The economic cost of medical error in the US was estimated to be almost USD 1 trillion per year. Additional indirect costs include loss of productivity and reduced trust in healthcare system. Improving patient safety in US Medicare hospitals is estimated to have saved around US$ 28 billion between 2010 and 2015.
The outbreak of COVID-19 has provided an impetus to the ongoing clinical trials in search of new improved and more effective drugs. These factors result in a growing incidence of adverse events and drug toxicity. Pharmaceutical firms need to streamline the costs of safe drug for patient safety, increase process efficiency, decrease time-to-value for new drug launches, and smartly monitor adverse events during post-market surveillance. Due to the unparalleled huge volume of data for such events received in the digital-first age and increasing regulatory reporting requirements, it becomes imperative to rethink the current pharmacovigilance processes and adopt a digital-first approach by leveraging pharmacovigilance automation and advanced analytics solutions.
A digital-first approach and partnership with next-generation technology solutions providers could help the pharmaceutical companies to rethink the pharmacovigilance case processing value chain and re-engineer the manual processes eliminating redundancies. Leveraging intelligent automation and analytics that leverage Artificial Intelligence technologies such as intelligent OCR (Optical Character Recognition), Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Natural Language Generation (NLG) throughout the traditional case processing value chain could help in the early detection of potential adverse events.
