As a Compliance Officers, you must to stay on top of the behaviors and actions of employees across the organization to minimize risk. Simply reporting your annual Sunshine Act transactions once a year is not sufficient for a healthy compliance program. There’s nothing worse than reviewing your annual submission only to find a string of out-of-compliance payments or behaviors that have been going on for months.
Disparate Data Blurs Visibility
Today, you must be equipped with data for a more “real-time” monitoring approach. The most recent DOJ guidance for compliance reinforces this, directing that teams must have data access and resources to be effective. In theory, getting access to your data should be straightforward. Many companies are automating expense tracking through tools like Concur or Oracle. In reality, getting a holistic look at your environment is difficult:
- Transactions and HCP support programs are spread across many different enterprise systems. These systems can range from complex CRM tools to cryptic spreadsheets maintained manually.
- IT departments are overtaxed and may not have the bandwidth to serve the compliance team beyond the basics
- Hiring a consulting firm to build an integrated data solution is expensive and time-consuming
Integrated Data is the Key
Because of these challenges, some compliance officers choose to settle for sampling transaction data – manually reviewing a handful of transactions to ensure there are no issues. Although better than nothing, this approach can expose you to compliance risk. In addition, when you sample individual transactions, you have a very limited view of the compliance landscape. You can only achieve true visibility comes from monitoring of the entire data set. More importantly, matching transactions from different, disconnected systems can uncover trends, outliers, and linked actions that reveals much more strategic insight into your business.
Full compliance data monitoring is within your reach. Sapling Data can help you build a data-driven compliance strategy for proactive monitoring. Contact us to learn how.