Advisory boards get used in very different ways. Some companies run them mainly to tick a compliance box, and the report exists to prove the meeting happened. Others try to write the report themselves, in-house, alongside everything else. Both, I’d gently suggest, are leaving value on the table.

A room full of experts has given you their genuine, unfiltered read on your drug. After the meeting, the report is the only thing that carries that value forward. Whether it turns into something useful comes down to three things.

Filter. Not everything said in the room matters equally. I keep what’s relevant to the sponsor’s drug, their target patient population, and the healthcare professionals who actually manage those patients, and I leave the rest out. A report isn’t a transcript of the day; it’s a distillation of what the sponsor needs from it.

Contextualize. The reader wasn’t in the room. A comment that was pointed and deliberate in the moment can read as throwaway on the page. Part of the job is restoring the context: why an expert took the position they did, what it responded to, how much weight it carried. Feedback without context is just quotes; feedback with context is insight.

Synthesize. A dozen experts rarely agree cleanly, and the sponsor doesn’t need a dozen separate opinions. They need the signal: where consensus formed, where it genuinely split and why, and what that means going forward. This is the hardest part, because it’s where you stop transcribing and start thinking, but it’s what makes a report worth reading.

None of this is complicated, but it’s easy to skip, which is why so many reports end up as records nobody reopens. Get these three right and the report stops being proof a meeting happened and becomes something a team can act on.

A company that finds someone who can do all three is a few steps ahead.

What separates a report you skim from one you act on?