Strategies for Compliance Success in Meetings and Events

Compliance is measured on a continuum. Strategies to promote compliance for outsourced meetings management require an on-going commitment to investing in the people, processes, and systems that enable compliant choices.

The underlying goal is to achieve a culture of compliance, whereby compliance is natural, ingrained in your corporate identity, and woven into every process. Whether a manufacturer is emerging or fairly mature, the opportunity exists to grow, re-design, or refine strategies to improve compliance program effectiveness.

Below, we’ve outlined six areas where life science companies can focus their compliance strategies to better their meeting and event program experience.

6 areas to focus your compliance strategies

Staying apprised of the changing legal landscape and disseminating new policies as needed

1. With Consider charts that track pending legislation
2. Use dashboards that highlight relevant components of law
3. Create charts that show which components of laws are relevant to different roles

Testing/evaluating audit & controls procedures

1. With a mindset towards focusing on high risk activities, work with a committee across different departments to create your risk assessment
2. Start simple and as warranted, expand your audits
3. Be consistent

Simplifying HCP and vendor payments

1. Evaluate the efficiency, accuracy, and effectiveness of your own payment process
2. Tools exist to process non-employee reimbursements or honoraria; determine if those are worth further evaluation

Read how to simplify non-employee reimbursement with our
MeetingSource™ Expense tool.

Training and education needs

1. Thoughtfully developed content
2. Ability to update content periodically
3. Ability to deploy training (live, on-demand, or webinar)
4. Ability to track and verify attendance
5. Ability to test knowledge & mastery

Consolidating Vendors

1. Fewer vendors in your supply chain allow for the opportunity to infuse a strong culture of compliance within your outsourced teams and monitor their behavior increase
2. Consider whether your vendors are using multiple disparate systems for reporting spend and TOV. Consider whether reducing the number of systems to improve your TOV capture, eliminate manual entries, and improve efficiency or accuracy

Strengthen relationship between marketing and compliance

1. Consider how to engage compliance teams with marketing early on in the resolution of a problem
2. Find ways to “get to yes” in a compliant way
3. Look at team building opportunities between marketing and compliance

Developing a culture of compliance can feel daunting but it doesn’t have to be if you make concerted efforts to consider and implement improvements in some of the suggested life science strategies above.

Looking for more information on Life Sciences and healthcare compliance? Take a look at our Compliance Tips for Healthcare & Pharma Meetings for more inspiration.