Custom Translation Workflows Provide a Scalable Solution for Pharmacovigilance Case Work

As the company began developing an end-to-end pharmacovigilance solution for a large client, they knew they needed a strong translation partner with life sciences and post-editing expertise that could meet the internal and regulatory requirements. While they already had an in-house machine translation (MT) solution, they knew they needed to complement MT with the expertise of skilled human linguists to ensure the resulting output met their high quality standards.

They also needed a custom solution that could integrate with their own systems, seamlessly and securely, while facilitating communication with multiple partners throughout the process. 

The company selected ULG to take on this challenge because of our extensive experience in the Life Sciences industry and our expertise in creating customized solutions to meet our clients’ needs. ULG crafted an agile and comprehensive solution to address their pharmacovigilance (PV) challenges:

• Custom workflows for human post-editing: ULG created a system of tailored workflows to maximize efficiency in the post-editing process, while still emphasizing human expertise for the highest accuracy.   
• Seamless integration: ULG integrates with the company’s systems to make the process as easy and secure as possible.  
• 24/7 coverage: ULG provides round-the-clock support to accommodate urgent and unexpected PV needs.   
• Scalability: Designed to handle fluctuating volumes of requests on demand, ULG’s solution scales dynamically.   
• Dedicated linguists for superior support: A team of trained linguists, experienced in PV work, guarantees high levels of quality and accuracy.  
• Budget maximization: ULG defined a cost-effective pricing structure to accommodate anticipated high volumes across multiple languages.  
• Rapid onboarding: ULG onboarded over 100 individual linguists across 62 language pairs in 4 weeks as we prepared to ramp up the project.  

With this solution in place, the company is able to handle the fluctuations of pharmacovigilance work with speed, accuracy and scalability. 

Implementing ULG's solutions has yielded significant results in the following areas:  

• Language Diversity: Supported translations across more than 35 language combinations.  
• Scalability: Successfully processed almost 6,000 documents to date.  
• Volume: Translated over 8.1 million words (500k in the first month alone). 
• Budget optimization:  Applied insights gathered in year 1 to maximize the value of their spend in year 2.  
• Efficiency: Achieved an average turnaround time of 24 hours.  
• Expanded services: ULG extended our capabilities to include translations for patient portals, over the phone interpreting and call center IVR systems, enhancing patient engagement and safety reporting.