The growth of robotic process automation in life sciences and pharma

Robotic process automation, sometimes called “intelligent automation”, simply put, refers to the use of software to perform routine or repetitive tasks. An overly simple example might be setting up an auto-response on your email account for when you’re not around to answer a sender’s email yourself. But that really is a gross over-simplification compared to what RPA can do. In theory, any task currently completed by a human could be done with RPA. Which means RPA is extremely powerful. It can make business more efficient, increase productivity, eliminate human errors, and can be applied to any industry.
In life sciences, for example, one of the largest companies in the world, AstraZeneca, asked management consultant Deloitte to implement an RPA solution that would help the pharmaceuticals giant deal with what are called “Adverse Event reports”. AstraZeneca Patient Safety teams manage around 100,000 Adverse Event reports relating to their medicines every year.