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Solving the Translation Challenge for Case Processing
Updesh Dosanjh, Practice Leader, Pharmacovigilance Technology Solutions, IQVIA
Jan 13, 2023

The cost and expertise needed to translate AE information received by life-science organizations limits how organizations handle case receipt and case processing. On top of this, manual, traditional translation processes are slow, expensive and with increasing data volume and complexity, no longer sufficient. Traditional translation can take multiple days and use up to 50% of program budgets on less than 40% of source information received.

During the recent Safety Seminar in Boston, attendees dove into the examining the future of healthcare translation, industry challenges and where the market is headed especially as it relates to neural machine translation (NMT) - an AI-based translation solution.

Looking at the Healthcare Translation Essentials

There are five main pillars of healthcare translation essentials – speed, accuracy, efficiency, security and cost. Let’s dive into each one.

  1. Speed. Manual translation is often a multi-day process unless organizations are willing to pay for expedited timelines. This causes upstream delays, limiting the speed of requesting queries and the impact to quality of responses and down-stream, putting time pressure on the remainder of the process, especially for short due date cases. IQVIA’s NMT process allows almost instant turn-around of translations.
  2. Accuracy. Without high quality translation, there are risks that key information is missed or misunderstood. Manual translation will always carry a higher risk than NMT engines trained exclusively on life-sciences data, supported by highly qualified and fully vetted linguists and subject matter experts, to ensure consistently accurate, culturally appropriate translation.
  3. Efficiency. Multiple hand-offs dated technology and processes can impact efficiency of translation. Intelligent use of the latest translation technologies allows to streamline processes and design flexible, tailored solutions for clients. Translation can become a single step activity while also removing the need for tracking.
  4. Security. Current translation processes contain in-built threats to the security of your data: open systems, unchecked freelancers, and multiple hand-offs. IQVIA NMT is a closed, PII sensitive technology that ensures secure translation with no risks.
  5. Cost. Transparent pricing, lower than traditional processes, with no surprises in rush fees or extra project management fees are key to keeping costs predictable.

Reviewing NMT’s Role in Advancing Translation

Traditional translation processes are time-consuming as they struggle with the growing deluge of data being collected and requiring processing. Thus, life-science organizations are turning to AI. The state of the art for translation are Neural Machine Translations solutions, that use an automated neural network to train, learn and apply statistical models for machine translation across multiple algorithms at the same time. Data is peer benchmarked against multiple available systems to assess closeness and human-parity, and test segments are randomly selected for evaluation quarterly for each language pair. Assessment includes a ‘champion versus challenger’ evaluation model using BLEU, FTM, TER, Meteor, + human assessment.

This ensures the highest quality translation while continually learning. In addition, IQVIA is a SaaS platform, so organizations benefit from the millions of life-science and Safety specific translations IQVIA processes. When these aspects are merged with the specificity of the life-science knowledge for contextual understanding, pharmaceutical organizations experience higher quality translation for even the most complex of data translation requests.

This means the technology can be utilized instantly at multiple points throughout the case intake and processing process including during social media scanning, intake, case processing, and data analysis.

When firms combine NMT with the IQVIA Vigilance Platform, it automates multi-sourced data extraction, translation, normalization and structuring operations into databases. Rather than days with the traditional translation solution, it can be reduced to minutes with a totally transparent and predictable cost model.

IQVIA NMT learns and re-learns from life-sciences specific data and can fully automatically translate over 55 languages with high accuracy and can support over 200 languages with human review.

NMT incorporates the five healthcare translation essentials (speed, accuracy, efficiency, security, cost) to alleviate difficulties in the translational process and simplify case processing. As the industry continues to advance, traditional translation processes and cost models are no longer suitable. NMT is reliable, reduces costs, saves time, and lowers costs.

For more information, please visit the IQVIA Vigilance page or contact us at safetypv@iqvia.com for additional questions.

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