HCP Portal
With all roads leading to digital, the collaboration between
HCP
s and pharma companies can effectively be managed through an HCP
Portal – a digital collaboration tool where health care professionals and pharma companies can interact throughout the HCP
workflow.
What Is An HCP Portal?
Let’s be clear - an
HCP
Portal is not a marketing platform or a conduit for promotion. We refer to the HCP
Portal as a practical, critical, compliant tool to support the Pharma-HCP
interaction cycle, from initial contracting all the way to payment, an end-to-end solution.
Where Can Such A Portal Help?
The
HCP
Portal should therefore support and facilitate all the activities that constitute the end-to-end contract-to-pay process. These include:
- Managing a list of relevant and appropriate
Experts
, segmented according to various criteria
- Identifying the most relevant
HCP
s for a specific engagement – through a validated, compliant process
- Handling the initial invitations to the
Experts
, which may involve multiple rounds of invites to multiple event/engagement participants
- Managing the acceptance by participants to your events (or decline, query, optional, etc.)
- Handling of contracting and/or SOW to cover the event (either existing, additions, or new contract)
- Creating contracts, managing the workflow, ensuring approval and compliance at all steps, dealing with unforeseen/exceptional contractual requirements by either party
- Digital signatures along the way
- Sharing and approval of materials for the event (e.g. presentations, training)
- Travel and logistical organization – either directly through the portal or in close integration with logistical vendor software
- Capturing travel preferences, and sharing with relevant vendors
- Distribution of travel and logistical data to all
stakeholders
– participant, internal staff, external providers, etc.
- Management of compliance and approval workflows at multiple levels e.g. approval of use of a KOL located in country X for participation in an event in country Y organized by country
- Service delivery confirmation at various points during the engagement
- Management of post-service requirements to ensure completion and delivery of service
- Submission of expenses and OOPs by
HCP
s (including integration with external submission tools e.g. Concur/SAP)
- Payment of expenses and honoraria –
HCP
Portal can either act as a trigger to external payment systems (last mile management) or implement this directly
- Management of consent and other documents as relevant throughout the contract-to-pay process
In the context of what an
HCP
Portal can help with, the above list is by no means exhaustive! In fact, they barely begin to scratch the surface. Each one of the above points can be expanded further in detail with subroutines and sub-sub routines galore, and an effective HCP
Portal should be able to manage all of these throughout the contract-to-pay cycle
How To Ensure HCP Portal Success?
There are two important considerations that can help ensure that your project does not go the way that large complex IT projects often do – over budget, out of time, and not fit for purpose.
The first consideration involves flexibility. The
HCP
Portal must be able to accommodate the unique needs of all your key markets, in all various combinations, covering many different types of engagements, from contract-to-pay. Each markets/user must view the HCP
Portal as a simple, effective, supportive tool that perfectly matches their unique needs. Without this flexibility, an HCP Portal rapidly loses its value, and grinds to a halt.
The second consideration involves the user experience, not just from the point of view of the pharmaceutical user, but also the
HCP
user. The experience should be balanced to serve both these stakeholders
– a challenging proposition given the different needs, even though both are bound by the same shared workflow to an extent.
Why Should The Health Care Professional Sit At The Heart Of The HCP Portal?
When we presented at the Managing
HCP
Interactions conference on “Unifying the End-to-End Workflow”, we raised the idea of building the entire contract-to-pay digital platform (the HCP
Portal) around the one constant that applies throughout the workflow: the HCP
.
The justification for taking such an approach is overwhelming. For example, consider just the initial stages of planning an interaction with a health care professional – even at this early stage you will need to know the
HCP
’s availability, collaboration preferences, payment & consulting caps, any potential conflicts they may have, travel restrictions, etc. All of these require direct HCP
input.
So why don’t we get them involved as early as possible? Why can’t they become an integral part of the
HCP
Portal workflow right from the start? Why can’t they participate proactively in, what is after all, their own contract-to-pay workflow?
But more often than not, an
HCP
Portal is designed with the pharma companies’ workflow as the main motivation.
If you are designing a portal for your customers to buy luxury hand-made shoes, you wouldn’t design the site based solely on your logistical or supply-chain requirements, would you?
Our proposition therefore is that technology can truly transform the contract-to-pay experience, but only with the
HCP
at the heart of it all, not treated as an afterthought.
Because utilizing technology to align CRM, FMV, Transfer of Value, Privacy/Consent, Caps, Contracting, Approvals, and all the other myriad of compliance, regulatory, and transparency necessities into a single
HCP
end-to-end / contract-to-pay workflow must surely involve the single constant of that workflow – the HCP
.
Now doesn’t that sound like effective
HCP
engagement through an effective HCP
Portal?
Our Superfly End-to-End Solution
If you’re getting the feeling that we know what we’re talking about, it’s because we do. System Analytic have been singularly focussed on improving the efficiency and efficacy of the KOL/
HCP
Engagement Cycle, a process spanning from identifying the right people to work with and managing operations and contractual components, all the way to reporting on engagements as individuals and as groups and using data derived from this cycle to help improve and drive engagements forward.
A decade of experience has enabled us to create
HCP
/KOL solutions to commonly shared pains that pharma teams experience during the contract-to-pay process.
