Discover how MSD France use Telecats Technology to ensure that hospitals, pharmacies and anyone who needs it can access any information about medicine and vaccine availability, anytime, anywhere.
Medical information is one of the many critical missions in the healthcare industry. Any pharmaceutical company has to ensure that everyone can have access to the required information on their medicine: when to take or not take their treatment, how to take it, or what are the conditions to order it.
At MSD France, these topics are managed by experts: doctors, pharmacists are answering questions from hospitals, doctors or pharmacies everyday. The number of questions to be handled by those teams is very variable: it depends on the diseases, their seasonality, the pandemic, or supply disruptions.
For Anne Tran-Joly, (Medical Information and Digital coordinator at MSD) : “One of our main challenges was to adapt the support teams which are made of a very skilled but scarce resource which is difficult to find and train for this sort of need. You don’t train a doctor for few weeks’ work! We were looking for a solution that would limit the impact of volume variability while keeping the high quality of services needed for our mission. This is what Telecats has been able to provide.”
Using their platform and language-modelling capability, Telecats has been able to implement a voicebot that can manage all calls related to medicine availability while integrating industry business rules for hospitals or pharmacies.
The solution setup is able to manage the full MSD medicine portfolio (one of the largest in the industry), but also packaging and dosages. In real time, it can assess which medicine is researched, and provide accurate information on availability and conditions, any day of the week… and a voicebot doesn’t suffer a peak of demand the same way a Medical Information center does. Scientists at MSD Medical Information can now re-invest their time on more complex questions and diagnoses.
Stephanie Collomb-Gilbert (Senior specialist, Medical Information) says: “One of our biggest questions was the name of the medicines themselves: they are very specific, and most of the market solutions were not able to manage them. This specific molecule naming could also have been a threat: sometime, people are not so sure on how to pronounce the molecules’ names. We were concerned by the efforts that could be necessary to reach the performance levels required to go live with this kind of automated solution to manage variations in pronunciations. We are in a process where we can’t afford mistaking one medicine for the other. But in just a few weeks, we reached a performance level sufficient to switch to production”.
All inquiries of medicine stock levels are now handled by Telecats’ voicebot with artificial intelligence, that has been trained on the MSD Medicine portfolio.
Arnaud Foubert (Medical Information Director at MSD): “It was key for us that our clients/contacts/partners accept and trust the solution as much as we trusted it. During the pre-launch and after several weeks, we managed several surveys to check how the new automated service was accepted. The results were positive and we knew we were ready to go. This is a big innovation for us and we are now working on expanding its scope of work to deliver more services to best serve our partners with swift and reliable interactions.”
About MSD: For more than 125 years, MSD has been inventing for life, bringing forward medicines and vaccines for many of the world’s most challenging diseases in pursuit of our mission to save and improve lives. MSD is a trade name of Merck & Co., Inc., with headquarters in Kenilworth, N.J., U.S.A. We demonstrate our commitment to patients and population health by increasing access to health care through far-reaching policies, programs and partnerships. Today, MSD continues to be at the forefront of research to prevent and treat diseases that threaten people and animals — including cancer, infectious diseases such as HIV and Ebola, and emerging animal diseases — as we aspire to be the premier research-intensive biopharmaceutical company in the world. For more information about MSD in France, please visit www.msd-france.com or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.
