Tracking Global Physician Spend

More Things to Consider When Going Global

Scaling domestic data collection to meet global requirements is a little more complicated that some may think, said Ashish Kalgaonkar, senior director, global transparency reporting, Eli Lilly and Company, at the 2012 West Coast Life Sciences Meeting Management Forum. “The perception is that we should be able to do this easily, like credit-card companies do, but it is much more complicated for pharma.” That’s because you can’t just take information from a centralized database, crunch it, and spit it out in a simple report— not when the players include travel and meeting services, research and development, IT, data governance, privacy, external communications, legal, finance, training and development, internal communications, the expense reporting system, the alliance management office, sales and marketing, and corporate affairs.

There also are operational considerations, such as what is currently available in terms of data collection and reporting systems, and what is required to keep up with the burgeoning world regulations. “There are a lot of vendors who can help us take data and hack it up, but you have to have accurate and complete data to give them to package,” said Kalgaonkar. You may need a European database, a U.S. database, and also a country-by-country database, which could get prohibitively expensive for those who operate in several countries. You also need to develop a dispute-resolution process, in case a healthcare provider disagrees with the amount you’re reporting. “We have had maybe seven disputes in total since we started our registry,” so it may not come up very often, but you should have a process in place to handle it.