-
Americas
-
Asia & Oceania
-
A-I
J-Z
EMEA Thought Leadership
Developing IQVIA’s positions on key trends in the pharma and life sciences industries, with a focus on EMEA.
Learn more -
Middle East & Africa
EMEA Thought Leadership
Developing IQVIA’s positions on key trends in the pharma and life sciences industries, with a focus on EMEA.
Learn more
Regions
-
Americas
-
Asia & Oceania
-
Europe
-
Middle East & Africa
-
Americas
-
Asia & Oceania
-
Europe
Europe
- Adriatic
- Belgium
- Bulgaria
- Czech Republic
- Deutschland
- España
- France
- Greece
- Hungary
- Ireland
- Israel
- Italia
EMEA Thought Leadership
Developing IQVIA’s positions on key trends in the pharma and life sciences industries, with a focus on EMEA.
Learn more -
Middle East & Africa
EMEA Thought Leadership
Developing IQVIA’s positions on key trends in the pharma and life sciences industries, with a focus on EMEA.
Learn more
SOLUTIONS
-
Research & Development
-
Real World Evidence
-
Commercialization
-
Safety & Regulatory Compliance
-
Technologies
LIFE SCIENCE SEGMENTS
HEALTHCARE SEGMENTS
- Information Partner Services
- Financial Institutions
- Public Health and Government
- Patient Associations
- Payers
- Providers
THERAPEUTIC AREAS
- Cardiovascular
- Cell and Gene Therapy
- Central Nervous System
- GI & Hepatology
- Infectious Diseases and Vaccines
- Oncology
- Pediatrics
- Rare Diseases
- View All
Impacting People's Lives
"We strive to help improve outcomes and create a healthier, more sustainable world for people everywhere.
LEARN MORE
Harness the power to transform clinical development
Reimagine clinical development by intelligently connecting data, technology, and analytics to optimize your trials. The result? Faster decision making and reduced risk so you can deliver life-changing therapies faster.
Research & Development OverviewResearch & Development Quick Links
Real World Evidence. Real Confidence. Real Results.
Generate and disseminate evidence that answers crucial clinical, regulatory and commercial questions, enabling you to drive smarter decisions and meet your stakeholder needs with confidence.
REAL WORLD EVIDENCE OVERVIEWReal World Evidence Quick Links
See markets more clearly. Opportunities more often.
Elevate commercial models with precision and speed using AI-driven analytics and technology that illuminate hidden insights in data.
COMMERCIALIZATION OVERVIEWCommercialization Quick Links
Service driven. Tech-enabled. Integrated compliance.
Orchestrate your success across the complete compliance lifecycle with best-in-class services and solutions for safety, regulatory, quality and medical information.
COMPLIANCE OVERVIEWSafety & Regulatory Compliance Quick Links
Intelligence that transforms life sciences end-to-end.
When your destination is a healthier world, making intelligent connections between data, technology, and services is your roadmap.
TECHNOLOGIES OVERVIEWTechnology Quick Links
CLINICAL PRODUCTS
COMMERCIAL PRODUCTS
COMPLIANCE, SAFETY, REG PRODUCTS
BLOGS, WHITE PAPERS & CASE STUDIES
Explore our library of insights, thought leadership, and the latest topics & trends in healthcare.
DISCOVER INSIGHTSTHE IQVIA INSTITUTE
An in-depth exploration of the global healthcare ecosystem with timely research, insightful analysis, and scientific expertise.
SEE LATEST REPORTS
FEATURED INNOVATIONS
-
IQVIA Connected Intelligence™
-
IQVIA Healthcare-grade AI™
-
Human Data Science Cloud
-
IQVIA Innovation Hub
-
Decentralized Trials
-
Patient Experience powered by Apple
WHO WE ARE
- Our Story
- Our Impact
- Commitment to Public Health
- Code of Conduct
- Environmental Social Governance
- Privacy
- Executive Team
NEWS & RESOURCES
Unlock your potential to drive healthcare forward
By making intelligent connections between your needs, our capabilities, and the healthcare ecosystem, we can help you be more agile, accelerate results, and improve patient outcomes.
LEARN MORE
IQVIA AI is Healthcare-grade AI
Building on a rich history of developing AI for healthcare, IQVIA AI connects the right data, technology, and expertise to address the unique needs of healthcare. It's what we call Healthcare-grade AI.
LEARN MORE
Your healthcare data deserves more than just a cloud.
The IQVIA Human Data Science Cloud is our unique capability designed to enable healthcare-grade analytics, tools, and data management solutions to deliver fit-for-purpose global data at scale.
LEARN MORE
Innovations make an impact when bold ideas meet powerful partnerships
The IQVIA Innovation Hub connects start-ups with the extensive IQVIA network of assets, resources, clients, and partners. Together, we can help lead the future of healthcare with the extensive IQVIA network of assets, resources, clients, and partners.
