Successful implementation of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in the Individual Case Safety Report (ICSR) management process leads to enhanced ability to protect patients

FEATURED SOLUTION: INTERACTIVE (ICSR) & AUTOMATION TECHNOLOGIES TOOL (IATT)

“Through the data presented within TransCelerate’s ‘Interactive ICSR & Automation Technologies Tool’ (IATT), our member company was able to adjust our short-term automation strategy for pharmacovigilance. By examining the IATT’s data for the maturity of automation implementation using robotic process automation (RPA), we had a strong case for utilizing RPA to achieve quick wins on process improvement across several steps in the ICSR process.

We implemented RPA into the ICSR intake process late last year (2020). A bot took over the duplicate check and import of E2B cases received from a business partner. This implementation of RPA automation led to a reduction in effort to manage cases and subsequently reduced cost. These improvements were fully realized with a relatively low investment of programming and validation, but at the same time, increasing the efficiency in these workflow activities.

The use of RPA in the ICSR Management process supports managing repetitive tasks and can be combined with other functionality such as optical character recognition (OCR). We added OCR into production with a second bot supporting another business case within the ICSR intake process.

Our two use cases show a savings of approximately 5-7 minutes processing time per ICSR, and the bots completely replace the human interaction for those activities. The free capacity (time and effort) in the case intake could be re-distributed with our CRO partner to work on ICSR activities with higher value and greater complexity. Overall, our use of RPA has dramatically improved our capability to process safety data faster and enable our people more time to examine more complex safety data, which will enhance our ability to protect patients.”

[Sponsor Company]