How to turn risk management into competitive advantage

This week's Expert View considers ways of maximizing the value of compliance data to drive commercial decisions, and is written by?Johan Holm, a principal at healthcare consultancy IQVIA.

The life sciences industry has always been subjected to transparency requirements. To help avoid compliance violations that may lead to penalties, many life science organizations have ramped up their efforts to collect compliance data and streamline the reporting process.

Data collection and reporting provides a clear and tangible benefit in the form of meeting complex regulatory requirements. However, organizations may be missing out on an opportunity to use this information outside the compliance department. With the right compliance management systems in place, it’s possible to generate actionable insights from compliance data and enable proactive decision-making across the organization.

Compliance data has value beyond compliance

Federal and state transparency laws require life science organizations to report their interactions with healthcare providers and healthcare organizations. These interactions include but aren’t limited to speaking engagements, lunch meetings, and clinical trials.

In the drive to implement regulatory compliance management systems, organizations have focused largely on the technology’s retrospective benefits – namely, internal and external audits. At face value, this is certainly understandable.

With federal and state attorneys general paying ever-closer attention to healthcare’s interactions with life sciences, from Purdue Pharma to Pfizer to Biogen, it’s imperative for organizations to demonstrate that they’re operating in full compliance with the law.

For many organizations, though, there remains an untapped benefit to the extensive data collection that regulatory scrutiny has required.

Compliance data has value beyond compliance, as it provides greater visibility into interactions with healthcare providers across the entire organization and allows for an assessment of the effectiveness of those engagements.

From compliance reporting comes a treasure trove of insights

One of the greatest benefits of proper compliance management is the ability to link previously disparate platforms and provide connected intelligence across engagements.

Take physician speaking engagements, for example. Tracking these interactions end-to-end requires looking at customer relationship management (CRM), expense management, contract management, event content programming, and logistics systems.

Even digital marketing campaigns require tracking CRM and email platforms, along with any databases in which physician contact information is stored.

As noted, establishing a holistic view of these disparate data sources in a single compliance management system has the obvious advantage of enabling more consistent adherence with compliance requirements. It also allows for ongoing monitoring, which helps organizations identify potentially problematic behavior as it’s happening.

There are many benefits beyond compliance, though. Coupling discrete data on interactions with analytics capabilities lets organizations spot patterns in engagement. Marketing teams can see which types of initial digital outreach are most likely to generate a follow-up, or sales forces can see whether virtual meetings, office visits, or meetings at industry events are most likely to increase prescriptions.

This insight gives organizations a significant competitive advantage. Traditionally, sales and marketing have moved slowly, with sales strategies revised quarterly and marketing content plans updated yearly. Readily available insight allows for rapid pivoting.

This helps organizations better meet customers where they are, it ensures resources are properly allocated for the most effective types of outreach, and it lets organizations better adapt to shifting market dynamics.

Empower compliance to benefit the entire organization

The ability to act on connected intelligence derived from compliance data doesn’t appear overnight. Once a compliance management system is in place, there are six key steps that organizations need to take.

• Standardize data collection to reduce transfer of value errors, harmonize the types of healthcare provider interactions, and provide a fully holistic view of end-to-end provider engagement.
• Provide a responsive interface that’s customized for the touchpoints that matter to an individual stakeholder while synchronizing updates to a shared data source for auditing and compliance purposes.
• Improve data capture to ensure that each touchpoint generates the high-quality data necessary for compliance monitoring, downstream reporting, and risk management.
• Shore up operational structure and avoid using multiple platforms to categorize engagements, calculate transfers of value, or conduct other activities associated with monitoring interactions.
• Focus on master data management so compliance management systems can handle both structured and unstructured data. Less time spent harmonizing data will result in faster time to ROI.
• Identify non-compliance trends through proactive analysis and use this insight to influence where to focus compliance monitoring efforts for executives, auditors, risk managers, and decision-makers.

Life science organizations have invested in compliance management primarily to protect themselves against increased scrutiny from federal and state enforcement agencies.

As leaders look to get the most from compliance management, they would be wise to consider how end-to-end insight into healthcare provider interactions enables connected intelligence that can influence sales and marketing strategies and empower quicker decision-making.

By recognizing that compliance data has value far beyond the compliance department, organizations can take what has been viewed as a risk-management requirement and turn it into a competitive advantage.