💵 When is it convenient to buy automation in the Drug-to-Market Journey?.
You might wonder when is automation useful in your Life Science pipeline for automated screening. In a price-per-seat model, that is €875 divided by the wanted ROI. In an Enterprise model it is up to the number of scientists.

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

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