💵 When is it convenient to buy automation in the Drug-to-Market Journey?.

Automation in healthcare is becoming extremely trending. And while benefits are clearly undeniable, the main question for every single head of pharmacovigilance, clinical research and C-level suite remains: when is it actually worth investing in automation in the Drug-to-Market journey?

According to our analysis, in price-per-seat models you have to consider €875 divided by the wanted ROI; while in Enterprise models you’ll have to consider the number of scientists performing screening.

🔍 Screening Activity Steps

We have interviewed 43 healthcare professionals ranging in different areas of interest: marketing & sales, drug development, drug discovery, clinical research, competition analysis and pharmacovigilance. All these areas had a set of activities in common that we can label as Screening Activity (SA).

SA can be broken down into 5 phases:

1. Searching for medical data (PubMed, Pre-Prints, Cochrane, PapersHive)
2. Storing and Sharing the interesting medical data
3. Perform an in-depth screening such as removing duplicates and applying inclusion / exclusion criteria
4. Trends and Patterns Analysis: common KoL, adverse effects, therapies, etc.
5. Reporting

While each area uses a SA for different purposes, the main focus is different Marketing & Sales, for example, focuses mostly on the storing/sharing and the reporting.

Pharmacovigilance focuses a lot on the searching and in-depth.

💰 Screening Activity Costs

The average scientist salary with a PharmD background ranges from €3k to €7k. For this analysis we’ll also consider a 40% tax to it that should cover social security. This leaves us with an average of €7k salary (including taxes).

The time spent on a SA varies a lot according to the time invested and the kind of automation performed. When interviewing the 43 professionals, there seem to be an average to a 2 weeks (minimum of few days to a maximum of a month).

Lastly, an automated SA would cost less due to the time saved. When considering all-in-one platforms that address most of the steps in SA, there seems to be a percentage that dominates all the others when browsing case studies and vendors: 25% of time can be saved on average.

This boils down the cost of SA to 2 weeks of a PharmD scientist €3,500. While an automated SA would have a 25% cost than a manual SA, €2,625.

Automation Purchase Breakdown

💺 Price-Per-Seat Model

When considering a Price-Per-Seat, knowing that each automated SA would save a company €875 for an all-in-one automation while €175 for a specific step, here is how to calculate a cost of a software with 100% ROI:

For a higher ROI, a company can always look at the spending. By dividing by 3, ROI would increase to 200%. Here a quick example on 100% and 200% ROI target with different SA activities in the company:

🚀 Enterprise Model

Enterprise Model is slightly different, as the purchase is done by company instead of per-seat. The formula is similar but we also should include the number of scientists involved. As it won't be feasible for a scientist to perform more than 12 Screening Activities per year.

If instead you are offered a price, consider the following formula:

Here a breakdown of the most common Enterprise Models we have encountered and the SA amount needed in order to achieve ROI:

While these numbers might seem big, when considering the status of mid and big Pharma, they are not. Let's consider the €1M model. 2286 SA, and since a full-time PharmD scientist can't perform more than 12 full SAs a year. This means 191 scientists.

👇 Conclusion

Whichever is your volume of Screening Activities, automation can and still will be a key asset in your arsenal as long as you have clear goals, an all-in-one platform to address all stages of it and and at least a +100% ROI target.

Would you like to test whether automating all stages of a Screening Activity is for you? Setup a Free Trial with us! We offer both Enterprise and Per-Seat.