Sci-Max Global MI-Tech Forum X Papercurve
Every year, SciMax Global holds a conference to provide insights on significant innovative trends and emerging technologies in medical communications and medical information management.
On April 5th, Ryan Whitham, our CEO had the opportunity to speak at SciMax’s 8th virtual summit. The focus of this year’s conference was “Getting Back to Basics.” To see a recording of the talk, you can view it free on the Scimax Website.
With over 120 attendees from more than 50 different pharmaceutical companies, the event was a great success. It featured a wide range of innovative discussions and perspectives on the pharma industry. Presentation topics included Interactive Content, Artificial Intelligence, Component Authoring and Efficiencies in Medical Communication.
For those who missed it or were unable to attend, below is a recap of Ryan’s presentation.
Papercurve will be attending conferences in the upcoming months such as MaRs Impact Health and Collision. We hope to see you there!
Using AI and Automation for End-to-End Content Compliance
We founded the company with the goal of disrupting the status quo in enterprise software, especially in life sciences. Coming from a financial services and direct-to-consumer background, seeing the usability of many of the enterprise applications out there was shocking to me. It’s no wonder so many enterprise software initiatives fail because of poor adoption. AI and emerging technologies were not progressing quickly enough. The time it took to get these initiatives off the ground, which included the employment of third-party IT firms, and the expense of some of these AI systems was not a compelling ROI use case. Papercurve arrived with a mission to make a difference.
Our Approach to AI
Read and Understand Life Sciences Documents
AI is first and foremost utilized to read and understand life science documents. Natural Language Processing analyzes a document and grasps what it is attempting to convey, as well as make connections and build relationships. We're teaching AI to perform tasks that would be rather time consuming.
Capture Review Team Expertise
Second, it's used to capture the expertise of your review team. AI gathers important data and makes it easily accessible to new employees who join the company and are unaware of the decisions made prior to their arrival.
Private Data
Thirdly, all data is kept private within our system. There are many big tech solutions out there that collect data and users have no idea where it goes. At Papercurve, we recognise that your information is private and it will not be shared outside of our company. People have told us that data privacy is a major concern for them, and that they value the privacy of their personal information. This is the value that we deliver.
Strong ROI Use Case
Finally, a strong business case with a positive return on investment. We've seen lots of three million dollar solutions to one million dollar problems. There are cost-effective and ROI-proven methods for accomplishing this. It must be a business case, not just buzzwords.
Culture of Compliant Content:
Patient safety concerns and regulatory monitoring are a big concern when creating content in pharma and life science. Everything that is written is subject to several checks and balances. The content must be reviewed and approved by a significant number of people, and it must include the necessary supporting evidence. However, there are numerous pain points to this process. The writing and creation of new content is slow since there are a numerous amount of people involved, which can also lead to confusion. Lastly, once that content is sent out, you've lost control of it. This does not have to be the case.
Solutions:
AI + Automation: Reduce Manual Processes and Increase Productivity
Content Lifecycle
Medical information, commercial, promotional and medical affairs all follow the same lifecycle. The content is written into a draft that is then sent to MLR or PRC reviews for feedback and revisions before being approved. Once it is approved, it will be released, and it must be maintained afterwards, in case it needs to be updated or has an expiry date.
We will focus on two points: Feedback & Collaboration and Releasing Content.
Pain Points with Collaboration
- There is no single source of the truth to maintain content consistency. What or who decides the right way of saying something in promotional content?
- Unintentionally, reviewers make comments on content that have already been approved. They suggest that a certain phrase should be altered but it’s already been done in other content, resulting in wasted cycles.
- It takes time to get new hires on the same page and gain knowledge of everything that's happened before they arrived with past projects and past decisions. When we looked at our data for 2021, we saw that our entire user base had a 25% turnover rate –that 1 in every 4 employees had left the company and been replaced in just one year.
Our Solution:
Improving Feedback Using Automation & AI
- Store a database of all approved product claims. Phrases that you would want to be reused.
- Use machine learning to identify previously approved product claims. It would be difficult and time consuming to look for these manually, especially if you are unaware that they exist.
Product Claims
An approved phrase, sentence, paragraph or page that describes an aspect or a drug or product. Something you'll want to apply in a variety of places across your material. Use cases include promotional, fair balance or part of a response.
Example: A commenter is prompted that the highlighted text is similar to an approved product claim. The AI will prevent the commenter from derailing the collaboration process by suggesting that a modification needs to be made when it has already been approved. Here's what we think you are trying to say, in approved language, the AI will tell the reviewer.
NLP reads the text, understands it, and finds similar connections. It's a lot different than an exact text match, which does not work that way. If you make a similar product claim with completely different wording, it will be found. Whereas with exact text match, it has to be the same wording.
Pain Points with Releasing Content
- There are no analytics from emailed content, and it is quite one-directional.
- After the content has been sent, there is no way to change or retract it. There's nothing you can do if there's an issue or a modification that needs to be done.
- There is no way to make it expire or disappear after a certain period of time.
Our Solution:
Share Link
Sharing content with a unique link. This has been very beneficial to our customers and our platform. When they open up that link, they get a clean, unbranded screen where they can view the content.
Benefits of Share Link: You can observe if they viewed or downloaded the content, and how long they viewed the content for. You can also update the content to a new version and disable access once a certain amount of time has passed. The most recent version is always displayed when an HCP or client hits the link.
Papercurve is dedicated to continuing to challenge the status quo in life sciences and offering revolutionary solutions to eliminate time-consuming processes from the content lifecycle.
If you’re interested in learning more, check out our Share Link and Product Claims features.
