Finding real influence in market access means looking past publication counts to ask: who truly shapes payer decisions, connects networks, and carries weight in the right regions?
Over 30 years' of experience in the pharmaceutical industry, specializing in commercialization.
When we first started building Knowledgeable, we kept coming back to a single, deceptively simple question: “Who said that?” We weren’t trying to be difficult. We just knew that, in market access, credibility is everything. The same insight can land completely differently depending on the source. You can’t make a defensible recommendation unless you understand both the evidence and its context.
It’s surprisingly easy to get this wrong. You find a paper, it looks relevant, the name on the author list is vaguely familiar. But if you trace it back and realize that person has never actually contributed to national assessments or payer strategy, the insight starts to fall apart.
That’s why we’ve invested so heavily in author disambiguation, network analysis, and stakeholder mapping. And no one brings this to life better than Louise Street-Docherty, our VP of Market access. In this Q&A, Louise explains what it really takes to build stakeholder maps that reflect genuine influence and help you move faster, with confidence, through complex projects.
Louise Street-Docherty:
Volume isn’t the same as influence. A KOL, to me, is someone who shapes thinking across payer, clinical, and policy spaces. I look for signs that their work is cited in national guidelines, that they lead trials rather than sit on the author list, and that they are known by their peers as a voice that matters.
You also need to look at how their network functions. Are they a bridge between institutions? Are they active across therapy areas that influence pricing and reimbursement conversations? That gives a clearer picture than just counting publications.
Influence shows up in patterns. For example, if a clinician is routinely invited to sit on HTA advisory panels or contributes to payer-focused working groups, that’s a good sign. They might not publish much, but they’re often present in the decision-making room.
I also watch for cross-sector involvement. If someone works at the intersection of clinical research, public health, and patient advocacy, they often carry more influence than someone deeply specialized in a narrow topic. These are the people who shape access narratives.
This is one of the most overlooked aspects of KOL mapping. A well-known academic might have real sway in Germany but almost none in Spain. You have to build filters that let you account for regional systems, payer structures, and how decisions are actually made on the ground.
At Knowledgeable, we always allow filtering by geography, institution, and publication relevance. That means you can start with the right scope, whether you’re preparing a submission in France or supporting a value story in Sweden.
It’s a bigger problem than most realize. You see “J. Kim” or “M. Rossi” and assume it’s the same person across five papers, but that’s often not true. Without clean disambiguation, you can’t trust the data.
This is where AI plays a huge role. Our system looks at co-authors, affiliations, topics, and publication patterns to distinguish individuals accurately. It means teams aren’t guessing or manually cross-checking every citation, which saves time and reduces errors.
We’ve built the system around three core principles: traceability, context, and usability. You don’t just see a name, you see their full body of work, who they collaborate with, and where they sit in the scientific and strategic landscape.
For example, if you’re entering a new disease area and want to understand payer-relevant influence in southern Europe, Knowledgeable helps you isolate not just authors, but the right authors. It connects the dots between publications, events, and networks so you can build a map you can defend, present, and act on.
We talk a lot about evidence, but not enough about context. Knowing who shapes a conversation is just as important as knowing what they said. It’s easy to overlook. It’s even easier to get wrong. But when you get it right, everything moves faster, your recommendations are more credible, your strategies more targeted, and your team more aligned.
This is why we built Knowledgeable the way we did. You shouldn’t need a team of specialists to answer basic questions like “Who’s actually influencing this decision?” Our platform puts that power in every consultant’s hands. And thanks to experts like Louise, it reflects how strategic thinking really happens in market access.
If that sounds useful to your team, we’d love to show you more.
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