently distinguish high-performing teams. These aren’t aspirational ideals. Rather, they are actionable capabilities spanning leadership, organizational design, and strategic execution.
Here’s what we at Salience Learning believe to be true: The Learning & Development (L&D) organization can directly accelerate progress on every single one of them.
In this article, we introduce the five KSFs and briefly describe how strategic L&D interventions can help Medical Affairs organizations close the gap between the current and future-state best practice. Then, over the next five articles, we’ll take a deeper dive into each factor with specific, practical approaches for implementation.
Because Medical Affairs has evolved, the enabling learning strategy should too.
The 5 KSFs and the Learning Opportunity
Blue Matter’s research identified five interconnected characteristics that distinguish best-practice Medical Affairs organizations. They are:
- Strong Medical Affairs Leadership
- Organizationally Endorsed Mission
- Creativity and Integrative Thinking
- Enabling Capabilities and Systems
- Insights > Strategy > Action Loop
Figure 1: Key Success Factors for “Best Practice” Medical Affairs Organizations
On paper, these KSFs are easy to grasp. In practice, most MA organizations face a common challenge: their teams weren’t trained for this version of Medical Affairs.
Traditional pathways into MA tend to run through clinical practice, research, and pharmacy. Unfortunately, those pathways do not adequately prepare life science professionals for cross-functional strategy development, integrative business thinking, or insight-driven decision making, all of which are necessities in the modern MA organization. Even experienced MA leaders often lack formal training in stakeholder influence, commercialization processes, business acumen, or strategic planning and communication. These can become significant learning and performance gaps that will hinder MA’s strategic potential.
What We’ve Observed
Across our work with MA teams at organizations such as BMS, J&J, GSK, Novo Nordisk, and Pfizer, we’ve identified common barriers associated with learning and development that limit an organization’s ability to achieve each of the 5 KSFs. Table 1 provides a brief overview.
Table 1: L&D-Related Barriers to Achieving the 5 Key Success Factors (KSFs) in Medical Affairs
| KSF | Common L&D-Related Barriers | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Strong Medical Affairs Leadership | Leadership development is often reactive rather than strategic. | Organizations often wait until someone is promoted into a MA leadership role before addressing capability gaps. By then, the learning curve is steep, the stakes are high, and new leaders are often overwhelmed with limited time to invest in developing their own professional areas of opportunity. |
| Organizationally Endorsed Mission | Cross-functional influence skills are assumed, not taught. | MA professionals are expected to collaborate seamlessly with the R&D, commercial, and market access teams. However, they rarely receive training on how to navigate complex organizational structures, dynamics, and competing priorities. Their ability to “market” themselves internally and externally across a diverse set of audiences through effective communication is very limited. This makes it more difficult for them to build trust in and credibility for their ideas, their department, or themselves beyond traditional scientific expertise. |
| Creativity and Integrative Thinking | Business acumen, patient centricity, and innovative thinking remain disconnected rather than integrated. | Many MA professionals understand business concepts superficially in the sense that they can explain how their company makes money but find it challenging to connect their work to P&L impact or to speak credibly about payer dynamics and commercial strategy. They embrace patient-centricity as a value and can usually translate it into evidence priorities and strategic action related specifically to patient care. However, they often struggle to consider how business realities and priorities fit into the equation. The deeper need is to determine those actions that are in the best interest of the patient but that also align with organizational goals. While scientifically rigorous, they default to conventional solutions rather than pursuing innovative approaches that serve patients, healthcare systems, and business objectives simultaneously. |
| Enabling Capabilities and Systems | Data literacy and process fluency are insufficient for MA’s strategic role. | MA teams excel with clinical trial data and scientific literature but lack the confidence and capability to leverage real-world evidence, claims data, and market research effectively. Compounding this data literacy gap is inadequate fluency with the organizational infrastructure meant to enable their work such as governance processes, analytical platforms, and workflow systems. Together, these deficiencies limit MA’s ability to generate timely insights and participate meaningfully in strategic decision-making. |
| Insights > Strategy > Action Loop | Insights generation is often strong but strategic translation and execution frequently underwhelms | Due to their scientific backgrounds, MA professionals usually think like clinicians. This can be highly valuable, but it can discount the importance of also thinking like business strategists. Their clinical backgrounds enable strong insight generation regarding treatment options and patient outcomes. However, many struggle to translate those insights into strategic business action with the urgency and technology needed to meet commercialization demands. |
What’s Next: A Roadmap for Transformation
Over the next five articles, we’ll explore innovative L&D solutions that are specifically designed to overcome each of these common barriers. Our goal is not to outline theoretical frameworks or generic best practices. Rather, we’ll share practical, implementable approaches that we’ve refined through years of work with leading MA organizations.
In Part 2, we’ll tackle the leadership development challenge by exploring how learning strategy can support predictive leadership pipelines, or systematic approaches to identifying and developing future MA leaders 2-4 years before they step into formal roles (rather than scrambling to prepare them after promotion). We’ll examine what future-ready MA leaders need to master, such as AI-augmented decision-making and navigating complex digital health ecosystems. We’ll also describe how targeted learning interventions can build those capabilities proactively. This isn’t about adding more training; it’s about strategically aligning L&D with forward-looking talent strategies.
Each subsequent article will follow the same pattern:
- Diagnosis of the barrier
- Innovative learning solutions
- Practical implementation guidance that MA leaders can quickly apply within their organizations.
As we’ll see, closing the gap between current and future-state best practice requires more than incremental improvements. It requires a new approach to developing MA talent for the challenges ahead.