If you’re leading Medical Affairs in 2026, staying aligned with the latest clinical research is no longer just a scientific obligation. It’s a competitive necessity. But over the past few years, we’ve seen the traditional journal club model that served academic centers for decades start to get stale and fall behind under today’s realities.For example:
And the actual insights from those sessions (often the most valuable part) get scattered across emails and disorganized shared drives.
When executed strategically on a proper tech platform, we see virtual journal clubs solve every one of these limitations. They expand the reach of expert you bring in, blend synchronous and asynchronous engagement, reduce administrative workload, and operate at roughly one-fifth the cost of traditional in-person programs. A lot of teams end up spending just 25–30% of what they used to spend bringing people together physically, while making their engagements deeper and more frequent.
This guide walks through the proven model our clients use to run journal clubs that produce real clinical intelligence, strengthen expert relationships and scale across therapeutic areas.
If you want to implement this playbook on a platform purpose-built for Medical Affairs, contact us—we help teams run virtual journal clubs, advisory boards and other expert engagements with far less friction.
We’ve seen three problems degrade and sometimes kill the old way of running clubs:
In short, the traditional journal club collapsed under the weight of modern clinical practice: too bound by geography, too slow for today’s data cadence and too fragmented to capture the insights Medical Affairs teams now need in real time.
Rather than a one-off meeting, virtual journal clubs are structured, ongoing engagement programs that combine three components:
These programs support three major Medical Affairs priorities. Let’s quickly run through each.
Experts receive a centralized location for clinical literature, updates and discussion threads. As they engage, you capture real-time insights on trial results, competitive data, safety signals, market developments and variations in real-world practice patterns.
These insights directly inform medical strategy, evidence planning, and internal understanding of therapeutic landscapes.
Here’s a quick example to illustrate:
During a virtual journal club on a Phase II oncology trial, academic investigators highlight that the reported ORR is promising but caution that the small sample size makes subgroup analysis unreliable. Meanwhile, community oncologists note that the adverse event profile appears manageable but flag that in their practices, similar agents often show higher rates of dose interruptions in older patients.
A cardiologist participating cross-functionally raises concern about a borderline QTc signal that wasn’t emphasized in the published manuscript but appears more pronounced in the supplement.
As the asynchronous discussion continues, experts share real-world observations about patient adherence barriers, speculate on how a competitor’s recently announced Phase III results could change treatment sequencing, and discuss regional differences in payer pushback.
All of this becomes centralized, searchable clinical intelligence that informs internal safety monitoring priorities, upcoming evidence needs, and how Medical Affairs educates field teams on real-world adoption challenges.
By structuring discussions around new study data, competitor readouts and specific research questions, you generate peer-reviewed intelligence that helps teams:
Asynchronous participation is especially valuable here. Experts can think more deeply and respond thoughtfully outside the pressure of a live meeting.
A Medical Affairs team may ask experts to review two new competitor studies ahead of their own data readout. The academic specialists focus heavily on methodology, pointing out limitations in comparator choice and statistical handling of dropouts. Community physicians respond differently, emphasizing that the titration schedule looks unrealistic for busy clinics and predicting lower adherence outside trial settings.
As experts debate endpoints during the asynchronous period, it becomes clear that quality-of-life data (not just efficacy) will heavily influence real-world adoption. These insights help the team refine their publication plan to emphasize patient-reported outcomes, adjust their narrative around differentiation and prepare messaging that addresses both academic critiques and community practice realities.
Because experts had time to think deeply and respond asynchronously, the discussion surfaces strategic nuances that would never appear in a single live meeting.
Virtual journal clubs move engagements from episodic to continuous. We see quarterly cycles supported by ongoing discussion create consistency, familiarity, more candid exchanges and a sense of shared intellectual ownership.
Over time, these interactions transform advisors into genuine advocates who understand and feel invested in your scientific direction.
Over several quarterly cycles, the same group of pulmonologists and allergists might reconvene to discuss evolving literature around a new biologic class. In the early sessions, participants share cautious, largely surface-level feedback. But as the cadence becomes familiar and the asynchronous threads accumulate, clinicians begin tagging each other in discussions, referencing prior comments from months earlier and volunteering real-world cases that illustrate how they’re thinking about new data.
Senior investigators start sharing preliminary thoughts on abstracts they’re reviewing for upcoming congresses; community physicians begin raising patient-practical considerations more candidly. The tone shifts from transactional (“here’s my comment for this meeting”) to collaborative (“here’s what I’m seeing and how it connects to what we discussed last quarter”).
By the end of the year, you can imagine several experts proactively asking to join steering committees or explore additional collaboration because the ongoing engagement has built trust, familiarity and a shared sense of scientific purpose.
Here’s the implementation roadmap we typically run with teams running their first virtual journal club.
Start by defining exactly what you want these journal clubs to accomplish. Are you primarily gathering clinical intelligence about emerging therapies? Building relationships with community physicians who will eventually prescribe your product? Educating internal teams about competitive developments?
Your objectives will shape everything from participant selection to content strategy to how you measure success. Be specific. "Stay current with the latest research" is too vague. "Understand how key opinion leaders are interpreting the latest competitive trial data for treatment-naïve patients" gives you something concrete to build around.
Platform selection reflects a strategic choice about partnership model. Some platforms focus squarely on software. Others take a more comprehensive approach, providing both flexible technology and expert guidance on engagement strategy—not just platform features.
At ExtendMed, we've built Health Expert Connect specifically for life sciences teams, combining sophisticated engagement tools with 20+ years of industry expertise in medical education and KOL engagement.
