For Medical Information (MI) departments, the most important pillar of driving a positive customer experience is content, namely how the company uses information to accurately and concisely provide responses to their customers. MI departments used to be able to rely on delivering this information via phone, but in the past decade, the channels through which information is delivered have evolved. To provide a meaningful experience, companies must now look at how they can provide information via websites, chatbots, apps, emails, videos, and more. The abundance of new channels and the pressure to provide quality information faster is a challenge for any company. When you add on the requirement to do this in other languages, paired with budgetary restrictions in our current climate, this can be even more daunting.

Luckily, many efficiencies can be gained by leveraging technology and AI to manage the full content lifecycle—from creation to translation to multichannel distribution. Here are some ways to bring efficiencies to your MI content processes immediately while ensuring better and faster content delivery for customers:

Start at the root—where the content is created: A key way to author content that can be recycled across multiple channels is leveraging a component content management solution (CCMS). A CCMS is a technology that enables companies to centrally store content (including graphics and multimedia files) at a component level. Some of the advantages include:

• Content reuse: Authors can recycle previously authored content. Today, MI departments are releasing content in an increasing number of ways. For instance, the content that lives in standard response letters (SRLs) can be used as FAQs on websites, responses delivered via chatbot, etc. A CCMS allows the same content to be used via any channel. In addition to driving overall consistency, it helps to reduce authoring time by an average of 71%.
• Multichannel publishing: A CCMS allows for the content to be published in any channel—from Microsoft Word documents to mobile apps to websites. By automating the updates and assembly in correct output formats, companies reduce production cycle time by over half. It also allows enables companies to publish in more channels so customers can access information in the most convenient way for them.
• Reduce cost and time to translate: Just as the English content can be recycled easily, the translated content can be as well. By having consistent source content, companies can take advantage of translation memory, reducing costs by an average of 36% while accelerating launch times. This means that customers can get access to important information faster.

Choose medical writers who have expertise leveraging technology: With the world shifting heavily to using AI/technology to automate processes, authors or medical writers need to adapt as well. In addition to the ability to use a CCMS as outlined above, medical writers are employing AI to do tasks that used to be completed manually, such as literature searches, which are a key step in the development of medical information documents like SRLs and FAQs. New technologies exist that allow writers to search hundreds of journals for specific search strings and phrases found in literature. These literature searches are then used to update medical information that reaches stakeholders, HCPs, regulatory authorities, etc.

Another large challenge for organizations is managing the review of documents if multiple parties are involved in sign-off. Using a technology for collaborative document management to set deadlines and assign tasks and leave comments, feedback, and edits throughout the document allows writers to more seamlessly collate information for the final draft. 

Automate the process of translation: Leveraging a translation management system (enables companies to automate the process of requesting, tracking, and reviewing multilingual content. By removing the manual effort of managing the translation process, as well as streamlining and providing an auditable medical, legal, and regulatory review, companies are able to launch global content over 25% faster. Similar to a CCMS, companies should look for a translation management system that  has the capability to reuse translated content to drive a significant reduction in translation costs while ensuring consistency. Recently, one large pharma achieved over $225K in savings in Year 1 from moving their global medical information requirements to TransPerfect’s translation management system — GlobalLink.

Choose technologies that are able to integrate for seamless content workflows: In an effort to drive greater automation across internal systems, it’s important to look for a CCMS and translation management system that are able to integrate with current back-end systems to publish content, including CRMs such as Salesforce and website content management systems like Adobe. As an example, manually transferring content between systems takes an average of one hour for every 500 words, meaning for a simple 5,000-word website, an employee will spend more than one business day managing the process—and that’s just for one language (the amount of time is multiplied for every language).

Leverage AI where possible: AI for translation and audio content is becoming stronger and stronger, and companies are leveraging it now to help reduce turnaround time and cost. AI can be successfully leveraged for MI departments in the following ways:

• Case intake and triage: Frontline staff enter call details in back-end systems. APIs between back-end safety systems and AI engines allow for real-time translation of call details, resulting in less time/error with frontline staff completing translation as they intake cases from around the globe. This allows them to understand the nature of the customer inquiry and to identify safety cases, then route them through the appropriate channels.
• Voicemails/audio content: Voice-to-text technology paired with AI facilitates real-time insight into the nature of patient and physician voice messages.
• Chatbot: AI can be integrated directly with chatbot systems to provide real-time multilingual chat support.
• Response content: AI paired with professional human review can help to create multilingual responses for customers not only faster but also at an average of 15% cost savings.

For consultation on how to apply AI and technology to improve the quality and efficiency of your multilingual workflow, please contact lifesci@transperfect.com.