Case Study: Global biopharmaceutical company achieves accurate social-media monitoring of on- vs off-label drug use with Cortical.io SemanticPro Classify & Automate

A biopharmaceutical company evaluated social media to monitor off-label drug use

Global biopharmaceutical company faced the challenge of measuring off-label drug use—a practice that’s common but hard to track because companies lack direct prescribing data and patient records are privacy constrained. The company engaged Cortical.io and its SemanticPro Classify & Automate solution to listen to social media (notably Reddit) and overcome the ambiguity and vague wording of patient posts with an NLU-based approach.

Cortical.io built a prototype using meaning-based algorithms to automatically filter, classify and summarize Reddit messages, training classifiers for each target drug. The solution reviewed over 2.2 million posts, accurately identified on- vs. off-label usage and filtered ambiguous or off-topic content; it achieved very high NLU metrics (92–100% accuracy) and produced a UI for inspection—results that led the Global biopharmaceutical company to pilot live streaming and consider production in 2021.