INTRODUCING AN AI-POWERED MEDICAL INFORMATION CHATBOT: TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS SUMMARY

Pharmaceutical companies are rarely at the forefront of innovation. Medical information (MI) teams are often seen as ‘doing the same thing in the same way’ as we did last century. However, times are changing; more of us are looking at innovative solutions to deliver medical information services based on the realisation that customer behaviours are changing and experience matters when engaging with companies. In this article, I will describe a journey of triumphs and challenges whilst introducing an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered Chatbot in to my organisation - from organisational impact, to regulatory and audit requirements but ultimately keeping the customer at the centre –what have we learned?

The Bright Idea

At the beginning of the pandemic it became evident ‘things were changing’; call volumes fell and we received our first quality complaint via Twitter! Our customers’ behaviour was changing to contacting us via digital methods, and most of these requests were being received out of conventional working hours. It seemed the right time to re-evaluate how medical information services were delivered. So the journey began……

The Solution

Technology as an enabler to our Medical Information function was a no-brainer. Having looked at trends across the industry, we knew we wanted Chatbot capability to provide additional support to both us and our customers.

Pretty early on, we realised user experience was important and we wanted to go beyond simple question and answer functionality: we wanted the user to be able to ask a question in their own words, just like making a phone call.

In the end, the choice of a partner company to help Orion deliver the project was easy, once we had defined our selection criteria, these being:

• Did the vendor offer an industry leading solution?

• What experience did the vendor have? Had they delivered Chatbots to the pharmaceutical industry before?

• Did the vendor understand the constraints on the pharmaceutical industry and the regulatory environment in which we work?

• Was a conversational AI agent available?

• What experience did we want to create for our customers?

• Did the technology have the capability to scale across the business?

• Could the vendor help navigate the stakeholders and bring everyone along the journey?

We selected conversationHEALTH because they offered us the opportunity to deliver a medical information Chatbot that can be integrated into our current systems, with an opportunity to work towards a human+AI hybrid approach over time, where humans deal with expert tasks, leaving the Chatbot to deal with the ‘routine’ whilst all working in the same MI ecosystem.