Advancing Drug Safety With Natural​ Language Processing (NLP)

Advancing Drug Safety With Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Pharmaceutical organizations are facing a safety data problem. The volume of safety information is growing, leading to unsustainable increases in the costs of traditional safety operations.

IQVIA NLP transforms safety-relevant unstructured text (from case reports, literature, call center feeds, drug labels, regulatory approvals and more) into actionable structured data that can be rapidly analyzed for safety vigilance at every stage through the safety lifecycle of a drug.

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Harness your internal and external safety data

Across the whole span of drug development, safety-relevant data is being both generated and sought from unstructured text. Applying innovative technologies, such as AI, across these data can speed up safety processes and decision support

Natural language processing (NLP) text mining can optimize safety platforms and lower development costs. NLP can be applied in many areas across the safety life cycle of a drug with key areas such as:

  1. Better access to information for safety assessment, providing a rich landscape of safety-relevant data sources
  2. To reduce manual effort in safety case processing with tagging and medical coding (e.g. to the Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities - MedDRA) of adverse events.
By 2023, 60% of the top 100 life science companies will use AI augmentation in one or more safety vigilance solutions
GARTNER REPORT: Jeff Smith, “Life Science CIOs Reduce Runaway Costs With Innovative Safety Vigilance Technology”. March 2021

Illuminating drug safety insights with NLP

Explore each drop down to the right to learn more about the key capabilities of NLP for drug safety.

IQVIA Safety Intelligence Hub

Understanding the safety landscape around any drug, adverse event (AE) or drug target is important, from initial therapeutic target selection through to post-market surveillance. 

The IQVIA Safety Intelligence Hub integrates the right content (including literature, drug labels, FDA regulatory approval packages) with ontologies, intuitive queries and easy-to-use searches, to get you rapidly and effectively to the information you need.

Auto-coding Adverse Events to MedDRA

Adverse event reports are usually provided by a reporter in natural language which needs to be transferred (coded) into a standardized format to allow database processing. Most of this coding is manual and time consuming. 

NLP speeds up coding of adverse events to MedDRA, improving coding consistency, in a reliable and repeatable process that decreases manual workload.

Our NLP solution for adverse events and MedDRA coding can be accessed on the cloud via APIs or embedded into your safety platform.

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