The Challenge

Engaging healthcare professionals (HCPs) and other service providers within the life sciences industry presents a myriad of challenges. From navigating intricate compliance regulations to managing complex workflows and interactions across departments, the process of HCP/O engagement is often fraught with inefficiencies and errors. Traditional methods of tracking engagements, such as spreadsheets and emails, are no longer sufficient in an age dominated by big data and stringent reporting requirements. As such, there is an urgent need for a solution that streamlines the HCP engagement lifecycle, ensuring compliance, efficiency, and accuracy at every step.

Engaging a service provider is often a lengthy process with many moving pieces and interactions between departments. During that time, the Compliance department attempts to keep track of and approve all activities and service providers to ensure compliance with external government regulations and internal company policies. The HCP engagement process involves various workflows involving reviewers from across the company. As an added layer of complexity, the events can be held around the globe with service providers from many countries, all of whom need their respective cross-border workflows. While it is possible to track the engagement process via spreadsheets, word documents, and emails, this can be messy and error-prone. In today’s age of big data and required government reporting, the difficult task of manually tracking engagements is quickly becoming impossible. Now, more than ever, it is essential to have an easy-to-use system where a company can track and manage activities, approvals, and FMV tiers and rates in one place.

The HCP engagement lifecycle encompasses a series of crucial steps, each demanding meticulous attention to detail and adherence to compliance standards:

1. Annual Planning: This phase involves capturing all activities planned for the year, aligning them with strategic goals, and establishing performance metrics for tracking and evaluation.
2. Needs Assessment: Activity concepts are captured, reviewed, and refined to ensure alignment with business objectives and compliance requirements.
3. Nominations: Service providers are assigned to activities, undergo fair market value assessments, debarment screening, FMV exception requests, and are reviewed for suitability for that activity.
4. Contracting: Contracts are generated, reviewed, and signed, either within the engagement platform or through integration with dedicated contract systems.
5. Content Management: Documents and activities-related materials are uploaded, reviewed, and annotated, ensuring compliance with regulatory standards in a dedicated system or within the engagement platform.
6. Activity Execution: This is when the event will occur.
7. Payments and Closeout: Spend data is captured, invoices are generated, and payment reconciliation is facilitated, ensuring transparency and compliance with reporting requirements. All information is stored for future reference or audits.

EngageMate’s Solution

EngageMate is an elegant system to streamline and simplify the HCP engagement lifecycle. Built on a flexible framework, EngageMate offers modules tailored to meet the unique needs of every company, ensuring seamless integration and comprehensive functionality:

• Annual Planning: EngageMate’s adaptive nature empowers companies to transition from traditional, paper-based annual planning processes to a dynamic digital platform. By linking activities created during the year to the annual plan, it is easy to track progress and metrics.

• Needs Assessment: Through the integration of customizable business rules, EngageMate ensures the thorough and consistent capture of activity concepts during the needs assessment phase. By enforcing compliance standards and data accuracy, EngageMate enhances the quality of information submitted for review, Reducing the amount of time reviewers spend asking submitters for updates.
• Nominations: Leveraging modern architecture and API connectivity, EngageMate seamlessly integrates with existing customer master programs. This integration ensures only the most up-to-date information is used for activities and reporting. If you don’t have a centralized Customer Master EngageMate is capable of storing all your customer profiles.

• Contracting: Most information needed for the HCP contract is captured in EngageMate during the concept and nomination stages. If you already have a dedicated contract system EngageMate can connect to it and share the needed information to generate the contract. Contracts can also be generated in EngageMate and sent for electronic signatures, completed contracts are stored with the appropriate activities.

• Content Management: If needed EngageMate provides a robust content review system, allowing users to upload, review, and annotate documents. This approach facilitates collaborative document management, with all documents attached to the activity they will be used in conjunction with.

• Review and Approval: With customizable workflows and automated notifications, EngageMate simplifies the review and approval process. Companies can configure sequential, parallel, or user-selected reviewer workflows based on the preferred business process, ensuring a full yet efficient engagement review process. Workflows can be set up by different countries, activity types, amount of risk, product, department, and even budget thresholds.

• Activity Execution: – On the activity start date, the system can move the activity to track when the activity should be happening. After the end date, the system automatically moves the activity to close-out.

• Payments and Closeout – Once an activity concludes, there is the critical task of capturing spend to ensure accurate transparency reporting, and EngageMate offers multiple avenues to accomplish this. Users can manually enter the paid amounts for nominated service providers and attendees. Alternatively, EngageMate seamlessly integrates with finance systems, automating the process of populating invoices for review before they are processed in the finance system. Once payments are made, information is transmitted back to EngageMate, enabling real-time tracking of spend against estimated costs within the activity. Additionally, for activities where invoices are generated within EngageMate, a dedicated HCP/O portal provides healthcare professionals with direct access to review their invoices, contracts, profile information, and activities.

Finally, while not part of the HCP engagement lifecycle, the system can capture external grant requests. The requestor will submit login credentials and create a profile. Once in the system, they can fill out any external grant request. This is then assigned a grant coordinator and reviewers, then finished with closeout and outcomes management.

In conclusion, EngageMate is a transformative solution for HCP/O engagement, offering unparalleled efficiency, compliance, and user experience. By leveraging advanced technology and intuitive design, EngageMate empowers life sciences companies to navigate the complexities of HCP/O engagement with confidence and ease, driving enhanced business outcomes in an ever-evolving healthcare landscape. As the industry continues to evolve, EngageMate standas ready to adapt and innovate, providing life sciences companies with the tools they need to succeed in a competitive and dynamic environment.

Visit our EngageMate page here -> https://cresensolutions.com/solutions/engagemate/