Biogen chooses Lexalytics to improve customer care
Biogen Japan LTD. is working with Lexalytics to create a system to respond faster and more accurately to questions it receives from patients, the media, physicians and other constituents at its Medical Information Department (MID).
Biogen, a pioneer in neuroscience, discovers, develops, and delivers innovative therapies for people living with serious neurological and neurodegenerative diseases as well as related therapeutic adjacencies. Lexalytics provides products that combine natural language processing with AI to transform text in all its forms into usable data.
The new, semi-custom application leverages the Lexalytics Pharmaceutical Industry Pack and combines machine learning and AI with natural language processing to immediately understand what conditions, drugs, ailments, or issues a constituent is calling about and deliver the proper response.
When a Biogen constituent calls into the MID, an operator is expected to provide a timely and accurate response. To achieve this goal under the current system, the operator has access to a database of frequently asked questions (FAQs), as well as product information brochures and other resources. If the operator is not able to answer the caller within 1 minute, the call is escalated to a medical director, which is costly for Biogen and frustrating for the caller. By combining machine learning and keyword search in a unified platform, the Lexalytics system is designed to reduce average call time without sacrificing quality of responses, reduce the number of calls that need to be referred to a medical director and consolidate the institutional knowledge located in disparate sources and databases, making it available across the organization.
“We’ve worked with Lexalytics for years on programs surrounding voice of the patient, voice of the key opinion leader, and social media monitoring, and they’ve always been a key partner,” said Keith Ho, director, customer focus and medical digital, at Biogen. “Traditionally, the thinking in the pharma and neuroscience industries has been that the specific terminology is so arcane and the data so unstructured that machines couldn’t possibly be trained to tackle some of our most difficult problems, but early testing with Lexalytics has been very promising. We believe this system is a first for pharma, and we’re excited to see how it improves our customer care.”
The new Lexalytics system has been trained using proprietary data from Biogen Japan LTD., including transcripts from call logs, product information brochures, and internal FAQ documents. While the system is currently being tested in a call center-type environment, Biogen believes that it shows promise for use at all constituent touchpoints, whether email, social media, chatbots or even a physician’s desk. The initial prototype system represents a transcontinental collaboration which took approximately a month to develop and is expected to be in full production by early 2020. Given the complexity of the Japanese language, Biogen and Lexalytics are confident the success of this pilot can be replicated for other languages and geographies.
For more information, go to www.lexalytics.com and www.biogen.com.