Part I: A Conference Overview and What It All Means for Your Training
Welcome to the first in this multi-part series based on CBI’s recent Pharmaceutical Compliance Congress! For obvious reasons, the conference went virtual this year, yet it offered an impressive lineup of industry professionals, vendors, and government officials offering compelling tips and guidelines for building and maintaining an effective compliance program in the life sciences industry. In addition to the live presentations, organizers offered 14 “on-demand” presentations covering an impressive array of topics, so from a content perspective, the virtual format created even more opportunities for learning.
Over the next month, I will touch on some of the thoughts shared by presenters related to topics like speaker programs, patient programs, risk assessments, third-parties, patient advocacy groups, transparency, and strategies for field team compliance, to name a few. And since the mission of this blog, and the PharmaCertify team, is to help you reduce risk and strengthen your compliance culture through training, I will include suggestions for growing and modifying your compliance training practices and curriculum in response to the information shared during the conference.
Kudos to the team at CBI/Informa for their diligent efforts to replicate the learning and networking experience of the live conference. PCC 2020 was a busy conference, with an impressive volume of content scheduled throughout the week and in the on-demand sessions. If you attended and did not have the opportunity to review the on-demand sessions, I have been told these will remain available until September 14th. You will especially want to review the State-of-the-Art Compliance Training session, where my colleague Dan O’Connor and compliance professionals from Sage Therapeutics, Regeneron, and Akebia Therapeutics share creative approaches for increasing training engagement and adoption. You don’t want to miss that one!
While some of the topics were familiar to anyone who has attended the conference in recent years, the “elephant in the room” was not ignored, as a multitude of presenters addressed the overwhelming challenges of keeping an entire organization focused on conducting business in a compliant manner during these unprecedented times. The result was an interesting blend of traditional and familiar compliance conference topics and guidance on navigating the risk associated with conducting business in a highly regulated industry during a pandemic, or at least as much guidance as can be expected at this time.
From a high-level training standpoint, the presentations at the conference affirm the need for a more dynamic and blended curriculum, with microlearning and other components delivered across your learners’ timelines. The method by which life sciences employees conduct their daily activities has suddenly changed, and the level of risk and potential for violations has grown exponentially with that shift.
One of the more compelling presentations was the “Criticality of Compliance” session with John Crowley of Amicus Therapeutics. John shared his family’s moving story and his incredible journey as he pushed for the development of a product to help his two children (did you know his story was the basis for the feature film, Extraordinary Measures?). As he spoke, John reflected on what the commitment means to the patients battling the rare diseases his company’s products treat, “as life sciences professionals, we are an extension of the oath that doctors and nurses have taken, and it is a solemn oath,” he said, “if there is a compliance violation, everything we hoped for in the next several years is threatened.” It is a laudable approach to building a culture of compliance at Amicus and one worthy of emulation.
I look forward to sharing more ideas from the conference, as well as subsequent training suggestions you can utilize to strive toward similar ideals and goals in your organization.
Thanks for reading!
Sean Murphy
PharmaCertify By NXLevel Solutions
Coming Up: Speaker Programs and Patient Support Programs