Streamlining compliance and engagement: How a pharmaceutical company optimized HCP processes

Client background

The client is a leader in complex therapeutic areas, offering life-changing medicines for rare and serious diseases. This global biopharmaceutical company with multiple commercial therapies focused on the oncology and neuroscience spaces, their research is driven by their patient-focused and science-driven approach which has allowed advancements across their active pipeline. The company was founded in 2003 in California.   

The business challenge 

The global biopharmaceutical company recognized the need to optimize their processes for engaging with healthcare professionals (HCPs) while remaining externally compliant with global rules and regulations. The organization’s existing processes were duplicative and inefficient for both internal operations and for the external HCPs and ran the risk of being non-compliant. 

Additionally, the organization had the opportunity to streamline the technology used for HCP engagement, providing a more user-friendly and simplified solution to its internal stakeholders as well as HCPs around the world.  

Strategy and solution

Baker Tilly worked with the company to redefine its global process for HCP (healthcare professional) engagement, transitioning from burdensome legacy systems and manual processes to a more streamlined and standardized approach. This newly defined process enhances consistency across the organization and evolves the role of key functions, such as Compliance, positioning them as business partners and advisors. The revamped approach has significantly reduced administrative tasks and shortened the overall engagement life cycle, as demonstrated by metrics showing decreased time from engagement initiation to contracting and from invoice submission to payment. 

To further support this transformation, the biopharmaceutical company implemented Baker Tilly’s end-to-end HCP engagement solution, engagementNOW, which integrates with critical systems such as the customer master database and payment processing solutions. Additionally, the organization launched Baker Tilly’s fair market value (FMV) compensation database, fmvNOW®, and the pre-tiered global key opinion leader (KOL) database, kolNOW®. These solutions eliminate the time-intensive work of determining FMV for HCPs and KOLs, contributing to a more efficient, scalable HCP engagement process. 

With a comprehensive approach to addressing unique business challenges, Baker Tilly’s solution has also reduced bottlenecks and improved the customer experience. For instance, the invoice-to-pay timeframe is now averaging less than 7 – 10 business days, increasing efficiency while supporting the need for robust compliance controls across the entire HCP engagement process. Internal approval processes have also been streamlined leading to a reduction of the time from initiation through contracting by 30%.