Increase content agility, not risk with AI.
EY Smart Reviewer uses Adobe tools to automate critical Medical, Legal, and Regulatory (MLR) processes.
90%
of the time identifies errors that are approved by MLR reviewers
Objectives
Accelerate critical MLR promotional reviews for more agile marketing
Help MLR reviewers focus time on reviewing new content and claims that require their expertise
Adhere to government and industry regulations for life sciences information
Results (compared to current MLR processes)
Improved speed in getting promotional materials to market with automation that supports MLR review process
Lowered costs by reducing the time MLR reviewers spend on proofreading and correcting common errors
Improved compliance through increased objectivity and consistency of MLR reviews
Transforming promotional content
After years working in the pharmaceutical industry, Shannon Hartley, Managing Director, Business Transformation, Health Sciences & Wellness, Ernst & Young LLP, understands the complexity of marketing in highly regulated industries. Marketers working in life sciences must comply with very intense MLR review processes to make sure all advertising and promotional content is accurate and complies with industry and governmental regulations.
“Everyone in the life sciences industry takes MLR very seriously, but this can lead to lengthy review cycles,” says Hartley. “The average time to bring promotional materials to market is around 60 days. That has a huge impact on the agility of pharmaceutical marketing.”
There had to be a better way. It’s why Hartley was excited to bring her experience to EY and EY Smart Reviewer — an AI driven review tool created to make reviews easier and faster. In her role with EY US Shannon is helping to transform MLR across the industry using AI and Adobe technology, including Adobe PDF Extract API.
Bringing agility to life sciences marketing
Even though the life sciences industry is highly competitive, marketers often have no way of quickly responding to changes in the market. It can take weeks to review promotional material before presenting it to audiences. The consequences of speeding through reviews are serious, as inaccurate or misleading messaging can potentially result in hefty fines, damage to the company's reputation/brand, and loss of trust.
At the same time, audiences today expect personalized experiences delivered across more channels, which increases the amount of content that marketing teams need to create. Companies have limited choices to keep up with demand: dramatically increase the number of people working on promotional content and reviews or find ways to streamline the review process.
“PDF Extract API solved an initial challenge for us by allowing us to break down the PDF into parts that the EY Smart Reviewer tool can review. Adobe, in addition to a few other tools, provide us with the quality results we needed to create EY Smart Reviewer.”
Shannon Hartley
Managing Director, Business Transformation, Health Sciences & Wellness, Ernst & Young LLP
Combining AI and Adobe APIs
EY Smart Reviewer has been shown to accelerate the review process by identifying errors that are corrected and approved by MLR reviewers more than 90% of the time by leveraging AI and machine learning (ML) to analyze promotional materials, identify promotional issues such as: spelling and grammar mistakes, claim mismatches, and adherence to health authority promotional requirements. The most common way that it’s used is to check content before it hits reviewers’ eyes, providing a head start with the most common issues annotated on the promotional piece.
Some of the tool’s nine modules check for common issues based on regulatory or industry standards, such as basic spelling and grammatical errors or appropriate footnote formatting. For other modules, EY teams work closely with clients to define a custom set of business rules, such as establishing brand and company guidelines for language or comparing claims in a new promotional piece with pre-approved ones in a claims library. EY Smart Reviewer tags any suggestions for corrections, offering suggestions to correct the errors which help the reviewers focus their review, dramatically improving the speed of review.
Hartley says, “By annotating incorrect content and suggesting corrections, EY Smart Reviewer helps enable reviewers to spend less of their valuable time on repetitive tasks like proofreading and spending time concentrating on claims and new content.”
Authors submit content for review as a PDF, but the type of content and precise format of the PDF can vary greatly. Hartley needed a way for EY Smart Reviewer to intelligently ingest content from any type of PDF and feed it into the natural language processing (NLP) engine. To solve this issue, the EY Smart Reviewer team turned to the experts in PDF files: Adobe.
The Adobe PDF Extract API, part of Adobe Acrobat Services, extracts PDF content while maintaining structural context — such as paragraphs, sections and reading order — in a structured JSON file. That means that it can accurately differentiate between the main content and a legal footnote — a critical distinction for EY Smart Reviewer. It can also preserve the formatting in tables or lists, allowing EY Smart Reviewer to determine the relationships between statements.
"PDF Extract API solved an initial challenge for us by allowing us to break down the PDF into parts that the EY Smart Reviewer tool can review," says Hartley. "We evaluated a number of alternatives and Adobe, in addition to a few other tools, provides us with the quality results we needed to create EY Smart Reviewer."
“With support from Adobe, we’re using automation to speed up promotional reviews, enabling our clients to get content to customers faster and save costs by eliminating the need to add more resources as content increases.”
Shannon Hartley
Managing Director, Business Transformation, Health Sciences & Wellness, Ernst & Young LLP
The future of MLR
The EY US firm has big plans for EY Smart Reviewer. While EY Smart Reviewer relies primarily on NLP to process documents, EY professionals have added enhanced AI and GenAI capabilities to expand the tool and add new functionality and new modules. While EY Smart Reviewer already integrates with Veeva, EY US plans to expand with deeper integrations that include commonly used workflow solutions such as Adobe Workfront.
“Our goal for EY Smart Reviewer is to support medical, legal and regulatory promotional reviewers, not replace them,” says Hartley. “It’s important that reviewers always have the final say, using their expertise to weigh risk during promotional reviews. With support from Adobe, we’re using automation to speed up promotional reviews, enabling our clients to get content to customers faster and save costs by eliminating the need to add more resources as content increases.”
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