Industry Insight

Rajul Jain from ProPharma considers how AI can be used in patient support, especially considering how it can be used to streamline operations and supplement human expertise

Rajul Jain (RJ): Most industries now provide customers with 24/7 access and support to their products and services. With this trend, patients, their caregivers and healthcare professionals naturally expect that the pharmaceutical industry’s patient support should be available 24/7 as well. All the information can be provided on the websites as with most industries, but medical information is complex and requires a high level of reading proficiency and scientific knowledge. To truly support patients with enhanced quality of care, a medium that can disseminate understandable and engaging information is necessary. This is where artificial intelligence (AI) plays a crucial role with its natural language processing capabilities. AI can analyse a patient’s intent, conversational style, sentiment and many details during the interaction to help them find the answers in a patient-specific way. AI transcription, translation and voice generation enable us to provide 24/7 services to patients in both written and verbal interactions.

AI’s role in 24/7 patient support is tremendously helpful to operations, too. It reduces the need for out-of-hour or extended shift assignments, which gives a team a better work-life balance. Although it is the best practice to have native speaker specialists interact with patients, AI translations enable patient support in more languages and countries, especially in small markets in the past that did not have many opportunities. AI translations also allow non-native speaker specialists to assist other languages or regions when there is an unexpected increase in support volumes. AI handling common and simpler inquiries alleviates our specialists from repetitive tasks and engages in more complex information handling and personal developments. AI’s data also provides us with insights that could improve ways of working and knowledge sharing to further enhance patient support. It is important to strengthen data privacy and security, correct biases and errors and actively engage in the safe use and regulations of AI to continuously monitor and improve for AI use in patient support.

RJ: In every level of therapy development and patient care, subject matter experts must go through vast amounts of scientific and clinical documents for their specific tasks such as designing studies or responding to inquiries. Specialised fields, like oncology and rare diseases, have very complex mechanisms for how drugs work and how to interpret clinical data from studies and publications. AI, which can process massive amounts of data quickly, can immensely help subject matter experts or specialists by finding the needed information in a short time frame to perform their work. AI can also support increasing the quality of the deliverables and operational excellence. For example, in medical information or patient support contact centres, AI can transcribe real-time conversations for many purposes. The transcription can be used as a source of documentation, capturing the details of patient inquiries and responses that can be further used for quality control and analytics for intents, sentiments and insights. While it’s not possible to listen to all calls in the contact centres, transcription enables the ability to ‘see’ all calls, increasing the pool of data for review. In the contact centres, the specialists use keywords to search for documents that could support patients, and most databases are designed for exact spelling matches. With AI power, the specialist does not have to go back and forth on different keywords, because AI can recognise misspelling and synonyms to efficiently search all relevant documents at once. AI can also generate a summary or draft to respond to patient support inquiries for specialists to review and edit rather than creating a response from blank.

Ultimately, specialists and subject matter experts who are highly experienced in therapeutic areas and products are relied upon to determine if the information is accurate and complete to convey to patients and healthcare professionals. They will continuously work with AI to ensure that AI is compliant with standards for unbiased scientific exchange.

RJ: AI has been a crucial component of operational and business roadmaps for years. AI helps teams to be more efficient, productive and creative to better serve patients. The goal is to deliver information faster by analysing customers’ emotions and intents in real time using private data-secured language AI models.

Implementation of AI tech in the quality control process, especially catching a possible missed adverse event or product quality events, would give us crucial benefits in compliance with patients’ well-being and regulatory requirements. Leveraging AI content creation ability assists specialists and medical writers in drafting study documents or responding to complicated medical inquiries. What could have taken hours for writers to draft, are now expected to be initiated by AI in minutes for writers to review and complete. As mentioned earlier, AI’s data also provides insights that could improve working and knowledge sharing to further enhance patient support.

RJ: The use of AI enables the pharmaceutical industry to offer new channels for patient support that were not available in the past such as voice or written chatbots that are available 24/7. AI translation is another breakthrough, which has opened opportunities to support more countries and languages. While patient support centres may have a team of native speakers, having AI transcription and translation technologies enable companies to connect with more patients worldwide to support their healthcare needs.

Human interaction is a more powerful and meaningful way to connect with patients; therefore, it is important to place a higher focus on leveraging AI internally to enhance communications with patients. Transcription can ensure that critical information is captured while minimising the risk of misinterpretation or omission.

AI-enabled search engines or writing tools can shortenthedeliveryofdocumentsandresponsesthatare important for patient care. AI-assisted quality control processes and analytics give insights into the patient’s needs that would enhance patient care efforts.

RJ: AI is changing most industries, and it will become a prevalent part of patient support, such as 24/7 virtual assistants that can drive patient-centric conversations. In the pharmaceutical industry, the drug or device development life cycle is complex, and the industry has many areas that could use AI. AI use within each area will be unique to meet its core function. Medical information departments and patient support contact centres can leverage AI’s ability to efficiently find information for specialists, helping patients and healthcare professionals make therapy decisions. Intent and sentiment analysis can also be used to assess how the team can better assist patients, with more personalised care plans that could improve the safety and health outcomes of patients.

Innovation in the pharmaceutical industry is an ongoing effort, but AI will introduce a new level of capability in analysis and generation. Ultimately, AI will elevate the quality of patient care and new standards for excellence in patient support.