Cegedim survey updates industry response to aggregate-spending rules

The midnight oil is burning at many pharma companies as they make their final preparations for submitting aggregate-spending data to CMS by March 31, a requirement under the Physicians Sunshine Act. Recent reporting indicates that the Sunshine Act has already had an impact on physicians’ acceptance of speaker fees; now, Cegedim Relationship Management (Bedminster, NJ) is reporting that 64% of surveyed physicians say that the law will have an effect on their interactions with manufacturers, ranging from “not very much” to “greatly affect.” Only 14% of physicians indicated that “It won’t affect my interactions at all.”

Cegedim survey data indicate that the reporting tasks are setting up more or less as expected, with pharma companies more easily able to report spending sourced from its sales/marketing activities, and more difficultly for spending sourced from sponsored research. Forty-one percent of manufacturer-respondents are using a third-party IT system to compile their spending data; and 24% are currently using manual or spreadsheet-based processes. Just over half (51%) are using the same system for reporting sample distribution as for spend reporting (depending on the jurisdiction, both of these need to be reported in some cases). Overall, 76% of respondents prefer to have their aggregate-spend solution to include a “pre-integrated customer data solution,” i.e., a master customer dataset, which eases pairing up expenses with the specific healthcare provider. And they say that for planned future reporting methods, 53% say that they will eventually use a third-party system; 33% an internal system; and 14% a manual/spreadsheet process. By a 58-40% margin, respondents say that they expect investment in agg-spend reporting to increase in coming years.

Besides conducting the survey, Cegedim Relationship Management is an active player in they aggregate-spend reporting business, providing both a software platform, AggSpend360, and a master-data service, OneKey, for both national and global healthcare-provider identification. The full report is available, after registration, from Cegedim's site here.