The compliance deadlines for U.S. Federal “Sunshine Act” compliance are January 1, 2012, for data recording and March 31, 2013, for data and reporting. Compliance entails addressing of these pain points:

• Become compliant with state and federal laws.
• Maintain flexibility in dealing with evolving legislation.
• Integrate promotional spend data from disparate sources.
• Obtain insight and maintain visibility for compliance.

IBM provides the IBM Promotional Spend Compliance Accelerator for Life Sciences to enable simple but reliable compliance with U. S. Federal and several state laws requiring the recording and reporting of life science product promotional spending.

The IBM Promotional Spend Compliance Accelerator for Life Sciences:

• Provides regulatory compliance capabilities for the Federal Sunshine Act and similar state legislation.
• Reduces risk of noncompliance with advanced analytics and data aggregation capabilities.
• Increases operational efficiency role-specific and easy-to-use user interfaces.
• Enables informed decisions and timely action by multiple entities and departments.

IBM PSCA supports the five phases of Federal and state life sciences “Sunshine Act” compliance:

1. Planning: Identifying and mapping information aggregated from different sources.
2. Integrating: Unifying data from across the enterprise—that is, from sales force automation tools, customer relationship management applications and ERP applications.
3. Tracking: Ensuring that aggregate spend data is accurately, completely and consistently compiled, categorized and reported as prescribed by both state and Federal requirements.
4. Preventing: Implementing proactive measures to identify noncompliance going forward.
5. Optimizing: Analyzing how to best spend promotional dollars for maximum return on investment (ROI) and refining business processes based on an understanding of data.

• Meets immediate and future aggregate spend challenges.
• Built using best practices gleaned from multiple client implementations, the solution offers scalability and a robust underlying technical architecture that provides advanced data integration capabilities.
• Covers a breadth of highly specific business rules to deal with evolving regulations.
• Includes flexible business process management to manage dispute resolution, report certification approval processes and decision-support analytics.
• Provides capabilities that extend beyond compliance issues.