European Local Law Disclosure Reporting implementation at a Top 10 Pharma with Cresen Solutions’ SpendMate?
Cresen Solutions was formed to provide distinct and qualified services to the Life Sciences Industry. Our organization has a clear focus and mission to enable improved business outcomes through advanced technology solutions and analytical expertise. The leadership team is composed of seasoned healthcare industry experts focused on enabling the technological advancements necessary in today’s ever-changing healthcare landscape. Strong foundations in technology systems and solutions, as well as the business acumen to enable predictable business results are keys to our success. Experience, quality, and innovation are the cornerstones of our team’s capabilities and will be applied to each engagement. SpendMate?, a Global Transparency Reporting solution, is a flagship product for Cresen Solutions and embodies our mission of solving client's business challenges while enabling them to excel through innovative solutions and quality deliverables. SpendMate? solves the complex business process challenges companies encounter in a concerted effort to satisfy the insatiable appetite of countries and regulatory bodies around the world, seeking more transparency between industry and the healthcare community via transfer of value reporting regulations.
In the fall of 2020, Cresen Solutions was engaged by a top 10 pharmaceutical company client, having recently acquired a large multinational competitor, and was embarking on a post-acquisition initiative to achieve significant cost synergies across key business functions. The client was familiar with Cresen Solutions’ well-regarded reputation in the Transparency Reporting domain and sought their expertise to streamline disclosure reporting for European Local Law requirements utilizing the feature rich capabilities available in Cresen Solutions’ SpendMate? application for Global Transparency reporting.
The scope of the engagement spanned the Transparency process lifecycle - collection, aggregation, validation, and reporting of transfers of value provided to reportable recipients in several European countries for the 2020 reporting period and onwards.?Given the dynamic global regulatory climate that companies operate in today, Cresen Solution’s recommended that the first phase of the project focus on executing a detailed audit of the local law requirements. In partnership with the client’s compliance function, the applicable laws of all countries in scope were reviewed, country specific requirements were documented, and a comprehensive compliance rules tool was built to ensure the appropriate level of details were consistently maintained and available to impacted stakeholders. The compliance rules tool housed the following key details about each report: Regulation/code, applicable reporting entities, list of covered recipients, scope of disclosure, frequency of reporting and deadline. disclosure submission and format, along with other specific aspects such UCI, consent, and language requirements.
Upon completion of this effort, a series of workshops were held with the client’s local country compliance officers to understand how their business and Transparency program operated, what obstacles they were facing, and to design a business process using SpendMate? that would meet their reporting demands in the long term. Cresen Solutions collaborated with local country compliance officers to understand how engagements with HCPs and HCOs were managed, including how the transfers of value from these interactions were collected for reporting. As to be expected, given the client’s global footprint, and having just completed an acquisition, there were several legacy company-specific tools and business processes in use for the management of local country-based engagements. As a result, there were several challenges identified in the Transparency process lifecycle.
The top challenge recognized by several countries was the timeliness of the engagement spend collected. The local Transparency programs were manually collecting spend from the business and due to a variety of factors, it was not always provided in a timely manner putting the reporting at risk. Additionally, when the data was provided it was not always complete and it was common to find missing customer or spend data points needed for reporting. Typically, the data provided was not complete because either the business stakeholder was not familiar with the reporting requirements, or the data required for reporting was not easily ascertained. The inconsistent quality of the customer data in upstream legacy company business systems was particularly challenging. It made it very difficult to identify reportable recipients, populate required reporting columns for customer details, and aggregate transfers of value by reporting categories as defined by local law reporting requirements. Finally, while producing the reports the transactions collected did not always have amount values in the currency required by local law and thus amount values needed to be converted manually.
After engaging key process stakeholders and taking an inventory of the engagement data available in their key business systems, several steps were implemented to streamline the collection and aggregation of spend. Automated feeds with the requisite customer and spend details from key business systems to SpendMate? were established using the application’s standard global spend templates. The intent of automating the collection was to improve the timeliness and completeness of the data, as well as to significantly reduce the manual effort, and potential for human error, involved. Business rules for mapping and validating the data collected from the HCP and HCO interactions were configured by locale. The exercise of mapping of business system field values to a standard list of values established for relevant reporting fields in SpendMate? improved the integrity of the information. Furthermore, setting up data validation rules for such fields on incoming transactions facilitated the proactive identification of errors that could be remediated upfront before reports were generated.
To address the poor-quality customer data coming from business systems, a SpendMate? feature that enriches customer records with demographic details from a third-party customer provider in real time was enabled.?The enablement of this feature ensured customer profiles used for reporting were regularly updated with the latest profile, address, or unique country identifier changes available and helped to reduce duplicate customer records. Duplicate customers from different business systems created in SpendMate? due to not being enriched by the third-party customer provider could be manually merged and transactions for the merged customer assigned to the preferred customer. The Customer Merge feature in SpendMate? served two purposes: prevented duplicate customers from appearing on reports while reporting all spend for all merged customers under one preferred customer. The outcome of these customer data enhancements by extension improved the overall quality of the disclosure reports and aggregating of spend by customer became more precise.
SpendMate’s user-friendly UI and robust report engine allowed local compliance officers to easily configure their business rules for generating and formatting disclosure reports. All aspects of their reporting needs could be managed in the UI ranging from mapping customer and spend attributes to reporting categories, formatting of data for reporting columns, to selecting the applicable currency. The conversion of amount values in other currencies to the reporting currency was handled while generating the report. The currency exchange rates in the tool were refreshed monthly. Changes in the underlying data collected impacting a report, in a particular reporting period, could be managed in the reporting engine. To ensure the accuracy and completeness of local law reports, validation reports were run in SpendMate? highlighting any issues with customer or transaction details pertaining to a specific local law reporting requirement. Issues identified with reportable data in the validation reports were easily updated using the bulk update feature in the tool.
In conclusion, the goals and objectives of the implementation were met with the spend needed for 2020 reporting year collected, aggregated, and validated in SpendMate?; followed by the generation of the reports and timely submission to the respective regulatory bodies.?Hopefully, you enjoyed reading this white paper on Cresen Solutions SpendMate?, and we look forward to publishing subsequent white papers covering the implementation of our other flagship products - MonitorMate? and EnageMate? - at top 10 Pharma companies soon. MonitorMate? is a Global Risk Assessment and Compliance Monitoring platform built on a question based analytical model for accessing, monitoring, and evaluating risk for a variety of healthcare interactions.?EngageMate?, a solution built to help life science companies proactively manage the entire lifecycle of HCP engagements from Business Planning, Needs Assessment, HCP Nominations, Fair Market Value, Spend Capture, and Engagement Closeout. In the meantime, please feel free to reach out to us if you are interested in learning more about our product and service offerings.?