Automation has been around for centuries. Switch your automation goggles on to “active” and you will see it everywhere. Our COO, Martti Ahtola describes his daily routine noticing the vast majority of his activities includes automation in one way or another. And when you start looking, you can see it has been this way for years.

When did we start to automate our routine tasks? Do we really use it in ways we should? Does it help and are there areas we should leave without significant technology innovation? Why is Pharmacovigilance still lagging behind? In this blog post, Martti ponders about these questions and looks at possible answers and ways forward. In the second part of this topic, Martti will describe what tools exactly are helping him get his work done just a bit easier.

Let’s start from scratch

At Tepsivo, we are building our culture around and justify our entire existence by process optimization and automation. Our unique position and innovative approach to pharmacovigilance mean substantial workload reduction for our clients, our staff and partners. As we do this, we consequently bring down the cost of services and enable everyone involved in our projects to spend more time on fulfilling tasks and a lot less or no time doing simple tasks like filling out and sending forms or tracking in multiple trackers and logging data in several locations as has been the process traditionally.

For us to succeed, adopting automation on a daily basis is absolutely crucial. We will share more information and insights into how exactly we do this and why our approach is unique in our following posts. But before we take a deep dive into how exactly we do this, let’s first look at the role automation is playing in our lives.

Automation of the ages

As automation has become embedded in our culture and company strategy, I started to think about it differently. I was noticing nice automation functionalities everywhere and the list of possibilities for automation seemed endless. Honestly, it was a surprise. Automation was already everywhere in my working environment and it was working so well that it had largely gone unnoticed (as it should) but it was also for large parts going unused (at least in the pharmacovigilance industry.)

Broadly speaking, automation is part of the human nature. We are always trying to think how to do something in an easier way, do things faster, how to use less energy. This is why human race has thrived. Since the beginning of time we have used tools and harnessed fire, water and wind to do our work. Also, the concern of people losing their work due to technological advancements has been around since the Ancient Greeks, or even since before the invention of the wheel.

Fast-forwarding to pharmacovigilance and everyday office work. Information work was revolutionized in the past 30 years. The 80’s brought the computers to the office. The 90’s brought the internet and mobile phones. After this, the smart automation has increased our productivity and the amount of information so much that makes it almost impossible to imagine how things were done before.

It is everywhere

First concrete ways you probably experienced how automation could really help to improve your work was when Word’s spelling check started correcting your grammar or when your Nokia phone started predicting your text input. Or maybe it was when you realized that Wikipedia has all the information you need or in addition to providing all the information you could ever need, Google started also translating all the languages you could imagine. And then Chrome started translating web pages.

If you put on your automation-goggles on like I did and start thinking about it, there really are almost no parts of the regular office job that are not already somehow automated, intelligent, or smart. Gmail suggests automatic email replies and Outlook allows you to set automatic replies. Your phone is probably suggesting helpful quick replies in the notifications that make you feel like it knows what you’re thinking. Your alarm clock wakes you up for work. It will remind you to wake up in 10 minutes if you did not do so. I am not even going to talk about smart fridges with Spotify and online grocery stores. Google Maps recognizes automatically where you live and where you work. It will remind you when to leave for work with your preferred transport method and tell you if there is going to be traffic or problems on the way.

My phone reading my mind

Do we make the best of it?

Why then, when you finally arrive to the office, it feels like you are still doing repetitive, simple tasks that could be automated, especially for those of us working in PV?

The issue lies somewhere in the risk averse nature of pharmacovigilance and pharmaceutical industry as a whole. There are good reasons behind this, but even EMA recognizes the fact that there are challenges related to the lack of regulatory standards, guidance and validation for the use of patient-level healthcare data, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning and that the regulatory process is ill adapted to an increasingly dynamic environment in which technology and science, particularly in areas such as use of device data, real world data, adaptive algorithms etc., are developing faster than current regulations and guidelines.

More about this in a later blog post!

Where does it stop?

Not the whole workday is automated (or has the opportunity for automation), yet. Food delivery services have seen an increase this year and Pizza Online was my personal go-to website 10 years ago. Pre-planned, packaged and delivered meals are already available but they have not broken yet to the mainstream. Also, automated exercise has been the American dream for a long time, which (unfortunately?) has not been realized.

Probably it is better not to automate these parts of the workday as there are clear benefits for both having lunch with colleagues and exercising after work. Lately, it has been a bit challenging to eat out with colleagues or to go to the gym after work, but there is already a huge industry of streamers specialized on eating and online excerices. Of course, you can also put on your Teams video conference during the lunch break or after work and just enjoy the company of your friends or colleagues around the world.

What’s next?

One of the more likely ways how automation and intelligent technology will take over pharmacovigilance and other regulated areas of medicine is medical devices. Health technology is a very important growth area for major tech companies. There are smartwatches, fitbits and sports and health related apps that are already in everyday use. I would argue that this type of information is as important as health information collected due to pharmacovigilance regulation. Also, the information is as related to people’s privacy as the safety related information, probably more.

I am also hoping this type of preventative treatment and monitoring of health status will partially replace the “traditional” medical treatment in the near future. We are already creating so much safety and health related information that we do not know what to do with it. So, let’s not forget that innovation is one of the three base pillars of WHO’s essential medicines and health products department and pharmaceutical industry should be leading the innovation in order to provide the patients the best treatment possible.