Power Platform Accelerates Treatment Access for Patients – Case Study

When patients’ treatment access depends on your ability to make them known to doctors, acting quickly is crucial. We are proud to have created an automated management system for one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the country. Thanks to our Power Apps-based solution, this company has entered the cloud for the first time.

Case study of the modernization of a pharmaceutical company and the use of the Power Platform to facilitate patient access to treatment:Every year, the company’s pharmaceutical products improve the well-being of millions of patients around the world. The company regularly introduces new and improved treatments targeting various medical conditions.Access to information on these innovations is crucial for the general public. That said, in Canada, it is illegal to communicate any drug’s therapeutic claims in direct-to-consumer advertising. So this partner has a department dedicated to the organization of marketing activities. These activities are an opportunity to introduce new treatments to health professionals, who can then prescribe them to patients. However, the numerous validation procedures for such activities—which ensure their compliance with pharmaceutical industry regulations—made their realization laborious.

When Modernizing Paper Processes Doesn’t Work

This department had major legal responsibilities but faced an even greater challenge: activity validation was done entirely on paper. Up to five coordinators had to mark these forms, which were passed from office to office. In addition to errors and long delays, applications were misplaced or simply lost. The company needed to eliminate this inefficient exchange of paper documents, which was not scalable. It needed to automate all approval processes and be able to manage them electronically while ensuring security at every stage. But the company had been struggling for several years with a user adoption problem: countless attempts to modernize had been made. As the need for activities grew and demands mounted, the success of future activities was at stake. The company turned to XRM Vision for a solution.

XRM Vision’s solution

To adress these issues, our team has created an application based on Power Apps, which hosts all new marketing activity requests of the company. Paper forms are replaced by electronic forms generated automatically by the application. When submitting a request, the requester can ensure that all the required information is collected and that his documents are stored on the cloud, available to the reviewers. Delays caused by missing information are now a thing of the past. XRM Vision’s has also made it possible to digitize the application process and automate the entire validation process. Reviewers can view new applications awaiting approval within the application, check the stored documents, and approve or reject the application with a single click. As a result, the company has increased its efficiency, mobility, and the number of activities carried out. The most remarkable innovation of this application? The transition from paper to digital was completed in just one month. Indeed, the solution is flexible and was designed and tested quickly using the latest Microsoft features. As a result, the company is now able to easily adapt to the needs of its team and to the evolution of the pharmaceutical industry.

User Adoption and Migration to the Cloud

With our solution, this partner completely digitized its activity validation process. This led many employees to recognize the tangible benefits of cloud computing. Many users are pleased with the increased efficiency and mobility, and are encouraging their colleagues to follow suit. They are even considering ways to optimize remote collaboration in other ways, making their own requests for improvements based on their new understanding of the cloud and its potential. This enthusiasm, which is already prompting the team to think about optimizing other processes, could spread to other departments. In fact, we are already in discussions with this company for a second roll-out phase to streamline more processes.

Positive Results for This Pharmaceutical Company

Thanks to our application, this company improved the efficiency of the marketing activities department and reduced its costs. The number of generated and accepted requests has already increased by 50%, allowing the company to run more activities. The digitization of processes also means that requests can now be processed remotely, at all times. By storing documents online, the company centralizes information, improving its monitoring of activities and their impact. In fact, during the current COVID-19 crisis, the application enabled a seamless transition to remotely manage the process. Thanks to automation, risks of errors and document loss is significantly reduced. The scalability of the platform and user adoption allows this partner to plan for continuous process optimization.

Power Platform and the technologies of this solution

XRM Vision designed a customized solution for this major player of the pharmaceutical industry. But what technologies were used? Entirely based on Power Apps, the application also leverages other Microsoft technologies. Indeed, in order to automate and interlink actions, our team also used Power Automate, another Power Platform tool. In addition, the solution uses Sharepoint for document storage and generation, and the whole has been integrated with Outlook.

What competitive advantage does this solution offer?

XRM Vision was able to present a convincing case thanks to Microsoft’s reputation for security. Familiarity with Microsoft environments was also a key factor, ensuring better user adoption by reducing adaptation time. The flexibility of the Power Platform to quickly test an application was also of great importance. XRM Vision’s Microsoft Gold partnerships and our proven ability to integrate various innovative Microsoft technologies—such as Power Automate—have been instrumental in meeting each of our partner’s needs.

Our solution’s impact on this partner

For this partner, this solution is a unique opportunity to boost the efficiency of its marketing activities. Indeed, this platform offers several benefits:

• Document storage and centralization
• Process automation
• Mobility
• Ability to monitor marketing activities impact
• Flexibility

The flexibility of this solution allows the company to quickly modify it according to its changing needs. As a result, our application is turning digitally reluctant employees into accomplished cloud users. With thousands of employees worldwide, the company could adapt this tool to the processes in other countries. Moreover, this partner continues to optimize its application with a second development phase. Thanks to the solution’s flexibility, we can consider additional implementation phases.

Is this solution transferable to other sectors?

Of course, this solution is tailored to the processes of a particular pharmaceutical company. That said, our team could easily adapt it to the validation processes of other companies of this sector. These companies often report issues of resistance to change, which can cause outdated processes to persist. So, our solution can benefit this industry. Moreover, our automated management system also has the potential to grow outside this sector. Possibilities include becoming a documentation and approval management vertical with dynamic business rules. The ease of implementation and scalability of the platform makes it adaptable to other industries. In short, our team can adapt this application for other organizations, such as an internal document management solution. Indeed, we have developed an expertise with the needs of the pharmaceutical industry. And similarly, over the years, we have acquired many change management tools or those facing user adoption challenges. Therefore, this background, along with our Power Platform expertise, will be useful in new contexts!

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