Don't try to launch a comprehensive program immediately. Start with a limited-scope pilot that validates your model before full deployment.
One approach that consistently delivers superior results: the "bookend" model combining opening and closing synchronous meetings with 2-3 weeks of asynchronous discussion in between.
This hybrid approach works because it accommodates different working styles: some advisors prefer contributing during live discussions, while others provide their most insightful comments during asynchronous phases after having time to reflect. It also helps break the ice between experts by allowing them to see and hear each other in real time when they first meet, grounding the engagement with this human element.
With a validated model, you can expand participation, add therapeutic areas and implement advanced features.
Here’s how we do this with Health Expert Connect™:
Journal club discussions often reveal which research topics resonate most strongly with different stakeholder groups—insights that directly inform publication strategies and author selection.
When you see community physicians particularly engaged with real-world outcomes data while academic thought leaders focus on mechanism of action, that tells you something about how to target different publication venues.
Successful journal clubs naturally identify experts who should participate in deeper strategic engagements. The cardiologist who consistently provides nuanced feedback on competitive data might be exactly who you need on your next advisory board.
The community physician who asks the most practical clinical questions might be ideal for patient education content development.
For companies preparing for product launches, journal clubs provide an efficient way to educate your internal teams and key external stakeholders about the competitive landscape.
You can systematically work through relevant literature over several months, building comprehensive understanding of the therapeutic area and where your product will fit.
Here are a few pro-tips from our experience in running these engagements.
Load your content library with all discussion resources well in advance—at least one week before synchronous sessions. Participants need time to review materials and formulate their initial thoughts.
Create a discussion framework with clear questions and prompts. Don't just ask "What did you think of this study?" Instead: "Given the patient population in this trial, how does this compare to what you're seeing in your practice? What concerns would your patients have about this treatment approach?"
Good discussion prompts are specific, clinically relevant and open-ended. They should invite expertise rather than testing knowledge. You're not looking for right answers—you're looking for diverse clinical perspectives that illuminate strategic questions.
Use a full set of engagement tools (webcam video, slides, polls, chat and breakout rooms) to maintain interest and accommodate different participation styles. Interactive elements like questionnaires and real-time polls encourage deeper consideration of clinical materials. Some teams even incorporate brief quizzes that test comprehension of key studies, though this works better for educational programs than strategic advisory discussions.
When MSLs serve as moderators, we find they add particular value given their clinical backgrounds and expertise in stimulating meaningful scientific dialogues among peers. They tend to understand the clinical nuances well enough to ask probing follow-up questions and can connect insights from one discussion to broader strategic priorities.
For the opening session, plan an icebreaker that helps participants get to know each other professionally. This doesn't need to be elaborate. Sometimes just asking everyone to share their clinical focus area and one interesting case they've seen recently is enough to establish rapport.
The real strategic value often emerges in asynchronous discussions, where participants have time to formulate thoughtful responses and build on each other's ideas. This is where you get beyond surface-level reactions to clinical data and into nuanced analysis of implications for practice.
Keep discussion threads focused on specific questions. If you're discussing three different studies, create separate threads for each rather than having one sprawling conversation. This makes it easier for participants to engage selectively with topics most relevant to their expertise and makes the analysis of insights much cleaner later.
Have moderators respond to contributions with follow-up questions. When a cardiologist mentions seeing adherence challenges with a particular therapy, that's your opportunity to probe: "What specific barriers are you seeing? How are you addressing them? Have you found approaches that work better than others?"
Share supplementary materials as discussions evolve. If someone raises a question about real-world outcomes, that's the perfect moment to add a relevant observational study to the content library and direct participants to it.
Use analytics to monitor participation across activities. Look beyond simple counts of who logged in. The depth and clinical relevance of contributions matters more than participation frequency. One highly engaged cardiologist who posts three substantive comments is more valuable than ten participants who each contribute a generic acknowledgment.
AI-powered analysis can identify emerging themes across multiple engagements, sentiment shifts as new data becomes available and consensus forming around clinical questions. At ExtendMed, our platform's AI capabilities help medical affairs teams quickly synthesize insights from hours of discussions and identify patterns that might not be immediately obvious when you're reading through individual comments.
Create executive summaries that distill key insights for internal stakeholders. Medical directors and brand teams don't need to read through every discussion thread, but they do need to understand what you're learning and how it should inform strategy. Extract specific quotes that illustrate important perspectives, always with proper attribution and respect for what participants intended to be shared.
Virtual journal clubs are a strategic evolution in how medical affairs teams engage with clinical literature and expert communities. Success requires ongoing commitment to content quality, participant engagement and continuous improvement based on feedback and performance metrics.
ExtendMed's Health Expert Connect platform provides everything medical affairs teams need:
For over 20 years, we've helped life science teams—and their agency partners—solve these exact problems. We partner with pharmaceutical, biotech and healthcare companies to engage key opinion leaders and other stakeholders more efficiently than alternative solutions.
Unlike larger platforms that require annual commitments and six-figure budgets, we offer pilot programs and flexible contract terms that let you prove the model before scaling. No long-term commitments required—start small and grow with us. We're a technology partner, not a competitor to your agency relationships.
We provide the platform and technical expertise to systematize your processes around education and engagement, while your agency partners or internal teams bring the content expertise and therapeutic area knowledge.
Ready to transform how your medical affairs team engages with clinical research and expert communities? Schedule a demo to see Health Expert Connect in action.