Our client, a Top 5 global pharmaceutical company, has thousands of web pages, images and PDF documents online in more than 40 different languages. The company ensures that its online content is accurate and compliant with regulatory requirements at the point of creation and distribution, but unless it is actively managed and updated, certain information – such as Summaries of Product Characteristics (SPCs), dates of preparation, Adverse Event (AE) reporting procedures etc – can easily become out of date. Company policy is that digital properties must therefore be regularly audited to ensure continued compliance, but their previous approach, whereby each page, image or PDF

would have to be identified and searched through manually, was tediously slow and eye-wateringly expensive. Once found, the search results would then be sent to content owners in a complex spreadsheet that was difficult to work with. Perhaps not surprisingly, response rates were less than 25%.

Of greater concern, the manual process was very prone to human error. Potentially ‘problematic’ content could include anything from privacy notices, legal notices and adverse event reporting links down to individual phrases, dates, telephone numbers, addresses, URLs – and even single words. The fact that these could be buried deep within a document or a PDF – or even hidden away on a packshot within an image file – meant that the company was searching globally for an unknown number of microscopic ‘needles’ within literally thousands of ‘haystacks’.