It’s estimated that large pharmaceutical companies process between 500-700,000 adverse event cases each year and that the processing of these cases equates to around half of output from Pharmacovigilance teams.
An Adverse Event (AE) is “any untoward medical occurrence” in a patient receiving a medicine. These events include everything from so-called “non-serious” side effects such as nausea to more serious events such as reports of malignancy.
These cases often come from a variety of different systems/in different formats, and the data varies in quality, structure and composition. Pharmaceutical companies usually have a CRM in place to track input from various devices, but this is always reliant on humans (doctors, clinical specialists, etc.) entering the right amount of detail in cases. This information then needs to be evaluated by specialists every day to determine if a case had an adverse effect.
The adoption of automation can reduce human error, ensure standardisation of process and significantly reduce processing time. A combination of different automation technologies will provide a solution. A bot can collate information into a central ERP, and through use of parameters analyse keywords and related health factors such as age and underlying conditions to prioritise which cases are more likely to be classed as AE. By automating manual steps, a pharmaceutical company significantly lowers its compliance risk with the potential for significant savings.
In cases where we have implemented such solutions, typically the bot had around a 70% success rate. Still, as the bot processes more data, it can learn to identify these AE cases better and will become more and more accurate over time.
If you’d like to find out about how your organisation can leverage automation then be sure to get in touchContact us today.
