Case Study

Learn How the Leading Provider of Commercialization Services to the Life Sciences Industry Leveraged DistillerSR Automation to Achieve Faster and Smarter Systematic Reviews

This leading provider of global commercial services to the life sciences industry, offers integrated solutions which span all stages of the product lifecycle. From patient experience to channel distribution, they deliver longterm, sustainable value for patients, prescribers, channel partners, and payers.

Repeatable, Configurable Processes

Customizable workflows have enabled the teams at this organization to create standard, repeatable processes for conducting their health technology
assessments (HTAs) literature reviews.

Powerful Deduplication

DistillerSR’s powerful deduplication tool has simplified this organization’s process of detecting and removing duplicate citations, preventing skew and bias caused by studies included more than once.

Effective Team Management

This organization has benefited from team members working simultaneously on the same project. DistillerSR allows managers to have real-time visibility into their teams’ activity and performance.

Like many healthcare research organizations, this leading provider of global commercial services, from patient experience to channel distribution in the life sciences industry, struggled to balance their high standards of research practice with increasingly tight deadlines and limited budgets. The growing volumes of scientific literature, the demand for transparency and accuracy, and the need to manage time efficiently required a more consistent approach than the piecemeal, manual processes they were using.

Years of Excel: Manual Literature Reviews Without Efficiency

The Senior Director of Value and Evidence at this organization was managing a team conducting systematic literature reviews (SLRs) entirely manually, using spreadsheets and word processing programs and coordinating projects via email.

“Conducting literature reviews before we discovered DistillerSR was an entirely manual process,” he says. “It was arduous and cumbersome and wasn’t conducive to our needs. Furthermore, it wasn’t conforming to industry standards. ”The desire to improve efficiency while managing the increasing volume of systematic reviews was the catalyst behind their research for a better solution. The team needed a platform that was industry specific and adhered strictly to the PRISMA reporting guidelines and the principles and processes outlined in the Cochrane Handbook. They were looking for a web-based platform that was simple, easy-to-use, and able to import references seamlessly.

“I did an extensive search on available published SLRs comparing existing tools and of all the available systematic review tools, DistillerSR stood out because it manages every aspect of a systematic review. For a core and true systematic literature review (SLR) as defined by Cochrane, DistillerSR outperforms when
compared to any other platform available as established by a published systematic literature review I came across throughout my research, assessing the available tools in the market.

It’s intuitive and provides a seamless experience from search through screening, data extraction, and reporting.”

DistillerSR’s comprehensive audit trail also helped provide greater transparency and compliance compared to traditional Excel spreadsheets. “As the administrator, I can see what my review team does down to the second,” He says. “ I have the ability to restrict certain features and trace back every response and reference within the platform. It helps us keep the data clean and in check. And at the end of the process, the team can generate a PRISMA flow diagram that provides a complete report of the inclusions and exclusions.”

Driving Efficiency With DistillerSR for Intelligent Workflows and Streamlined Processes

It was critical to leverage automation to drive smarter processes and improve efficiency. With every new technology and software, there’s always the fear of a steep learning curve, but adopting DistillerSR was painless for the team. “The DistillerSR user guide and technical support made the learning phase easy,” He notes.“It took me an hour to learn the basics of the platform as an administrator, and two or three days to become fully functional and to create workflows, user forms, and templates.”

DistillerSR makes any project, large or small, simpler to manage so that an individual or organization can produce transparent, audit-ready, and compliant literature reviews.

Reviewers can reuse the same configurations, reports, and even entire project templates that meet their own protocol requirements. “Every research project is different, so what I like about DistillerSR is the customizability of the user forms. They can be molded and adapted to each project with the click of a button.”

Customizable workflows have also enabled the teams to create standard, repeatable processes for conducting their health technology assessments (HTAs).

“DistillerSR outperforms when compared to any other platform available as established by a published systematic literature review I came across assessing the available tools in the market. It is intuitive and provides a seamless experience from search through screening, data extraction and reporting.”

Senior Director of Value and Evidence, Healthcare Research Organization

They use DistillerSR as a central repository for global HTA recommendations. “We have tracked and published global HTA abstracts and conference proceedings on oncology. This work would not have been possible using Excel,” He says.

DistillerSR’s powerful deduplication tool has simplified the process of detecting and removing duplicate citations, preventing skew and bias caused by studies included more than once. “DistillerSR has the ability to detect more duplicates, compared to other reference managing software we currently use, improving our workflows”, He stated.

Collaboration between reviewers has also improved following DistillerSR’s implementation. Distributed teams can benefit from the web-based platform, working simultaneously and continuously on the same project, while managers can have real-time visibility into productivity levels by easily tracking teams’ activity and performance.

DistillerSR solved all the issues that large volumes of data combined with tight deadlines and dispersed teams can create, enabling faster and more accurate literature reviews with reduced completion time. “Finding DistillerSR was one of those moments when I wondered how I ever lived without it,” he says.

“We have tracked and published global HTA abstracts and conference proceedings on oncology. This work would not have been possible using Excel.”

Senior Director of Value and Evidence, Healthcare Research Organization