On June 5th, 2019, ArisGlobal held a webinar focused on the “Key Use Cases of Automation in Pharmacovigilance.” During that event, 84% of attendees indicated a significant increase in their case volumes over the last five years. Although the stage of planned or currently adopted levels of automation varied, attendees had some thoughts to share about where automation should be prioritized once adopted.

In our June 2019 webinar “Key Use Cases of Automation in Pharmacovigilance”, Dr. Tims Thimmanna and Dr. Swati Nayak presented how automation addresses specific areas of PV-related changes – case intake, data entry, dictionary coding, duplicate check, follow up, narrative generation, causality assessment and submission. During the webinar, we asked respondents where their automation priorities were across the case processing workflow. The results were highly distributed, which reaffirmed our belief that automation can have a positive effect in many different places, as we’ve seen from working on automation use cases directly with some of the industry’s largest organizations.

Indeed, robotic process automation (RPA) can be leveraged to automate manual, repetitive steps and is best used in cases where human intervention and decision-making is not typically required, whereas artificial Intelligence (AI) and its sub-categories can mimic human decision-making to read, interpret, and analyze source documents and determine the appropriate actions required. For example, natural language processing systems can be used in literature surveillance and review of medical literature. Image recognition systems can be useful in medical review and assessment of laboratory reports. Machine learning can be used in performing logical steps of case processing.

Overall, these cognitive computing tools can augment the performance of a company’s pharmacovigilance staff, reduce the volume of manual and repetitive tasks and allow a PV team to focus on more value-add activities.

Which areas of PV are you most likely to automate?

DUPLICATE CHECKCASE INTAKENARRATIVE GENERATIONQUALITY CHECKFOLLOW-UP PROCESSINGEND-TO-END CASE PROCESSING

(This is Blog Three in a Series of Three Blogs from the Key Use Cases of Automation in Pharmacovigilance Webinar.)

To learn more about the insights shared and questions asked and answered, view the on-demand Key Use Cases of Automation in Pharmacovigilance webinar and read our white paper “Cognitive Computing in Pharmacovigilance: Revamping Drug Safety Using an Advanced Computing System.”

We also invite you to register to attend a complimentary lunch-and-learn workshop on July 18th in Cambridge, MA. “Building an Automation-Centric Approach to Drug Safety.” During the two-hour workshop, Edwin Raj, Senior Director and Head of Safety Operations, AMAG Pharmaceuticals will share how they have replaced their legacy Argus system and are moving away from repetitive manual tasks by automating patient data collection from any source, which reduces errors and increases cost savings. Space is limited, so register soon if you are available to attend.

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