Perspectives

Automating medtech processes

Increase efficiency and reduce costs

Medtech product development, commercialization, and back-office processes can be surprisingly manual and labor intensive, lengthening product life cycles, increasing costs, and heightening the potential for human error. Fortunately, many of these processes are relatively straightforward and can be automated cost-effectively within a short time frame with robotic process automation (RPA) and cognitive automation (CA).

RPA and CA in medtech

Lengthy and expensive medtech R&D cycles, increasingly stringent regulatory requirements, and intensifying global competition are driving medtech companies to develop and launch innovative new products as quickly and cost-effectively as possible.

Written with medtech challenges in mind, RPA and CA in medtech: Increasing efficiency, reducing costs:

  • Explores the potential for RPA and CA technologies to improve medtech clinical and business operations
  • Describes how RPA and CA can help solve common product development and commercialization challenges
  • Provides a suggested approach and key success factors for automation deployment

The benefits of medtech automation

The cost and time savings from automation can be significant, but RPA and CA offer other benefits as well, including:

  • Compliance: Eliminates the need for error-prone manual intervention and increases compliance, thus reducing the amount of time spent on rework and review.
  • Control: Enhances management control of processes through improved visibility, and expands expertise and insights to deliver greater customer value.
  • Capacity: Enables transformative change by leveraging technology to complete tasks previously viewed as too costly or time-consuming to consider.

Key areas where medtech automation delivers measurable benefits:

  • Sourcing and procurement
  • Commercial operations
  • R&D clinical trials

Medtech automation: Opportunities and hurdles

With application opportunities across the medtech value chain, RPA and CA can increase organizational efficiency and quality by automating decision-making, approval routing, and task and document management. So why are companies waiting to automate their clinical and commercial operations?

Some common hurdles include the perceived high cost of integrating multiple systems, departmental process variations, and entrenched production and commercialization methodologies. However, increasing numbers of medtech organizations are discovering that RPA and CA technologies are relatively easy to implement and scale, as they reside in the cloud and there is no need to integrate them with existing systems.

Abstract

The path forward

Learnings from numerous client engagements have taught us that successful automation programs evolve from strategy to pilot to production.

Implementing RPA and CA at scale within the right governance and deployment model can deliver substantial cost and time savings, presenting a compelling business case for medtech companies. A pilot medtech automation project can deliver efficiency, quality, and monetary benefits within weeks but typically must be deployed at scale for 12 to 18 months to achieve optimal strategic and operational benefits.

To learn more about Deloitte’s global RPA and CA capabilities, please contact one of the Deloitte practitioners listed below.

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Get in touch

Brent Griffith
Managing Director
Deloitte Consulting LLP
Jaspreet Anand
Senior Manager
Deloitte Consulting LLP
Myriam Lopez
Senior Manager
Deloitte Consulting LLP
Varun Gupta
Senior Consultant
Deloitte Consulting LLP
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