Recently, I found myself in a discussion with some colleagues around whether artificial intelligence (AI) could increase commercial engagement and sales productivity; specifically, the Linguamatics flavour of AI, Natural Language Processing (NLP). My first reaction was no – our customers tend to use NLP to pull out critical information for safety assessment from internal reports, genotype-phenotype associations from literature, inclusion/exclusion criteria from clinical trial records; and many more examples that impact drug R&D.

But as the discussion progressed, I realized that as our customers drill more and more into the power of NLP to unlock value from real world data, the answer is actually yes. NLP enables data-driven, rather than document-driven decision support, by extracting key concepts and context from unstructured documents, which can then be rapidly reviewed and analysed. So, since much real world data is unstructured text, NLP can bring real productivity gains.

Challenges for pharma medical field teams

Let me give you some background, and then some examples.

Over recent years, pharma sales reps and medical science liaison staff (MSLs) have faced increasing challenges around access to Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs), physicians and prescribers, due to a more restrictive regulatory environment, new healthcare business models and evolving economic conditions. The boundaries for how pharma sales reps can interact with physicians are more limited, for example the “lunch and learn” meetings that used to be a key tool have been significantly curtailed. In parallel, the pressures on physicians to see more patients also reduces the time they have to learn about new drugs or improved therapies.