Meeting the federal and state aggregate spend reporting requirements demands significant time, resources, focus, and strategic processes from a life science organization.
The evolving nature of the requirements and expectations set by the CMS make it extremely difficult for life science companies to comply with them, let alone monitor and stay updated with changes to current rules and regulations.
For such reasons, organizations must build an effective and efficient aggregate spend solution as part of a comprehensive compliance program.
Through automation of tasks involved in aggregate spend reporting, such as data collection, validation, duplicate entry identification, and omissions, life sciences companies, and compliance teams can minimize the time required to meet the aggregate spend reporting deadline, ensuring timely submission of their reports to the CMS.
In addition to integrating or deploying a transparency reporting solution, below, we’re sharing some simple tactics that enable life sciences and compliance professionals to save time and quickly meet aggregate spend reporting deadlines.
1. The Proactive Approach
Testing and validating data as soon as it is generated would reduce the pressure on compliance teams as they would have evaluated and validated data prior to preparing federal and state reports.
This proactive approach needs to be planned and implemented in life sciences organizations to ensure that accurate reportable data is finalized long before the CMS submission.
2. Consistent Testing
A consistent testing process would allow compliance professionals to strengthen the accuracy and quality of data submitted to the CMS.
Usually, disputes such as “meal or gift disputes” arise after CMS submission – the primary reason for this is that the data submitted to the CMS has errors.
Compliance teams can identify and mitigate the risk of disputes arising after CMS submission through consistent testing of the aggregate spend data being prepared.
Moreover, entries concerning the recipient that can be evaluated before CMS submission are the following:
- Recipient
- Type
- License
- Information
- NPI
- Specialty
- Credential
- Address
Entries concerning the expense that can be evaluated before CMS submission are the following:
- Spend City, State, Zip
- Product
- Spend Purpose
- Spend Nature
- Study Info
- Date
3. Risk Tracking, Identification & Remediation
There’s a high probability of data falling through the cracks due to the sheer amount of it being generated and compiled.
In addition, tracking, identification, and remediation of data at the 11th hour increase the probability of errors of omissions.
Gaps in the process of collecting and managing data internally or externally are another factor that influences the accuracy of your data.
Mitigation tactic? Tracking your spending trend, identifying gaps, and remediating them will eliminate these problems moving forward – eventually resulting in compliance teams having clean data to work with that can be compiled and reported on time.
4. Leveraging Analytics
A significant reason why analytics is an integral part of our entire data-driven compliance platform is that it allows life sciences companies and their compliance team to compare data and identify potential missing data, policy violations, spend outliers, and more.
This strategic approach enables compliance professionals to analyze industry data, as well as, their own data and derive actionable insights from them in the form of remediation tactics and implement timely corrective measures to ensure positive outcomes in the future.
5. Foreseeable Automation
With the challenges mentioned above being dealt with manually, automation happens to be the key to a more convenient and accurate aggregate spend reporting process.
Large data sets, monitoring aggregate spending, identifying high-risk activities, and taking corrective measures are critical parts of aggregate spend reporting that are prone to human error.
An automated and data-driven aggregate spend reporting system alleviates the headache of preparing aggregate spend reports while providing compliance teams with a systematic way of meeting CMS requirements.
Schedule a demo today to learn more about how qordata’s aggregate spend reporting solution empowers compliance teams.
