While the healthcare industry has always been highly regulated, recent developments mandate that transparency and compliance monitoring are not afterthoughts for manufacturers, healthcare organizations and healthcare professionals (HCPs).

The number of regulations continue to grow, and the penalties for violations become significantly larger given the availability of large volumes of spend and prescription data in the public domain. Already strapped for time, compliance teams simply cannot afford to devote the hours required for all that tracking, analysis and reporting manually or through spreadsheets — and even if they could, the risk of human error is simply too high.

The Sunshine Act requires companies to record all transfers of value, analyze these expenditures against pre-established thresholds and report them to the federal government and to designated state agencies. Failure to comply and follow an established process for engaging with HCPs can result in significant fines and multi-year audits of the company’s processes and procedures.

If manufacturers are to take a proactive stance in complying with today’s massive and growing web of regulations, new solutions are needed. Fortunately, today’s advanced analytics platforms give organizations the actionable insights that they need within their day-to-day working environment, not only to stay compliant, but also to become aware of and address potential violations before they cause expensive problems.

The Analytics Solution

For organizations looking to maintain a stance of proactive compliance in today’s regulatory environment, a manual approach simply isn’t viable. Forward-thinking companies are already making the leap into intelligent technologies that can simplify, streamline and ensure the accuracy of their compliance processes.

Today’s advanced analytics platforms can automatically monitor business rules and codes of conduct to ensure that the organization is always compliant and is able to address exceptions quickly and in a timely manner. Compliance teams can create filters, drill-down into their data and flag outliers that could indicate compliance risks.

When our customers began asking for a more robust analytics solution, we knew that a basic dashboard wouldn’t suffice. So, we built configurable dashboards that took into account specific compliance thresholds for a customer to highlight exceptions without needing to build customized dashboards for each customer. We needed a solution that would allow us to rapidly deploy those dashboards to all of the different users throughout our customer’s organization. The result, MediSpend Insight, not only removes much of the administrative burden from our customers’ already packed to-do lists, but also it helps them sleep better at night knowing that their compliance process is as solid as it can be.

MediSpend Insight enables customers to benchmark their spend against the competition, determine which key opinion leaders are being sought after by companies, for what purpose and how much they are being paid. MediSpend Insight also enables customers to monitor field force activities in real-time, identify and manage off-label use of products or devices and identify outliers and correct non-compliant behaviors.

For healthcare organizations looking to stay on the right side of compliance, we have bad news and good news. The bad news is that current regulatory requirements probably won’t be going away. The good news is that advanced analytics offers the solutions needed to stay on top of the rules, to be proactive in addressing problems as they arise and to fulfill obligations – all without placing undue burdens on staff. Now that’s a healthy solution we can all live with.

 

Neeraj Singhal
Vice President, Product Management

June 10, 2020