Even though government and regulatory bodies enforce transparency reporting requirements for life science companies, many corporations in this industry are still not ready to meet these new mandatory reporting requirements on Health Care Professional (HCP) aggregate Travel & Expense spend in an efficient and reliable manner, increasing the risk of non-compliance.

Non-compliant companies not only face punitive actions including fines but also may feel the impact to their reputation with investors and other stakeholders. Not having a HCP spend reporting system can turn out to be more expensive than making an investment in implementing an automated system and supporting processes to track, manage and report HCP spend information.

Life sciences companies have been developing or are already anticipating their obligation by law to develop aggregate HCP spend transparency reporting capabilities to comply with US State and Federal reporting laws (Sunshine Act), EFPIA Disclosure Code in Europe, and comparable transparency acts in other countries like Japan, Taiwan, Australia and Canada

FinTrans Solutions help their clients by offering end-to-end Global HCP Transparency Reporting Services, encompassing the following key elements:

    1. Provision of insights into countries’ current and anticipated regulatory requirements for HCP spend reporting.
    2. Development of a detailed HCP spend transparency reporting strategy.
    3. Identification of the right data sources and transport mechanisms for HCP related master & transactions data from external data provider or client databases to SAP Concur for HCP spend processing. For most clients, master and transactional data exists across numerous systems and, in some cases, is not always clearly attributed to the specific HCP. For many clients, identifying and validating the data integrity in the source systems and aggregating HCP reporting relevant data can be a cumbersome enterprise.
    4. Design and development of all in- and outbound integrations from and to externally sourced vendor databases (real-time data) or client systems (e.g., client CRM and/or event management solution).
    5. Configuration of the system by:
      • Activation of meaningful HCP related expense types (nature of spend),
      • Activation of one HCP attendee type under the attendee functionality,
      • Activation of HCP attendee related fields on the attendee form (e.g., HCP registration ID),
      • Activation of additional HCP custom fields such as event ID or Internal Order cost element on the attendee form, as well as,
      • Linkage of the HCP related custom fields to the attendee form and
      • Linkage of the HCP attendee type to all the respective HCP related expense types
    6. Enablement of meaningful and compliant transparency reporting capabilities either:
      1. via integration of the SAP Concur attendee extract into the client’s data warehouse or
      2. via Cognos Analytics & Intelligence reporting directly out of SAP Concur.

      In the event option 1 is selected, FinTrans Solutions will take care of the integration which will enable our client to leverage their data warehouse and create complex custom HCP spend reporting output run out of their data warehouse and drill down on HCP spend by HCP attendee and by individual HCP event code. If option 2 is selected, FinTrans’ Cognos Analytics & Intelligence experts will be able to create powerful HCP spend reporting outputs in a similar way as part of FinTrans’ standard “Analytics and Intelligence” service offering.

HCP spend reporting is not only about meeting regulatory requirements – it’s even more so a powerful way of managing and controlling HCP Travel & Expense spend while tracking planned vs. actual vs. residual HCP spend in real-time across multiple layers and monitoring HCP cost efficiencies as well as driving future HCP related procurement decisions. Therefore, Transparency Reporting must go hand in hand with early organisational alignment, development or modification of HCP spend processes and policies, the proper definition of roles & responsibilities, well-coordinated change management efforts, detailed program management and alignment of HCP data & HCP spend processing solutions via integration, starting with the closure of the execution of an individual event and concluding with compliant and value-added HCP transparency reporting enablement.

Illustration: HCP Transparency Reporting Integration Landscape