–the Chatbot may collect adverse events and quality complaints’

Starting the project brought challenges, some of which were unexpected. The project touched many areas of the business (both local and global), from the regulatory and compliance teams, to the legal team, the tech teams and digital therapeutics, to name but a few. Everyone was excited and wanted to get ‘in on the act’, but there was resistance – mainly driven by thoughts of regulation and inspections. Would the Chatbot pass? Did we have the expertise to perform validation tasks? Was the Chatbot a medical device?

The competence and thoroughness of the team at conversationHEALTH guided us expertly through all these regulatory challenges and in particular through the intricacies of the validation of a GxP-relevant, AI-powered Chatbotsomething that was a first for us. The global team were eager to get involved in this activity and understand more about this technology ‘for the greater good’.

Reflections

So, as we launch our Chatbot – would we do it again?

We are wondering why we did not embrace this new technology earlier. The Chatbot is integrated as another channel for medical information, much like our vendor that answers our phone calls. However, in this instance, we have greater control over consistency and accuracy of responses and can see trends in questions in real time, rather than waiting for periodic reports. We have greater flexibility to understand what our customers want from us and can flex to meet these needs much more easily.

Our Chatbot has a persona that reflects our organisation and can represent us all day, every day; we would rather a user interact with Orion’s Chatbot than look for the answer on Google or social media.

Now that the platform is in the organisation, we can continue to add Medical Information services to the Chatbot, as well as extend it across markets and even to other departments. All built from the groundwork and cross-functional team involvement at the start.

What have we learned?

We can offer a ‘full service’ to our medical information customers out of hours.

Looking across the industry, many companies are now leveraging Chatbots to support medical services, freeing up resource to allow our teams to get on with the expert tasks they are so skilled at doing.

We learned that we already had the skills to successfully introduce and validate an AI-powered Chatbot; we just needed to apply our skills, rather than get side-tracked or intimidated by the words ‘Artificial Intelligence’ or ‘Machine Learning’.

It is possible to innovate in medical information – we should embrace new technologies and make them work for us!

Julie Boothe Medical Director, UK and Ireland, Orion Pharma (UK) Ltd