Medical affairs: Japan’s trusted integrator
Key takeaways
- Medical affairs can serve as the trusted integrator of Japan’s healthcare ecosystem. By connecting scientific evidence, stakeholder insight, patient experience and enterprise decisions, medical affairs is becoming a strategic partner that shapes better decisions across the product life cycle.
- Earlier evidence planning, connected data and AI can turn medical insight into action. Medical affairs should help shape Japan-specific evidence strategies from early development, use real-world data throughout the asset life cycle and apply AI to synthesize compliant insights that inform decisions.
- Stronger healthcare collaboration requires clear governance, purposeful partnerships and impact-based measurement. Medical affairs leaders should establish practical compliance rules, build partnerships with patients, healthcare professionals, academia and industry and replace activity counts with measures of changed decisions, closed evidence gaps and improved patient outcomes.
This white paper includes contributions from guest authors Masahisa Jinushi of Tanabe Pharma and Yohei Ohashi of UCB. It was published jointly by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the Japanese Association of Pharmaceutical Medicine (JAPhMed) and ZS.
Medical affairs can become the trusted integrator Japan’s healthcare ecosystem needs. Its authority comes from science, but its future value will come from connecting science, evidence, stakeholder insight, patient experience and enterprise decisions in a way no other function can.
Insights from the Japan Medical Affairs Summit 2026
Leaders from 25 companies came together at the Japan Medical Affairs Summit 2026 to discuss which collaborations create value, which add load and how to tell the two apart early enough to matter. They emphasized medical affairs’ standing as an independent scientific authority and were careful about any action that could affect the function’s reputation. At the same time, they argued that its future value lies less in what it knows than in its ability to connect stakeholders that rarely connect themselves.
Read this white paper to discover how medical affairs can become a leader in an outcome-driven, patient-centered and increasingly AI-enabled ecosystem.
