Compliance officers are turning to more data-driven approaches to actively monitor their compliance risk. With the Sunshine Act and associated reporting requirements now in place for more than 8 years, a tremendous amount of industry data is available to the public. Compliance officers have historically shared internal data with company leadership and the board of directors to show they are on top of global relationships and transactions and the potential risk associated with them.
Recently, some of our clients have started to look outward to take advantage of the data available to compare their risk profile with the industry. Benchmarking against industry peers not only gives them more confidence in their compliance programs, but also adds strategic insight into their go-to-market strategies. Leadership always feels safer knowing what the market is doing and where you stand within that framework.
How do you find industry benchmarks? Because each manufacturer operates with a different set of product offerings and a different definition of “their market,” it’s important to tightly define the comparison. We’ve worked with clients to specify which companies make up the best benchmark comparisons. We then aggregate the data to define their benchmark comparisons. Although many compliance officers are hyper-focused on the internal data they need to monitor their program, this external data can also be enlightening.
Some of the interesting questions you can answer with external benchmarks include:
- How much are my industry peers spending on relationships with HCPs? (oftentimes, we normalize this number against sales figures or number of sales people to give you a more realistic comparison)
- How much are my industry peers spending on strategic relationships with HCPs vs transactional relationships (strategic relationships involve consulting, training, and research)
- How many different HCPs are my industry peers working with? How wide is their footprint in the market?
- What is the average spend per HCP for my industry peers? How does that vary between strategic and transactional spending?
- How has spending trended over the last few years for my industry peers?
When you apply a data-driven approach to your compliance monitoring strategy, don’t forget to incorporate external, publicly-available data to complete the picture.