Quality Decision-Making Practices in Pharmaceutical Companies and Regulatory Authorities: Current and Proposed Approaches to Its Documentation

BACKGROUND: Pharmaceutical companies and regulatory agencies endeavor to relate their decision making with outcomes to improve future decision making and to ensure that gained knowledge is fed back into a learning system. Nevertheless, such a correlation can only be achieved by documenting the expected outcome of a decision at the time it is made, enabling comparison of the expected outcome with the actual result. METHODS: Participants at an international workshop discussed how the documentation of decisions could be evolved as companies and agencies look to improve their knowledge base. Discussions were informed by a pre-workshop survey of pharmaceutical companies and regulatory agencies. RESULTS: Most survey participants from 12 companies (55% response rate) and 11 agencies (73% response) have a system in place to enable documentation of major decisions, however, systems are used primarily to document outcomes rather than the process, while information from documentation is not always used, and feedback loops are not in place. The majority of participants indicated that their organization currently documents most decision-making practices included in the proposed template. Workshop participants agreed that all major past decisions should be referenceable and suggested incentives to enable decisions to be referenced, and confirmed elements and characteristics of a decision-documentation template. CONCLUSIONS: This survey and workshop identified the current landscape and gaps in the documentation of decision making and suggested revisions for a proposed documentation template. The use of technology to enable information extraction with support from artificial intelligence and future decision making was a recommendation highlighted by participants.