Expanding the usage of your document management system
The medical and legal review process is unique to the life science industry. While operating in Europe, it is often a requirement that promotional material is reviewed and formally approved before publication. In some countries, the material must even be submitted to health authorities, ensuring regulatory compliance. Therefore, a formal standard operating procedure must be adopted. Typically, companies perform such a process by leveraging a cloud solution or on-premises document management system.
Given the scope of the MLR SOP (Medical, Legal Regulatory), a lot of different stakeholders must be involved in the process of obtaining approval. It is not an exception to have more than 10% of the companies’ employee requiring a license for the approval system, leading to the document management system for promotional material being a significant share of the marketing IT spend. The best approach to create value from the licenses is to maximize the business benefits from the usage, as the cost is fixed and linked to the SOP.
Not all the document management capabilities can be leveraged from day 1. At BASE, we have specialized in maximizing the value of the digital investment of life science companies, as digital publishing is an area where a lot can be achieved. The broad idea is to add digital assets management capabilities to the standard promotional material capabilities within the system. Solution vendors provide a lot of capabilities in that direction with their standard license, and no additional cost would be incurred by companies while reaping a lot of business benefits. We have identified multiple use cases where standard capabilities can be leveraged by the business to be more efficient.
The most common use cases identified for improvements and usage of the solution capabilities are:
- Internal digital assets publication: ensuring that only the most up to date version of the asset are available internally in any of the places where the asset is published
- Publication to external stakeholders: sharing only the most up to date version of the document externally and keeping the links to the latest version. Typically, you would like to ensure that only the most up to date version of the safety information are made available to an HCP irrelevant of when the HCP click on the link
- Searching for content within assets: enabling the users to perform google like searches within the assets can be of tremendous values, ensuring aligned access and that only the most up to date, approved content is available
- Creating libraries of assets: creating a central repository (Brand Portals) linked to a brand for the marketers in countries or regionally to be able to identify the content already created and limit the duplication of effort
In all, the above use cases should be an integral part of your digital asset management process as it ensures a consistent and up to date availability of the assets, at all time, in the digital world. It is possible to leap forward by ensuring that your MLR system meets the criteria of the identified use cases, thus creating additional business value on top of the traditional approach.
About BASE life science
BASE life science is an innovative and forward-thinking technology, product and service consultancy specialised in creating real business value from digital platforms and data. Our experienced teams are ready to help optimise your technology and business processes within Customer Engagement, Quality, Regulatory, Compliance and Clinical data management.
BASE currently operates from our offices located in Denmark, Switzerland, and Germany, from where we assist customers across the globe. You can safely choose us as your entrusted partner, as we will make it our goal to bring your vision to life.
About the author — Luca Morreale, Head of Operations, Switzerland
Highly motivated consultant focused on solving commercial & pricing challenges for Life Sciences companies through advisory, assessment or implementation services. Pragmatic & result driven with a strong ability to lead a team in a complex environment to achieve project goals. Ability to provide insights both at the strategy level as well as the operational level
