Educational Events Reporting

Reducing the burden of Pharmaceutical Educational Events Reporting by Grant Halloran, CEO Orbis

"Every six months Australian pharmaceutical companies that subscribe to the Medicines Australia (MA) Code of Conduct must submit a report to MA that lists the details of every Educational Event that they conducted in that period. Up until June 2008 the participating companies (47 in all) conducted over 15,000 events.

If one was to look at the data that comprises these reports, it might be easy to mistake the amount of effort that a pharmaceutical company goes through to create this report. The data set is not overly complex by business reporting standards, but this belies the overwhelming corporate effort that each company must make to produce this report.

The advent of this reporting requirement has added a considerable burden to various constituencies within the company. It is wrong to assume that this is simply a finance function. The other functions affected include Sales; Medical; Marketing and the Executive.

Making it Easy for Sales

At the very beginning of this process sales representatives are the people who generate ideas for events. They want to educate HCP’s. This has become a complicated minefield now where sales reps have to follow rigid guidelines that direct how an event can be staged and its format. This is further complicated by the need to differentiate between an Educational Event, a Sponsorship, a Grant, or a Donation. Each of these classifications must be handled differently internally and has different regulatory implications."

The Educational Event report is the end result of a long and complicated process that spans many different areas of the company. A typical process includes many steps, such as steps 1 - 8 below.