Now that the Sunshine Act has been in place for 10 years, most medical device and pharmaceutical manufacturers are able to manage the annual transparency reporting requirements (although significant changes are in store for 2021 Sunshine reporting requirements that will add new challenges). Compliance officers are now looking for ways to adopt a more proactive model monitor transactions and relationships in real-time to get in front of compliance issues before they escalate. Building a healthcare compliance program that leverages data in smart ways reduces risk and generates value in multiple dimensions:
1. Your compliance analyst team is inefficient and disengaged – Many compliance teams are dependent on centralized operations teams to equip them with tools and data for monitoring, or worse are juggling system extracts and spreadsheets on their own to monitor transactions. Data-driven compliance monitoring drives efficiency and engagement with the analysts on your team – Rather than feeling buried by hundreds of spreadsheets and data exports or feeling blind by only seeing small samples of the data they need, your analysts will thrive using modern tools for visualization and data manipulation. We’ve found that the average analyst is 3 times more efficient when equipped with scalable, cloud-based analytics tools compared to the more traditional collection of spreadsheets and desktop reporting tools.
2. Your compliance team gets surprised too often – With modern analytics and visualization tools, you can unlock new insights and knowledge not possible with traditional tools, enabling you to “see around corners” more effectively by making it easier to find outliers, trends, and risk factors across vast data sets. Rather than react to troubling trends that appear in annual reports, you can monitor your entire universe of transactions and relationships as they evolve through modern data analytics, and no longer feel undermined by a lack of visibility.
3. You want to better align your compliance strategy with Department of Justice (DOJ) guidance. Having a demonstrable data practice can better defend and protect the company in the event of an investigation, audit, or legal situation. With hard evidence of the processes and systems in place that are backed by data and an active monitoring approach, you will be in a better position when potential issues arise.
4. You want to a place at the table as a strategic leader in the business. Once equipped with a proactive monitoring approach to compliance, you – as the lead compliance officer for the firm – can take a more strategic posture when working across the enterprise with this knowledge. Rather than always feeling overwhelmed and dreading the next potential compliance issue that may come up, you can rest easy knowing that you can respond quickly and naturally to any inquiries – and you can contribute to strategic discussions involving sales channel effectiveness and competitive behavior with the right strategy for data integration and dashboards.
Building a data-driven monitoring strategy for your compliance team is not limited to large organizations. You can move out of reactive mode and stand up a cloud-based, central compliance data monitoring platform for the cost of about half an analyst on your team. Download our data-driven compliance monitoring white paper to learn more at SaplingData.com.