Somewhere in most small and mid-size life sciences companies, there's a shared inbox called something like medinfo@ — and inside it, a compliance incident waiting for a date. Medical information requests arrive by email, phone, through sales reps, and at congress booths; they get answered by whoever sees them first; and the record of what was asked and what was said lives in scattered threads and a spreadsheet that one person understands. It works, in the sense that requests mostly get answered. It fails the day an auditor, a regulator, or your own leadership asks a simple question: show me.

This guide covers how to stand up a formal MIR workflow — intake, triage, response, compliance, and reporting — and why, unlike most Medical Affairs systems, this one genuinely doesn't require an IT project to deploy.

Why shared inboxes and spreadsheets fail as MIR systems

A medical information request isn't ordinary correspondence — it's a regulated interaction. Off-label questions must be handled under the unsolicited-request framework, adverse event mentions carry pharmacovigilance reporting clocks, and every response needs to be reconstructable later. The shared-inbox model fails all three quietly:

• No audit trail. When the response to an off-label question lives in one person's sent folder, the organization can't demonstrate what was said, what source material supported it, or who approved it.
• Buried safety signals. An HCP's email asking about an interaction might mention a patient event in passing. In an inbox, that mention depends on the reader noticing; pharmacovigilance timelines don't care whether anyone noticed.
• Silent inconsistency. Two team members answer the same question differently in the same month, and nobody knows — because there's no shared record of standard responses.
• The one-person dependency. The spreadsheet tracker works precisely as long as its owner never takes vacation, changes roles, or leaves.

None of this shows up while volumes are low. It shows up at the audit, the inspection, or the leadership review — the three moments when it's too late to fix retroactively.

The five components of a compliant MIR workflow

1. One intake queue, every channel

Requests arrive by email, web form, phone, field teams, and congress conversations. The workflow starts by collapsing all of them into a single queue with a standard record: who asked, through which channel, about which product, verbatim question, and date received. Field-originated requests matter most here — an MSL or rep capturing an HCP's question on the spot, routed instantly to MedInfo, beats a forwarded email three days later on both speed and compliance.

2. Triage and routing rules

Not every request deserves the same path. Standard on-label questions can go straight to a documented response; off-label questions route to medical review under unsolicited-request handling; anything mentioning a possible adverse event or product quality complaint escalates to pharmacovigilance immediately. Writing these rules down — and having the system enforce them rather than relying on judgment under inbox pressure — is the single biggest compliance upgrade in the whole workflow.

3. Response from pre-approved content

Most MIR volume is a familiar set of questions in rotation. A library of medically approved standard response documents — kept current, versioned, referenced to source data — means routine requests get consistent, compliant answers in minutes, and your medical reviewers spend their time on the genuinely novel questions. This is also what makes medical information quality consistent across whoever happens to be staffing the queue.

4. The compliance layer

Three things belong here: automated adverse-event and product-quality-complaint detection on every inbound request (so a safety mention in sentence four of a longer email gets flagged even when a human skims past it); enforced documentation — the request, the response, the source material, the approver — captured as a structural requirement rather than a best practice; and turnaround-time tracking against your internal SLAs, because “we respond promptly” is not an answer auditors accept.

5. Reporting that turns requests into insight

MIR patterns are one of the most underused evidence sources in Medical Affairs. If eleven HCPs ask about the same dosing scenario this quarter, that's not eleven support tickets — it's a signal about an evidence gap or an education need. Routing MIR themes into the same evidence-gap taxonomy as field and advisory board insight is what turns the MedInfo function from a cost center into an intelligence source your insights program actually draws on.

Shared inbox vs. purpose-built MIR system

Setting it up in days, not months

Here's the part that surprises teams coming from enterprise CRM implementations: a MedInfo workflow is one of the few Medical Affairs systems that genuinely deploys in days. There's no field-team rollout, no territory model, no data migration from a legacy CRM — a small MedInfo team and a content library are the whole footprint. A realistic first week looks like:

1. Day 1 — intake: point your medinfo@ address and web form at the system; define the standard request record.
2. Day 2 — routing rules: codify your triage logic — on-label, off-label, AE/PQC escalation paths, and who reviews what.
3. Days 3–4 — content library: load your existing standard response documents; flag the gaps for medical review to fill over the following weeks.
4. Day 5 — go live: route new inbound requests through the system; keep the old inbox as a monitored fallback for a transition period.

TikaMedInfo is built for exactly this deployment profile: AI-powered routing, response recommendations drawn from your pre-approved library, built-in AE/PQC escalation, and audit-ready documentation — live in days, without IT involvement, priced for small MedInfo teams rather than enterprise suites.

Frequently asked questions

What is a medical information request workflow?

It's the defined process a life sciences company uses to receive, triage, answer, document, and report on medical information requests: a single intake queue across channels, routing rules by request type, responses built on pre-approved content, automated adverse-event detection, and an audit trail covering every interaction from receipt to closure.

How quickly should a company respond to a medical information request?

Set internal SLAs by request type — many teams target 24–48 hours for routine on-label requests, with longer, documented timelines for complex questions requiring medical review, and immediate escalation clocks for anything involving a potential adverse event. What matters to auditors is that the timelines are defined, tracked, and met — not any single universal number.

Do small MedInfo teams really need software for this?

Below meaningful volume, a disciplined inbox process can work — the risk isn't volume, it's documentation. The moment your team handles off-label questions or fields requests that might contain safety mentions, the audit-trail and AE-detection requirements exist regardless of team size. That's why purpose-built MedInfo tools that deploy in days without IT have become the practical answer for teams of two or three, not just large departments.

How does automated adverse event detection work in an MIR system?

The system screens every inbound request's text for language suggesting a possible adverse event or product quality complaint — a patient reaction mentioned in passing, an unexpected-symptom description — and flags it for pharmacovigilance review automatically, independent of whether the human handling the request noticed. It supplements, never replaces, human judgment and your PV reporting obligations.

What's the difference between an MIR system and a CRM?

A CRM tracks relationships and interactions broadly; an MIR system is a regulated-workflow tool with specific machinery a CRM lacks: unsolicited-request handling, pre-approved response libraries, AE/PQC escalation, and MedInfo-grade audit trails. The two work best connected — field teams capture requests in the CRM they already use, and the MIR workflow handles them compliantly from there.

The bottom line

An MIR workflow is the rare Medical Affairs upgrade with no good argument for waiting: the compliance exposure of the shared-inbox model is real today, the deployment cost is measured in days, and the same system that removes the audit risk turns your request patterns into evidence-gap intelligence. If your MedInfo process still depends on an inbox and one person's spreadsheet, this is the quarter to retire it.