Medical affairs is in a period of rapid change as it adapts to a broader, more complex customer model that includes healthcare providers, payers, patient advocacy groups and digital influencers. It’s pursuing several strategies to navigate these changes, including investing in scalable nonpersonal channels that can deliver impact at a lower cost. Still, only 13% of medical affairs leaders consider their organizations best in class, according to the ZS Medical Affairs Outlook Report 2025.
As medical affairs strives to become future-ready and improve patient outcomes, modernize its go-to-market models and master complex ecosystems of data, a vital solution is coming into view: a centralized operating model at a global capability center (GCC).
India has quickly evolved into a GCC hub, with about 1,600 GCCs operating across various sectors, including IT, finance, pharma R&D and life sciences. The pharmaceutical industry, in particular, has been leveraging tech talent in India for years to build centralized operating models that support commercial, regulatory, clinical and safety functions. This trend has accelerated in the last five years, with companies such as Amgen, AstraZeneca, BMS, GSK, Lilly, Merck, Novartis, Novo Nordisk, Pfizer and Sanofi all establishing or expanding their presence in India. These companies view GCCs not as cost centers but as value creation hubs.
Why pharma companies are reconsidering GCCs for medical affairs
While pharma functions like commercial and R&D have embraced centralized operating models through GCCs, medical affairs has been slower to adopt. It has traditionally been concerned about challenges including:
- Fragmented global processes with limited harmonization
- Siloed markets, and duplicate and inconsistent execution
- Underutilization of technology and automation
- A lack of scalable delivery models
But with rising expectations from customers and internal stakeholders, medical affairs is reconsidering its position on GCCs. Healthcare professionals (HCPs) now demand faster, consistent and high-quality scientific engagement that aligns with their needs in real time. Internally, organizations are under increasing pressure to drive operational efficiency, achieve cost savings and enable more agile, scalable resourcing models. These twin imperatives are pushing medical affairs to rethink their approach to GCCs and embrace a tech-powered centralized operating model.
Why now is the time for medical affairs to invest in GCCs
When it comes to leveraging GCCs in India, medical affairs is where commercial was a decade ago—full of untapped potential, primed for growth and increasingly crucial to the pharmaceutical value chain. There are three reasons it’s the right time for pharma companies to leverage GCCs for medical affairs:
Strategic relevance: Medical affairs is no longer a support function—it’s a strategic bridge between clinical development and commercial execution.
Technology-driven transformation: AI, real-world evidence, natural language processing, content engines and digital health are becoming central to medical affairs—and these are areas where India’s tech and data talent excels.
Demand: Pharma companies are recognizing that medical affairs is a strategic powerhouse, and demand is growing to scale the function and invest in advancements that enable medical affairs organizations to become future fit.
How commercial paved the way—and lessons for medical affairs
Commercial functions demonstrated how to leverage GCCs to successfully scale operations by focusing on three key factors: people, technology and process. Commercial built structured roles and clear career paths, and established centers of excellence that elevated both capability and consistency. Through technology enablement, they adopted enterprise platforms like Veeva, Salesforce and Tableau, while also developing tech talent locally—particularly in India—to accelerate scalability. Finally, they standardized operations globally by implementing unified playbooks and service-level agreements to drive efficiency and quality.
Commercial’s coordinated efforts laid the foundation for a robust, scalable model. Medical affairs can now draw from this experience and adapt the same principles through a structured decisions framework that creates global consistency, optimizes location strategy and determines what to build internally and what to outsource.
The decision framework serves as a blueprint for building scalable, efficient and tech-enabled global capabilities. Two key pillars comprise the framework:
Harmonize the process: The first step is to standardize and streamline processes across geographies and business units. For commercial pharma marketing operations, this meant moving away from country-specific variations and toward globally consistent workflows, supported by centralized governance and shared best practices.
For medical affairs, this could involve harmonizing content development, publication planning, medical information handling and engagement workflows. Standardization not only improves quality and compliance but also enables better measurement, benchmarking and scalability. Technology undoubtedly plays a significant role in harmonizing the process.
Right shore and source: Once processes are harmonized, organizations must decide where they should be executed and who should lead the way. GCCs in India stand out as the optimal “right shore” location due to their deep scientific and digital talent pool, cost advantages and alignment with global time zones.
Sales operations teams leveraged GCCs by centralizing functions like analytics and content development. Similarly, medical affairs can tap into GCC expertise in real-world evidence analytics, AI-driven content engines and more. Medical affairs has an opportunity to build not just delivery hubs but strategic capability centers.
This decision revolves around what to insource versus outsource. In commercial, teams assessed each process based on complexity, sensitivity and strategic value. Intellectual property (IP)-heavy, complex or compliance-critical processes were brought in-house via GCCs, while repetitive or transactional activities were outsourced to trusted partners.
Medical affairs can pursue a similar strategy by insourcing work—including scientific content development, AI models and data analytics—that create long-term IP and competitive advantages. It can then outsource commoditized or lower-risk tasks, such as standard literature monitoring or formatting support.
