AHM
Compliance and Efficiency Gains for Life Sciences Companies

As part of his commitment to the industry and to his clients, Nigel Whitehead, CEO at AHM (Advanced Health Media) travels extensively and listens a lot. What he hears from industry leaders is often frustration with the costs and complexity engendered by complex regulations and compliance issues related to managing interactions with Healthcare Professionals (HCPs).

Complexity Begets Complexity

Currently, according to Whitehead, there are too many disparate IT systems and business processes operating at Life Science organizations. Critical HCP interaction information often resides in multiple, sometimes incompatible systems and follows inconsistent business rules. This results in lack of standardized business processes and, inevitably, data inaccuracy. The absence of robust and standardized integration means that key information is not flowing when and where it is needed, compromising the ability of organizations to stay compliant, particularly with regard to their myriad of interactions with HCPs. Even when compliance is achieved, it is often at a tremendous cost in time and resources—degrading the ability of organizations to operate with the agility required in an increasingly tough market.

The solution, Whitehead believes, is for Life Science organizations to take an enterprise platform approach to ensuring compliant HCP interaction across their global affiliates. What does this mean? Most of all it means effective and affordable integration and standardization across markets.

An AHM Approach

“Companies need to maintain and monitor the interactions consistently,” says Whitehead. That’s why AHM has developed a single end-to-end platform for managing Healthcare Professional (HCP) and Healthcare Organization (HCO) interactions and maintaining compliance with key regulations.

AHM’s CentrisDirect™ compliance platform suite leverages the underlying global platform provided by Salesforce, “To address the operational and compliance needs related to interacting with HCPs across a diverse set of interaction types,” Whitehead explains.

CentrisDirect is designed to address the diverse operational and compliance needs related to transfer of value reports, consulting engagements, speaker training, and clinical R&D

Because it is built on cloud technology and supports multiple languages and currencies, CentrisDirect can be deployed anywhere in the world.

While CentrisDirect allows pharmaceutical companies to manage their HCP and HCO interactions in a compliant manner, AHM’s customer-centric portal, CentrisConnect™ provides a way for their customers to connect directly with HCPs to manage individual logistics and financial payments information. HCPs can view and manage the critical interaction data via web or mobile device. “While interacting with HCPs, companies want a highly intuitive environment that will enable key opinion leaders and other important customers to manage their work in a holistic way, and CentrisConnect addresses this need,” says Whitehead.

AHM applied its deep industry knowledge to support creation of “best practice” modules which support a “pro-active compliance” approach to data and process needs. Over the course of its 15 years in business, AHM has managed HCP interactions across 90 countries. “We serve 11 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. and an increasing number of emerging companies. One pharmaceutical company quickly realized that their current systems were not capable of supporting compliance to global requirements. The company was struggling to apply common standards and processes across its global affiliates. By deploying AHM’s CentrisDirect, they created a best practice to guide the global workforce through a unified process for interacting with HCPs.

For the future, “AHM is planning on further investing in analytics capabilities,” says Whitehead. Although the healthcare interaction space has an abundance of compliance data it is still very fragmented. “There is a tremendous need for appropriate analysis of that data in order to maintain better governance,” he says. AHM is also planning to expand its services in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Latin America and across the U.S.