Designing better advisory boards: The power of data-driven KOL selection

There’s a quiet truth in medical affairs that most people know but rarely say aloud: advisory boards often look the same, year after year.

It’s no surprise. With limited time and high stakes, teams often default to familiar names - the KOLs who’ve always been on the list. They’re experienced, available, and well-known. But over time, this familiarity can become a limitation. If the same voices are consulted again and again, you risk missing emerging insights, underrepresented expertise, and the chance to align your science with where the field is actually going.

At VISFO, we believe there’s a better way to build the room.

A smarter way to build the room

We’ve spent years refining how we work with scientific publication data. Our proprietary disambiguation technology lets us clean and structure the literature in a way that gives an accurate view of who’s really shaping the science. Then we go a step further.

We assign dynamic impact scores to every author and publication, not just globally, but within the specific topics and subtopics our clients care about. That means if you want to identify the top voices on EGFR resistance mutations in NSCLC, not just lung cancer generally, we can show you exactly who’s publishing, how recently, with whom, and with what influence.

This allows teams to build advisory boards with intention. Not based on who’s already on the call list, but on who can bring the most value to the specific challenge in front of you.

Building balance by design

A truly impactful advisory board brings together multiple types of expertise. With our system, you can balance your selection across:

• Established KOLs driving guidelines
• Rising stars with cutting-edge research
• Digital opinion leaders shaping online dialogue
• Market Access experts who can frame value
• Treating clinicians offering real-world insights

For example, when working with a client preparing for a launch in dermatology, our data showed that newer voices in the field were driving conversations around patient-reported outcomes, a key point of differentiation for the asset. By including these individuals, the team gained insights they wouldn’t have heard from a more traditional board.

This approach goes beyond just improving diversity. It improves the quality of discussion and the relevance of the output.

Interactive design, not a one-off list

Most KOL mapping ends with a static spreadsheet. Our approach doesn’t.

All stakeholder mapping happens inside HelixAI, our collaborative platform. Clients can interact with filters, apply their own strategic lens, and drill into each expert’s activity: from recent publications and congress sessions to clinical trial involvement and network connections.

Need to find a KOL who’s recently published on immune checkpoint inhibitors in Asia? Or someone active in both publications and reimbursement discussions? You can do that. And as your needs change, so can your board.

You can also build lists aligned to specific strategic questions. For instance, “Who are the top experts on long COVID-related fatigue with a payer-aligned communication track record?” That question isn’t too niche for HelixAI. It’s exactly what it was designed to support.

The long-term advantage

KOL mapping isn’t just for one meeting. Done right, it becomes a strategic capability.

With our live data feeds and dynamic scoring, your advisory board isn’t just well-designed today, it stays relevant over time. You can track how each expert’s influence evolves, see when new voices enter the field, and respond quickly to new publication activity.

And because everything lives in the same collaborative space, future engagements, speaker nominations, and strategic planning all benefit from the same foundation.

This also brings transparency. Every choice can be backed up with data. Every list can be traced to evidence. And every board becomes part of a broader, evolving engagement strategy.

Design with intent

It’s easy to find names. What’s harder, and more valuable,  is finding the right names for the job at hand.

When you build an advisory board with VISFO, you’re not just booking a meeting. You’re making a strategic decision about whose voices will shape the direction of your asset, your communications, and your future planning.

With a science-first foundation, live mapping, and a collaborative platform, we give you the tools to build better boards. And the results speak for themselves.

If you’d like to see how this looks in action, we’d love to show you around.