Together, these decisions form a powerful, structured pathway for medical affairs to leapfrog traditional operating models and build a future-ready, tech-enabled and strategically aligned centralized operating model.
A GCC success story in medical affairs
In the pharmaceutical industry, different regions often experience challenges accessing the appropriate documentation necessary for evidence generation. This situation leads to inefficiencies, duplicated efforts and wasted time. Teams frequently look for data but struggle with limited visibility into existing studies, which sometimes results in the costly authorization of duplicative studies.
Some firms are charting a better path forward. One major pharma company aimed to strengthen its data-driven approach and patient centricity efforts. To do so, it developed a centralized evidence platform at an Indian GCC that enables evidence generation teams to easily find, review and share details on both existing and planned studies. The centralized evidence platform serves as a comprehensive resource hub for clinical study information. It enhances evidence generation, enables better transparency and improves patient outcomes by offering detailed study information with accessible links to data, reports and publications.
This centralized platform also supports effective collaboration and the alignment of evidence generation activities. The value the platform created is clearly visible, as it has led to significant operational efficiencies and cost savings. Over two years, the platform has generated more than $1 million in savings, and further growth is expected, with anticipated savings projected to exceed $2 million in the short term. These savings stem from productivity gains, avoidance of redundant studies and vendor cost savings. The platform has increased operational efficiency by streamlining information retrieval, empowering data-driven insights and enhancing visibility and collaboration across functions.
Technology platforms are vital to a centralized operating model in GCCs
When pharma companies decide to leverage a GCC for medical affairs work, field medical is often the leading area for early investment, given its ability to enhance the overall effectiveness and responsiveness of medical affairs. It plays a critical role in driving scientific engagement, key opinion leader advocacy and product launch success by enabling personalized, evidence-based interactions and addressing gaps such as real-world evidence. As expectations grow around digital proficiency and omnichannel delivery, companies must equip field medical with the right technology and data capabilities to meet stakeholder needs and ensure strategic impact.
That’s where technology comes in, as the right tech platforms can help medical affairs overcome long-standing productivity and scalability barriers. These tech platforms consolidate fragmented data, automate administrative tasks, personalize stakeholder engagement and generate timely insights using AI and advanced analytics.
For pharma companies leveraging GCCs in India, tech platforms power the centralized operating model by providing a critical foundation to scale field medical operations, integrate evidence generation and enhance decision-making across global markets. With India’s strong digital and scientific talent pool, pharma can embed tech platforms in GCC operating models to streamline processes, improve real-time collaboration and support high-quality scientific engagement at scale. This allows medical affairs to shift from fragmented and reactive approaches to become a harmonized, tech-enabled function capable of delivering faster, more consistent and more impactful outcomes for both internal stakeholders and external customers.
Here are five must-have capabilities for GCCs that are considering a technology platform to power their centralized operating model:
AI and analytics integration: Enable predictive modeling, personalized customer engagement and real-time insights to optimize sales strategies and operational decisions.
Scalability: Meet global and regional needs while breaking down data silos by using modular, cloud-based platforms with seamless integrations.
Compliance: Ensure adherence to regulatory requirements via real-time audits, secure data management and robust system governance.
Global harmonization: Balance standardization and local customization across markets through unified frameworks for processes like roster management, call planning and incentive compensation.
Easy implementation and continuous improvement: Emphasize the right delivery model—whether it’s organic, build-operate-transfer or hybrid—and ongoing platform innovation to incorporate emerging technologies and maintain operational excellence.
Future-proofing medical affairs: Why now is the time to build a GCC
The role of medical affairs is evolving—fast. As the function moves from a support role to strategic partner, organizations must ask themselves a fundamental question: If we’re not yet leveraging a GCC, should we start thinking about it? The answer, given the shifting landscape of healthcare, is a resounding yes.
India has proven itself as a global epicenter for GCCs across commercial and R&D functions. With its deep bench of scientific and digital talent, mature delivery ecosystems and significant cost advantages, it is uniquely positioned to support the next wave of medical affairs transformation. Establishing a GCC in India isn’t just a cost decision, however—it’s a capability decision. It’s about building smarter, leaner and more scalable global operations that can flex with business needs, enable real-time insights and power scientific engagement at scale.
Pharma companies that already operate GCCs have the opportunity to build on their existing centralized operating models to increase their GCC’s value. With tech platforms, delivery models and governance mechanisms already in place, expanding into medical affairs is not only efficient but also strategic. Companies have the chance to embed best practices from day one—harmonized processes, centralized governance and AI-driven operations—without repeating the early missteps of other functions. This late-adopter advantage allows medical affairs to skip the experimentation phase and leap directly into a high-impact, tech-enabled global centralized operating model.
The decision to act now—whether you’re building from scratch or scaling what you already have—is not just about operational efficiency. It’s about future-proofing medical affairs to empower it to meet the demands of a fast-evolving healthcare ecosystem while transforming into a true engine of scientific and strategic value.
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