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Real-World Experiences of Mobile Apps within Pharmacovigilance and Medical Information

According to Statcounter, a web traffic analysis tool, in September 51.3% of web pages were loaded from mobile devices with only 48.7% being accessed from a desktop. If you dig a little deeper, you can see a variety of stats that also tell you that the world is increasingly connected to the internet. In fact, it is estimated that 3.9 billion people now have internet access2. That is a lot of people and a lot of mobile devices. So with this overwhelming evidence that mobile solutions are a huge part of our lives, it is surprising that there are so few options in support of both medical information and pharmacovigilance (PV) activities. Of course, there are some choices for PV, but nothing to date that combines these two functions within a single, mobile app that can be provided to sales representatives, healthcare professionals (HCPs) and even patients. That is until recently. ArisGlobal is a life sciences software solutions provider that has pioneered the advancement of pharmacovigilance and medical information. We have been at the forefront of regulatory compliance and pride ourselves on our deep expertise and technological innovation. In 2015 we released our first mobile app, LifeSphere Mobile MATM, to support the collection of product complaints, adverse events and medical information requests from field-based teams, and we are now seeing increased adoption rates of this technology. Our clients are finding interesting ways of using this technology to drive even greater value: improving compliance, efficiency and productivity. A few examples are listed below.

Medical Enquiries

Our most recent customer is providing its mobile solution to its salesforce to track medical information requests in the field. They are also planning to deploy a desktop portal for healthcare professionals to submit enquiries directly, but their primary business case is to allow their salesforce to log enquiries from the field and at congresses. Using off-line capabilities for when there is no internet access, sales teams will use mobiles or tablets to track medical information requests and send them directly to the medical information teams for fulfilment. Interestingly, they are initially keeping the safety and medical information apps separate, but may decide to merge these in the future.

Adverse Event Reporting

Another recent customer decided to use the app to enable their sales team to collect and report adverse events. They will use the app to collect data from the field and use our adverse event triage module (LifeSphere Intake and Triage™) to assess inbound cases and then integrate with their back-end PV system.

Self-Service Portal

In a final example of the versatility offered with LifeSphere Mobile MATM, we have engaged with a top 20 pharmaceutical company to provide a self-service medical information portal. The company will publish approved content such as package inserts and prescribing information and then provide access to HCPs. Access will be restricted, and the authorised HCP will be able to select the product of interest and submit their question. Using basic tokenisation, the system will present to the HCP the top five matching documents. If too many documents are presented, the HCP will be asked to refine the search criteria or submit a medical enquiry. Of course, this opens the discussion to artificial intelligence and the use of natural language processing to assist with content searching – an area where ArisGlobal is also investing significantly…but that is a subject for another day. More information on medical affairs and mobility can be found in our recent two-part blog series, “Mobility and Medical Affairs: Enabling Communication and Collaboration across the Stakeholder Spectrum.” 1 http://gs.statcounter.com/press/mobile-and-tablet-internetusage-exceeds-desktop-for-first-time-worldwide 2 http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm