SO WHY AREN’T PHARMA COMPANIES LEVERAGING THE POWER OF THESE AI-DRIVEN PLATFORMS?
The rising cost of pharmacovigilance (PV) tasks has been an ongoing challenge for the pharma industry. Many companies have chosen to shift these tasks to overseas vendors to take advantage of cheaper labor without compromising quality. However, as the benefits of outsourcing have increased so too have the costs, forcing companies to shift their operations from country to country in an ongoing quest to find cost-effective labor pools. We’re starting to see this model hit its limits as companies can no longer find enough workers at desired cost levels in these countries to handle the PV workload.
At the same time, the volume of PV cases has steadily risen as regulators push doctors to report more incidences, and patients share their adverse event stories via chat groups, registries and social media. Regulators and industry bodies are also seeking more in-depth trend data that looks beyond individual cases to identify signal trend patterns across treatment categories and patient populations. They want to see companies increasing their use of AE reports to gain greater insights about safety and support future decision making.
The combined pressures of cost, volume and heightened demand for analytics are forcing the industry to embrace advanced technology to support their PV activities.
When pharma companies implement advanced PV platforms, they can transform their entire pharmacovigilance workflow. The benefits start with automated reporting, which reduces the time and labor costs, while speeding the delivery of information.
These platforms can also generate more value from PV tasks than was previously possible. Platforms featuring intelligent automation and predictive analytics capture and translate adverse event data from multiple channels and conduct deep analyses of integrated data sets to identify meaningful safety trends. This helps PV professionals better predict and prevent future adverse events and better understand safety issues and related opportunities across the treatment landscape. These added benefits result in reduced errors related to manual data entry and strict patient data privacy controls, minimizing pharmacovigilance-related risks to the business.
The current generation of pharmacovigilance platforms offers a variety of automation features and can have automation added including:
This is where many companies stumble. Whether they opt to build a technology platform in-house, or work with a vendor to replace their formerly manual and/or outsourced pharmacovigilance tasks, these projects face a high a risk of failure for a number of reasons.
Companies can avoid these risks by working with industry experts who can integrate the best of data analytics tools with the human science expertise to make meaningful data-driven decisions about product safety.
These technologies are already transforming the way pharmacovigilance tasks are performed, and every generation of tools will get smarter and more adaptive, extending applications to solve new pharma challenges in different ways. However, investments in these platforms won’t deliver the desired value until buyers understand their full potential, and partner with experts who have both the deep scientific and technological expertise to deliver innovative solutions that optimize pharmacovigilance activities for better, faster results.
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