More resources for measuring aggregate-spending data

Even as state legislatures continue to debate the need and utility of collecting data on spending by pharma and med-device companies (with the Massachusetts legislature reviewing, but not changing, its spending rules this summer), industry service providers are offering a growing number of solutions to the activity. The latest is QPharma, Inc. (Morristown, NJ), which specializes in regulatory compliance services, PDMA sample accountability and fulfillment, and IT validation. The company has announced qSpend as a Web-based, on-demand or outsourced IT service.

QSpend is said to be fully configurable, accepting aggregate-spending data via manual data entry, file uploads or third-party expense-management system interfaces. Besides accumulating spend data, the solution provides for tracking, evaluating and reporting the data.

Aggregate-spend reporting, depending on which state’s rules are applied, obliges manufacturers to summarize both promotional spending or gifts to healthcare practitioners, as well as contractual work in research or consulting. The Physician Payments Sunshine Act, part of the Obama Administration’s omnibus healthcare-reform law, will make this mandatory on the federal level in 2012.

QPharma joins IT vendors or service providers such as Cegedim Dendrite, IMS Health, and Porzio Pharmaceutical Services in offering agg spend solutions (Pharmaceutical Commerce, April, p. 25). But a Cegedim Dendrite survey from early this year showed that only 29% of manufacturers were “very confident” that they were collecting the data correctly. “With qSpend and our staff of regulatory specialists QPharma provides a cost-efficient total aggregate spend solution,” concludes Ray Roggero, COO of QPharma.

Meanwhile, Cegedim Dendrite has brought two consulting firms, Capgemini US (Chicago) and TAKE Solutions (Chennai, India; US HQ in Princeton, NJ) into its Alliance Program, with the former specifically to collaborate on implementations of Cegedim-Dendrite’s AggregateSpend360 and customer master data offerings, and the latter on the company’s Mobile Intelligence CRM solutions.