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Friday, October 19
Fri, Oct 19, 7:30 AM - 8:30 AM
Hall of Mirrors
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Protecting Consumers from Counterfeit Medicines Using R and Google Maps (304956)

*Sarah Eltinge, Johnson & Johnson Advanced Analytics 

Keywords: Geocoding, visualization, non-conventional data, leaflet maps, R

Johnson & Johnson’s Global Brand Protection (GBP) team works with local law enforcement agencies to identify counterfeit, potentially harmful medicines worldwide. GBP asked our Advanced Analytics team for help in utilizing a novel, non-conventional data source in their work. We successfully leveraged the free-text location information in this data source, which presented some tough analytic questions.

In order to utilize this multi-lingual location information, we queried Google Maps’ Geocoding API with R. We extracted latitude and longitude data from the results and used the new sf (simple features) package to aggregate it to various political geographies. In the future, we could group this location data by distribution regions, known counterfeit trade routes, and more. We constructed leaflet maps in RShiny to dynamically display this data to our colleagues in GBP, who saw great potential to leverage this system and protect consumers.

Because of R, geocoding and visualization tasks that normally cost tens of thousands of dollars were free, customizable, and easy to deploy - a win for Johnson & Johnson and consumers around the globe.