Deloitte unveils ExaLink, a cloud-based commercial-compliance portal

One side of the management of pharma financials is simply compiling costs and revenues—the basic financial reporting of any industry. But another side is meeting the complex and growing regulatory requirements, ranging from rebate programs under Medicare and Medicaid (which also need to be subdivided into the 50 states in the US); aggregate spend reporting by sales, marketing and R&D teams interacting with healthcare providers, the intricacies of commercial contracts (which include such items as volume discounts, chargebacks to reconcile payments) and more. There are IT vendors that provide tools to manage parts of these regulatory responsibilities, and there are a number of consulting firms that perform the necessary data management on behalf of pharma clients.

Now, a business unit of Deloitte Advisory, branded as CIS by Deloitte, is looking to combine the data management service with its own software, and make it available as a state-of-the-art, cloud-based service under the brand name ExaLink. According to Mel Walker, managing principal at Deloitte Advisory and head of the CIS unit, the service will enable largescale data processing necessary for regulatory reporting programs to be managed in a “lightweight” manner for pharma clients—no on-premises IT systems and their corresponding hardware requirements, while providing ready access and transparency to the reports as they are being developed, and to do analytics for goals ranging from forecasting to M&A activity.

There are other IT vendors using cloud-based services for this type of contract administration and compliance reporting, notably Model N and Revitas (and, in fact, Deloitte is a business partner of Model N), but according to Walker, the top-to-bottom rebuilding of the ExaLink service will provide a broader view of financials and compliance, while providing a high degree of data security through the company’s own ongoing security services. (Here, it’s worth noting that there are still numerous parts of the global pharma industry uncomfortable with shipping internal data into the cloud, even though major pharma companies are using CIS by Deloitte outsourced services today.)

Current services offered by CIS through ExaLink include:

• Government Pricing

• Government Rebates and Refunds

• Contract Rebates and Fees

• Chargebacks

• Membership: Class of Trade

• Membership: Public Health Services

• Integrated Business Insights

… and Walker says that the company will be “opportunistic” in pursuing other compliance and reporting activities. “We designed ExaLink as a true hybrid cloud platform that offers data security and scalability, operational management and access to business information that simply didn't exist previously. Data functions that are cost centers can now be value drivers because of greater focus into pre-deal analysis, post-deal monitoring, pricing discrepancies and the identification of lost revenue," she concludes.