LEARN MORE
Proven, faster DCT solutions
IQVIA Decentralized Trials deliver purpose-built clinical services and technologies that engage the right patients wherever they are. Our hybrid and fully virtual solutions have been used more than any others.
LEARN MORE
IQVIA Patient Experience Solutions powered by Apple
Empowering patients to personalize their healthcare and connecting them to caregivers has the potential to change the care delivery paradigm. IQVIA and Apple are collaborating to bring this exciting future of personalized care directly to devices patients already have and use.
LEARN MOREWORKING AT IQVIA
Our mission is to accelerate innovation for a healthier world. Together, we can solve customer challenges and improve patient lives.
LEARN MORELIFE AT IQVIA
Careers, culture and everything in between. Find out what’s going on right here, right now.
LEARN MORE
WE’RE HIRING
"Improving human health requires brave thinkers who are willing to explore new ideas and build on successes. Unleash your potential with us.
SEARCH JOBSBlog
Cut through the noise with NLP: Empower medical affairs to deliver richer insights
Apr 29, 2021
Dramatic changes in the healthcare environment have been re-defining expectations for Medical Affairs. The role traditionally involves engaging key stakeholders, driving the development of effective and market-responsive evidence strategies, and communicating products in areas such as speciality care. But therapies are increasingly complex, and regulations now call for a clear line between medical and commercial functions.
What does this mean on a day-to-day basis for our Medical Affairs teams? In short, they’ve got to meet an exceedingly high bar. Medical Affairs is expected to operate at strategic and technical levels from evidence generation to education. They have to capture insight and evidence from the near-infinite data that exists out there in unstructured text and communicate it meaningfully across multiple stakeholders at various levels. And they have to do it all without increasing cost to the business.
The good news for Medical Affairs is that while demands of the role have expanded, so has technology. At IQVIA, our award-winning natural language processing (NLP) capabilities are leading the market, and we’ve developed a technology that complements Medical Affairs (and many other roles) in cutting through vast and noisy textual information sources to quickly capture pertinent data points that support good advice, decisions and communications.
Using the IQVIA NLP Insights Hub platform, Medical Affairs teams can search and analyze siloed textual information from across a wide range of information sources — including internal SharePoint folders, external publication platforms, social media, news, and clinical trials databases — to get the answers they need.
NLP is a game-changer for Medical Affairs
A recent McKinsey & Company report explores this evolution of Medical Affairs, positing that the role of data interpretation has become so elevated that it now serves as a third strategic pillar of the pharmaceutical enterprise, alongside R&D and Commercial. As the report points out, 90 percent of the total data in existence today was generated in just the past two years, and it is only continuing to increase exponentially. As the function charged with interpreting and giving context to this flood of information, Medical Affairs needs tools to rapidly extract unstructured data across varied sources and produce a rich, visual interpretation. If that sounds like a complicated process, don’t worry — with the IQVIA NLP Insights Hub, it’s not.
Real-world applications of NLP Insights Hub really showcase the power and utility of these solutions, so I will share a few with you here.
-
Conducting post-market surveillance
In one case study, we helped a Safety team carry out post-market surveillance that would ultimately go to Medical Affairs to support better product understanding. The team needed to systematically analyze their call center feed in order to get to the root causes of reported side effects for certain products. We used the NLP Insights Hub to tag the call center feeds for metadata, exploring things like demographics, reason for calling, and more. Using NLP, we were able to quickly understand not only trends and topics for brands, but also of drug/disease relationships. In the end, we were able to categorize or tag over 70 percent of the reported side effects as being related to underlying pre-existing conditions and not true adverse drug reactions.
-
Enriching structured data
In addition to generating insights on trends, we can also use NLP to enrich structured data sources by mining unstructured information fields for deeper analysis. We do that by exploring the time series of events like field activity and then overlaying it with a topic analysis in order to understand if there are certain topics that are driving different outcomes, behaviors, or activities. As a result, Medical Affairs can be more responsive and quickly adapt to changing needs, redirecting resources towards areas that need them most. This application of NLP also helps Medical Affairs teams give data-driven evidence for changes in feedback, medical requests, in time spent talking to doctors, and more.
-
Automating extraction from notes
The final example I’ll share is an instance where we used NLP to capture data across notes submitted by global site event investigators to electronic document capture, which we then ran across multi-lingual NLP algorithms to look for patients at risk of high levels of metabolic imbalance. Through this process we automated extraction of features from more than 10 countries and effectively captured and normalized reasons for treatment decisions. The result was granular, real world insight into treatment patterns that would otherwise not have been available.
If your Medical Affairs teams are overburdened by increasing data and demands, I invite you to explore the NLP Insights Hub and our broader suite of NLP solutions to help them do their job more effectively. You no longer need to be an NLP expert to tap into large sets of textural, unstructured data. On the contrary, rapid attainment of these insights is now expected as the new normal for Medical Affairs - and the NLP Insights Hub is a valuable, trusted solution to that end. Reach out to us to request a demo.