An advisory board is a structured, compensated engagement in which a pharmaceutical, biotech, or medical device company convenes external experts — traditionally healthcare providers acting as Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs), and increasingly patient advocates and payer-side specialists — to gather scientific, clinical, or strategic input on a specific, pre-defined question. Unlike a promotional or educational meeting, information flows from the advisors to the sponsor, not the reverse.
Advisory boards are one of the few structured mechanisms Medical Affairs has for gathering deliberate, expert input rather than passively collecting field insight over time. A well-run board can surface an evidence gap, stress-test a scientific narrative, or validate a real-world evidence question in a single session that might otherwise take months of scattered field observations to identify.
They also carry genuine regulatory weight. Because advisors are compensated for their time and expertise, advisory boards sit inside a compliance framework — not a gray area — and getting that framework wrong exposes the organization to real transparency and enforcement risk, not just a poorly-run meeting.
Advisory boards have moved from purely in-person meetings to a hybrid model: a synchronous video session, usually capped around 90 minutes, combined with an asynchronous phase where advisors review materials and respond to structured prompts over days or weeks. The synchronous portion handles real-time debate and consensus-building; the asynchronous portion tends to surface more considered input, particularly from advisors who don't speak first in a live discussion.
Advisory boards operate under industry codes of practice — including those from IFPMA, EFPIA, PhRMA, and ABPI — which require that advisors be selected based on relevant expertise, not relationship history, and that the meeting objective be documented before outreach begins. In the United States, compensation must reflect Fair Market Value (FMV), and payments are subject to Sunshine Act / Open Payments transparency reporting. Getting this right requires accurate advisor records — credentials, license status, NPI validation, contracted rates, and disclosures — assembled before, not after, the meeting.
TikaMobile connects advisory board output to the same insight pipeline your MSLs already use, so a concern raised by an advisor and a concern raised in the field on the same clinical question don't sit in two disconnected systems.
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Related: Key Opinion Leader (KOL) · Medical Insights · Patient-Reported Outcomes (PRO) · Payer