You need technology to be successful

Generic budgeting and management tools can’t effectively handle the multiple sources in a real pharma environment. You need an integrated, tailored solution.

One of the biggest challenges for life sciences companies and in particular the agencies running their speaker program or related communication campaigns is that a great deal of information must be tracked, reported, and fed into the process appropriately in order to maximize efficiency and ensure compliance with relevant local and federal regulations. Often this will be exacerbated by the fact that this data resides in multiple different underlying systems, with different data storage protocols and no easy way to bring it all together. It’s cumbersome and time consuming for an agency to go into the different systems to get what they need to plan/execute programs and then to run reports for their pharma customer. A quick sample of the sort of information that is needed could include:

• Status of speaker contract (active/expired)
• Speaker honoraria status (approaching/reached cap?)
• Is the Speaker trained on the topic?
• How much have we spent?
• Is there sufficient budget to host program?
• Are there a sufficient number of attendees to proceed with the program?
• Where are the attendee signatures stored?
• Where is the survey data stored?
• What is the overall spend YTD?
• Where are the speaker T&E reports stored?
• Are they reimbursed in timely fashion?
• Is the speaker honoraria paid out?
• Where is the ToV information? Reporting Status?
• How do I generate the reports the customer requires?
• And much more…

As a result of the typical spread of underlying systems holding the information, generic software tools are unlikely to be effective for budgeting, expense tracking, attendee management, surveys, etc. It will be difficult to perform these fundamental functions in a holistic way that provides instant visibility into everything that’s happening. Even if an agency implements a “portal” to handle typical interactions with field reps and KOLs, they will still need a back-end platform that can make sense of the data, not to mention the smart automation to handle potential out-of-compliance situations in real-time. Over time, data has to be updated in multiple systems and somehow kept in sync, a situation that’s likely to lead to data handling errors and potential compliance issues.

There are also a lot of agency activities that generate paperwork that should really be automated. For example completing AV request forms or travel request forms for the speaker, sending reminder (form letters) to field and KOL, and ultimately creating auditable billing reports for the customer. It would be exceedingly time-consuming for agency personnel to generate these manually.

The real solution is a fully integrated platform, tailor made from the ground up to deal with unique complexities of Life Sciences marketing programs and capable of bringing source data together in one place for easy management and reporting. It’s the only way to ensure maximum compliance. Pharmagin is such a platform, built over a decade of work with agencies and pharmas.