Case Study

Global CRO Reduces Literature Reviews Times by 30% with DistillerSR

DistillerSR helps a global CRO efficiently screen more than 2 million references per year.

The organization is a world leader in using data, technology, and advanced analytics combined with deep industry expertise to help customers drive healthcare forward.

Increased Efficiency

After adopting DistillerSR , the organization realized an approximately 30% reduction in time spent on project management tasks, resulting in significant time savings and efficiency gains across the entire review and surveillance process.

Effective Team Management

With more than 70 team members working on scientific literature reviews across the world. DistillerSR’s standardized yet flexible workflows ensure anyone in any time zone can start work and pick up where another team member left off.

Faster Updates

The organization also uses DistillerSR as a repository for older reviews, making the process of updating reviews for clients faster and easier. A uniform process ensures that anyone, not just the original review team, can update projects efficiently.

Transforming Business and Patient Outcomes

Currently, the CRO has a team of about 70 experts working on systematic literature reviews (SLRs), surveillance, and triage across the globe. Following a robust review and quality control process, the team consistently delivers high-quality health economics and outcomes research (HEOR) projects on topics ranging from clinical efficacy and safety to treatment guidelines and economic burdens.

Managing a High Volume of Work

The organization’s systematic literature review team has roughly 65 reviews in process at any given time, each having between 6,000 and 10,000 references for the first level of title and abstract screening. While this type of review screening volume is common in the HEOR space, it still presents a challenge even for large organizations.

Before adopting DistillerSR, the organization was using Excel to manage their reviews by compiling data into a single sheet. Doing this was cumbersome since it required incredible attention to detail. Reconciling multiple sheets would also introduce critical errors, and it was time-consuming since multiple people could not work on the same page at once.

With DistillerSR, the team can efficiently manage multiple reviews with a high volume of references to screen.

Improving Efficiency and Reducing Errors

The organization estimates that DistillerSR helped reduce project management time by about 30% across a variety of review activities, including reference allocation, compilation, and quality control. They also estimate a 10% time savings during screening, which they expect to further improve upon by applying artificial intelligence to their workflows.

In addition to these time savings, they also credit DistillerSR in helping to reduce manual errors that can occur when copying and pasting data in a spreadsheet.

Adaptable and User-Friendly

The systematic literature review team comes from diverse backgrounds and is distributed across the world. Their team “chases the sun” and works on reviews 24/7. They required an adaptable solution that introduced uniformity in their review processes.

According to the customer, when using spreadsheets, people like to use their imaginations and get creative. DistillerSR makes things more uniform at all levels allowing for different teams to pick up and start working without a lot of explanation about how to use them.

The company invested in DistillerSR’s Professional Services, and was able to get properly trained in three to four sessions. Having a few members of the team DistillerSR certified means that knowledge trickle down to new members. When a new person starts, it’s easy to have an experienced employee show them how to use it. It’s very user-friendly.