Garbage In, Compliance Out: Why Your MLR Process is Broken Before it Starts

In a recent survey of Medical Affairs professionals, a painful truth emerged. When asked about the time required to review promotional materials, one response summed up the industry-wide frustration:

"If this comes from someone who throws things over the fence expecting me to fix their sloppiness — 10 minutes. If it’s high quality, probably 1–2 hours. But I’ve spent weekends on bad ones."

The survey data suggests that Review of Promotional Materials consumes roughly 20% of a Medical Director's time, often spilling into evenings and weekends.

But here is the uncomfortable reality: the bottleneck isn't usually the medical complexity. It’s the "Garbage In" problem.

The "Chinese Whispers" of Reference Management

The biggest friction point in MLR isn't the science; it's the administration of the science. The survey respondents highlighted real-world issues that dramatically extend review time:

1. Reference errors: Citing secondary sources or abstracts rather than primary data.
2. "Chinese Whispers": Copy-pasting claim lists from old documents without verifying if the original source actually supports the new context.
3. Subtle Drift: The innocent addition of marketing adjectives like "unique" or "best" that renders a previously approved claim non-compliant.
4. Lack of Annotation: Forcing the Medical Director to hunt through a 20-page PDF to find the one sentence that supports a claim.

When marketing or agencies submit drafts with these errors, they aren't just asking for approval; they are asking Medical Affairs to do the forensic work of fixing the content.

Moving Compliance Upstream

At PharmaText.ai, we believe that compliance should be a constraint of the design phase, not just the review phase.

If we want to stop "throwing things over the fence," we need tools that prevent the garbage from being created in the first place. This is why we built our Precision Traceability engine.

Unlike standard generative AI, which treats facts as "suggestions," PharmaText anchors every generated sentence to specific coordinates in your uploaded PDF.

• Before: An agency drafts a claim, loses the specific page number, and guesses the citation. The Medical Director rejects it. Cycle repeats.
• With PharmaText: The claim is generated from the PDF. The citation is automatically linked to the exact pixel coordinates of the source text.

The Result?

When the draft finally hits Veeva Vault, the Medical Director isn't hunting for evidence. They are simply verifying it.

We don't replace the review. We just make sure that what is being reviewed is actually ready for review. Stop spending weekends fixing sloppiness, and start using technology to ensure quality before the "Submit" button is ever pressed.